A few weeks back Airbus sent an alternative fuels expert to Australia (Sebastian Remy) to explain how it could reduce the release of fossilised carbon from jet fuel by half by 2020, and create a major new agricultural industry that would not impact food production.
Canberra didn’t want to know. For over a year Remy’s counterpart in Boeing, Billy Glover, has been explaining how algae grown octanes could completely replace kerosene by around 2040.
Both companies talk about the relevance of these advances to replacing fossil fuel in trucks, cars, and ships. Not just in the ‘toys’ of the jet set and the political elite.
The disinterest in Canberra is painful. Rudd’s mission in life is to gravitate unerringly to the most mundane of status quo positions, which he did yesterday. Bright invention just isn’t in the frame.
In the next few days a Continental Airlines jet in the US is set to trial a blend of biofuels including an algae derived component equal to more than 20% of the energy contained in it. This is about 10 years sooner than the best estimates given for algae based kerosene replacements only a year ago at a Boeing sponsored conference in Sydney.
Unfortunately the government’s stunted vision has been fed by the populist nonsense that characterises the carbon debate in this country. While it sticks with big oil and big coal, the carbon fascista sticks with social engineering and an insistence that science and technology really have no answers. This situation has been fueled by scientists who don’t trust the public with the actual science, and sit back and watch people fret about how much they might fart or the amount of carbon they exhale and hope that this hysteria will deliver big research grants and real power.
The driver of anthropogenic global warming is the release of fossilised carbon in volumes that overwhelm the natural and very complex cycles that reprocess carbon. It is the real problem. It is breaking the marine food chain, causing severe high level atmospheric cooling, and cooking the lower layers of the atmosphere under the blanket of excessive accumulations of carbon dioxide.
Everything else is a side show.
The 5% reduction target can be readily met from all sorts of carbon savings that will have sod all to do with the real problem, fossilised carbon. This travesty is possible because the populist campaign is scientifically illiterate, and much of the blame for this can truly be laid on the media, which is too lazy to inform itself about the realities.
4 Comments
I don’t think you understand. Time is short. The world is reeling under the weight of too many people and we don’t have until 2020 to take effective measures to fix the problem. I could hold my breath for longer than it would take a group of scientists to work out a way to convince all the assorted religious leaders of the world to work out a way of action on the Planet’s Population Explosion. And if you think emissions, carbon-footprints, fossil-fuels, and choking smog are unrelated to the population-explosion then you are sadly misinformed.
Venise,
Neither Rudd nor his opponents on this have come up with a population reduction target as far as I can tell. I think you are onto something.
There’s only one country in the world that I can think of that has pursued a serious and sustained policy to bring its population growth under control. The toll in terms of human rights violations has been high, but it has been very successful.
Industry, affluence, meat consumption, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and economic inequality in that country have soared as the population has begun slowly to decline.