Not necessarily. The federal government runs a $20 billion or so surplus fairly regularly, and the state governments up to $10 billion each. Let's say half the federal surplus and half as much again from the states, that'd give us $15 billion to play with.

An example emissions reduction budget would be,

- $7.1 billion for building renewables. Australia consumes about 240 billion kWh annually, equivalent to 27GW, so that 1GW annually could make us 100% renewable in 30 years, allowing for a slight increase in population combined with efficiency and thus a decline in per capita use. The 1GW delivered might consist of,

You can fiddle with the proportions a bit if you like, add in stuff that isn't commercially proven like wave power, or stuff that nobody really wants like nuclear, but the basic picture remains the same - to build up electricity generation from sources which don't require burning fossil fuels is not a big deal financially at the national level.

The biomass, geothermal and solar thermal would provide 60% of the total, thus a good baseload amount. The cost are the high average of present costs; while renewable proponents often say that when the things are built en masse they'll get cheaper, we can as easily say that higher demand will lead to a rise in price - which is what we've seen for wind turbines in the past few years, and the same appears to be happening with purified silicon for PV. So on balance we can expect it to be around the same.

- $1.9 billion for an extended electrical grid, since the above facilities would likely be distributed widely compared to today's coal-fired stations

- $1 billion for research into better renewables and energy efficiency - say $100 million for each of the above, $100 million for batteries, $100 million for heating and cooling, and so on.

- $3 billion for railways and trams. We currently have 38,500km of lines across the country, about 2,000km of which are in the cities. The world average for urban and suburban railways is about $15 million per kilometre, for tracks, engines, carriages, and stations. It's much cheaper across the countryside but 85% of the population is in the capital cities so let's be pessimistic about the cost.

Those 2,000km of urban railways and tramways take about 10% of all trips (compared to 80% taken by car). Spending $3 billion to add 200km annually and/or improve services would thus let us divert 1% of all trips to trains and trams each year. So that by 2050 we could have 50% of all trips by rail, which measure would take car use from 80% to 40% - halving emissions due to transport (since the trains and trams would be electric powered by the renewables above, they'd be low, though not zero, emissions).

- $2 billion for subsidies for various retrofits of homes and businesses to reduce their energy use. Insulation or something, I dunno. I mean hey, solar hot water systems are only $3,000, you could fit 666,000 homes annually with $2 billion, in twelve years every home would have a system. But probably if you made the biomass systems in the electricity generation system also hot water generators - as the Swedes and Finns already do - then you could forget about the rooftop systems.

So I mean, we already have these big surpluses. Traditionally governments save them up for electorate bribes just before election time, and for unwinnable foreign wars and overpriced military equipment that doesn't work. But we could put them to more productive use. What I outlined up there is just off the top of my head, and using only about a third of all state and federal surpluses. And it'd at least halve our emissions by 2050 even if we continue just digging shit up and selling it overseas as the base for our economy.

But there are heaps of export opportunities. There are about 3 billion people living in poverty who, if given the chance, want to lift themselves out of it. And those people want electricity. As we've seen with China, they'll take electricity any way they can get it - coal, nuclear, hydro, solar, they don't give a damn so long as it gives them electricity. Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Kenya, South Africa, all these places want to follow that.

We could be absolutely raking in cash from that over the next few decades. We've had decades of innovation in PV especially. But all the support goes to coal and mining, and renewables are actively discouraged both at government and corporate level. Stupid.