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The Garnaut Review will presumably form the basis of much of the Gov. policy re climate change. In a recent paper Prof. Garnaut indicated his support for the reduction of Australian per capita emissions to the world average by a process of "Contraction and Convergence" simultaneously with an overall reduction in world emissions.
Effectively this means a reduction of about 97% of our emissions. Impossible to have private motor vehicle, holiday travel and many other things. Probably just impossible without descent to Stone Age.
Prof. Garnaut thinks that if we design and execute the policies he is going to suggest we can achieve the emission reductions and maintain economic growth (includes the obligatory carbon sequestration).
As I've said before a Nobel prize wouldn't come close to being sufficient reward for the Prof. if he pulls this one off.
Any encouragement of car industry, new road building, immigration, increased birth rate, airport extensions etc is going in the wrong direction.
You can get reductions in your greenhouse gas emissions roughly as follows,
- stopping obvious waste, 25%
- planning to make use of economies of scale, 25%
- voluntary simplicity, 25%
In our home lives, "obvious waste" is stuff like leaving the aircon on when you're not home, appliances on standby, and so on.
"Economies of scale" at home are things like only doing the clothes washing when the machine is entirely full - 1x large load instead of 3x small loads - cooking a few litres of sauce or soup for the week instead of having 6x tv dinners, etc.
"Voluntary simplicity" are things like reducing your meat consumption, walking any journey under 3km, biking any journey from 3-15km, and public transport for longer journeys, or listening to music on your 1 watt MP3 player instead of your 1,000 Watt stereo, and so on.
So with a small amount of thought and effort, and without spending any money at all - in fact, saving money - you can reduce your domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 75%, to 25% of average.
The remaining 0-25% reduction (depending on who you believe when they say how much we have to reduce) requires either a non-industrial lifestyle (no electricity, etc), or else some money spending (either by you or the government) on solar panels, wind turbines, more public transport, more localised agriculture and manufacturing, and so on.
So we can get 75% of the way there with no significant change in our lifestyles. The remaining 25% would be achieved either by reverting to the iron age (not stone age), or else by spending money on solar panels, etc.
It's quite doable, we just need to have our shit together and not cry like little girls at the thought of less burgers and time in traffic. Man up.
a little too simplistic really. Household and personal consumption is but one part of the economy. For example how mnay tonnes of FF go into making your MP3 player, dishwasher, washing machine, bicycle etc.An then there is the whole question of food production and ditributions not to tmention all the other manufactured stuff which we will still use regardless of our personal household reduction.
There is going to be significant change to our lifestyles if we hope to achieve a 75% reduction in national greenhouse gas emissions. And RE is not going to save us. The GHG involved, and the energy input, in manufacturing the RE infrastructure is a losing game. More energy required than what is yielded over the life of the turbione, solar panel etc. You simply cannot run a steel mill on solar panels. You need mountains of coal both for the energy and the carbon. You need lots of steel (an copper)to build wind turbines as well as hundreds of kilometres of cable (aluminium) to carry the electricty to the grid.
But of course its just a matter of the guvmint spending money and all our little girl cries will be fixed. When the cornucopians realise that money is simply a figment of our collective imagination and that its only value is the symbolism we give it to allocate energy across the population, we will be getting somewaht closer to finding a way to live in a world of energy descent.
Of course it's simplistic, it's the response to an article which will be forgotten about within a week, what do you want, a doctoral thesis?
Relatively little fossil fuels go into our consumer products. The biggest contribution to fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are transport, power generation, and food production (especially meat). Everything else is small potatoes compared to those three.
Reducing those three are well within the ability of a person at home.
We'd also see flow-on effects from such reductions. If people are aiming to reduce electricity consumption, then they simply won't buy plasma screen tvs, so there'll be less emissions from their production. If people take the train instead of driving, then they won't have to replace their cars very often, and so on.
It's not well-appreciated, but ultimately the entire economy is about things we use in our day-to-day lives. Everything we mine or manufacture either ends up in our homes, or goes to produce something that ends up in our homes, or in our daily lives (public spaces like town halls). So if you and I reduce our consumption and emissions, that'll have a flow-on effect.
In any case saying that there should be household efficiencies and reductions is not to say that there should be no agricultural or industrial efficiencies and reductions. That I tell Jim to stop screwing around on his missus does not mean that I think Bob should keep doing it - I just happen to talking to Jim at the moment.
It's not true that renewable energy involves power plants which take more energy to manufacture than they'll ever produce; half an hour with google and a critical mind will show you this.
Saying this sort of stuff just discredits the rest of your message - people have got to cut making these sorts of nonsense arguments out if they want peak oil to be taken half seriously.
Wind turbines and solar panels (let alone solar thermal) are not energy negative - they have very good net energy paybacks (as long as the siting of them is reasonably intelligent anyway).
Steel mills (and anything else that sucks energy from the grid) couldn't care less if the power they use is coming from a solar panel or a nuclear power plant. A watt is a watt...
Garnaut too says we can have economic growth and international equity and vastly reduced emissions.
Given the "Contraction and Convergence" principles by 2050 the per capita Australian and American and European etc emissions target would be roughly that of today's Zimbabwean. Yuk.
Easy or likely? Look at the squabbles in Bali over the easy first steps.