At a recent meeting addressed by Professor Ian Plimer, the audience at Keith was treated to another side of the emission debate.
The professor acknowledged the vast inland area of Australia with a sparse population. Much of our exports are derived from these areas requiring hefty transport costs to reach ports for export. To handicap such activity with emission restrictions would impact heavily on export revenue.
Taken overall, thousands of jobs would be threatened.
Activists claim that renewable energy is cheaper than power from coal or gas but they overlook the level of subsidies applied to solar and wind power. No doubt hydrogen power along with any others being developed will also be eligible for subsidy help. Of course, the community is aware that even with storage, wind and solar power is very deficient in meeting the demand for power and recent shortages led to a call for the saviour, coal to help.
Professor Plimer reminded his audience that the so-called villain of carbon dioxide was an essential for all plant life to survive.
The most important point from the University professor showed the emission activists could rest easy because Australia has already reached the status of “Net Zero”. In fact we are in credit. The average annual per capita emission is 20 tonnes. For every Australian there are 30 hectares of forest, 74 hectares of grassland and each hectare sequesters about 1 tonne of carbon dioxide by photosynthesis. The result being that Australia sequesters approximately 5 times more carbon than it emits.
It appears the issue behind the emission story is more about controlling people and their activities than pollution.