AL Gore addressed delegates in Poznan, Poland, near the end of the UN Climate Talks. It’s a pretty great speech – especially the part where he mentions 350 parts per million (and you can see the international youth caucus get and give him a standing ovation for it).
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Great words indeed. The first political intiatives will always be the hardest. We won’t know that our government is serious until they start to make proclamation s about casualties. Some industries need to take themselves elswhere in the world. A good example is aluminium smelting. Elsewhere power used is 30% fossil fuels with 70% hydro. In Australia, we’re 70% fossil fuels. More specifically, in Victoria, we have the worst emitting power stations, powered by brown coal, with hundreds of kilometers of power lines, to smelters at the other end of the state. If this isn’t bad enough, the rate the smelters pay for electricity is 1/3 the rate charged to any other large industrial user, believed to be $0.02 per kWhr. This is less than cost of supply. Before any accounting is taken for emissions, it has cost us money to export aluminium and 80% is export, no value added. We’ve been exporting money!!
The London Metals Exchange was reporting recently that world demand for aluminium was continuing to increase “because it’s so cheap”!!
So how about the aluminium smelters don’t get any free permits so they can get the satisfaction of taking their business offshore?