IN THE 1960s asbestos mining was a very profitable business. And it created a lot of jobs. Asbestos was very useful – indeed one of the best insulating materials known to humankind.
The link between asbestos and cancer was known as early as the 1930s. But mining continued. Hot water pipes were sheathed in it. In Australia, it was mined into the 1970s despite the known risk. Asbestos was mixed with cement to make building materials and sprinkled in roofs to insulate Canberra houses from the cold.
But asbestos was toxic. Ultimately it was more economically beneficial to leave it in the ground than use it, aside from the human cost.
We should now be saying similar things about coal and natural gas.
There is a difference, of course. Asbestos mining could be stopped dead in its tracks and the economy still functioned and basic living standards remain much the same.
But an immediate ban on using coal to generate electricity or produce steel would almost shut the economy down and there are no immediate health dangers in using coal.
But in the long tern, the continued use of coal will be profoundly more damaging than the continued use of asbestos. If the world continues to burn fossil fuels the way we do the result will not be a few mesothelioma deaths (awful as they are) and a bit of economic loss weeding asbestos out of buildings.
Rather the result will be massive indirect economic costs because we did not have the sense to develop a gradual transition to leave the carbon-emitting toxic fuels in the ground and develop alternatives.
It could be done. We did it –albeit on a smaller scale – with fluorocarbons which were eating the ozone layer that protects us all from cancer-causing radiation.
Fluorocarbons were quite useful. They made refrigeration effective and cheap – but at a great global price.
It required government action in the face of a market failure. Without regulation, if there is a quick buck to be made no-one cares about the long-term cost.
With coal, however, there is no mood for government intervention to phase it out. Instead of acknowledging its threat to humankind and mapping out a future without fossil fuels, the government’s stated position is that coal comes first and everything else must work around it.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt, for example, said this week in response to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Coal will be used for decades and decades more.”
His bedrock position is that coal continues irrespective, and he presumes that someone (like the CSIRO, whose funds his government is slashing) will come up with a workable scheme to capture and bury the emissions. It is idiocy when other proven substitutes are available.
Hunt should not work from the base being utterly beholden to the coal industry and that coal will continue no matter what. Rather he should work from a base of what do we need to do to prevent global warming. How can Australia lead in a global movement.
In 30 years’ time, Hunt will look like an asbestos miner, so concerned about profits and economic benefits that he is blind to the looming catastrophe.
Sensible economists tell us that it will be less costly in the long run to do something than not. And it will not cost huge amounts to move more quickly to wind and solar electricity generation.
It is not impossible. Wind generation in Denmark, for example, has met the nation’s total electricity needs at peak times.
DOT DOT DOT
SPEAKING of electricity generation, last week’s column on solar voltaic power generated a few comments, some quite sceptical.
I have to admit that we live in the very best investment climate for solar. At 16 degrees south in Port Douglas we get a lot of sun. Moreover, Queensland has among the highest off-the-grid electricity charges in Australia.
The electricity we make, therefore, is quite valuable. When we generate electricity on our 5kw system we are in effect earning 28 cent a kilowatt – because that is what we are not paying from the grid. Also our roof has optimum pitch and is smack north and we have only just bought the system taking advantage of lower prices.
So some correspondents were right to question the 30 per cent return on investment.
One complained that in Canberra he was making a mere 15 per cent return on investment.
So, even aside from my best-case example, the point still holds that solar panels are about the best investment going. And their price is falling all the time while electricity prices continue to go up, presuming you are not renting; intend to stay put for several years and do not have shade trees all over your house.
The Government should have built on this rather than continue to pay homage to indefinite use of coal for electricity generation.
Greg Hunt’s response to the IPPC report this week was woeful.
The Federal Government should do something to force electricity generators – nearly all state-government owned – to stop abusing their monopoly power by paying so little for electricity generated by residents. They should also remove their limits (usually to 5kw inverters) on the amount that can be generated from the home to the grid. That would encourage even greater investment in solar.
If they were private companies, competition law would not allow them to get away with their low feed-in prices.
A QUICK thought on NSW: For decades NSW politicians have pursued policies that benefit individual and sectional interests and in return have received very large donations from those interests. Those donations then go into campaigns for politicians to persuade voters that, despite the pandering to sectional interests, they are governing in the best interests of everyone in the state. Wouldn’t it be easier just to govern in the best interests of all in the first place and tell all the rich and powerful sectional interests to go jump?
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 19 April 2014.
As a child, I often wandered along the train tracks of Gippsland which were littered with coal. Now you tell me I’m going to die a slow and painful death?! Oh God, NO! Help me! I’ve got lung cancer! Cancer I say! I’m gonna sue the Industrial Revolution! Thanks for alerting me to the menace of inert carbon. No, really.
Interesting article. Sorry, it went on a bit so I skim-read parts, but it seemed to me that there were a few basic errors.
We stopped using asbestos for insulation and CFCs for refrigeration in part, certainly, because of their inherent dangers, but also because we developed affordable alternatives. This was not an example of the triumph of regulation over “market failure” but simply an example of the regulators taking the credit just as the market was moving on.
I don’t see alternatives for coal yet, except maybe for Nuclear, which is opposed by the same people who oppose coal, and maybe natural gas, which also emits the evil ghgs – albiet smaller amounts per unit of energy generated – and the fracking boom is also opposed by the usual suspects.
You claimed that wind energy is a viable alternative “Wind generation in Denmark, for example, has met the nation’s total electricity needs at peak times.” Yes, luckily for Denmark it has access Germany’s grid for when the wind don’t blow. Those great big wind turbines are actually about as useless and wasteful as it gets.
Solar? Well, by the time those panels have paid for themselves (assuming they ever really do) it’s about time to replace them.
Anyway, look I don’t think you’re going to listen to reason, judging by your snide little remark about “sensible economists” – surely an oxymoron if ever there was one!! What makes these economists sensible? Why, they agree with you of course. We will phase out coal when we come up with an alternative. Meanwhile, billions of people will continue to have their lives improved by electricity – the greatest invention ever. If you really want to know who the sensible economists are, why don’t you go and ask a woman in Africa, who’s children are dying of lung disease from cooking over a dung fire in a mud hut, whether she’d prefer a cheap, dirty coal fired power plant which would add about 50 years to their life expectancy, over “doing something about climate change”, which would ensure they never get the economic progress they need to lift them out of poverty?
Price for solar panels are falling probably because the country makes them is burning more coal to power up the factories. And the ships carrying those panels to Australia are probably not nuclear powered either. When you don’t have the grid filling the power gap solar intermittency will make your power supply very unstable. Even on the finest sunny day you won’t get all 5kw for more than a couple of hours and how much the panels can produce also depends on the ambient temperature. Ever noticed on the 40C hot days the panels are not producing 5kw even when the sun is 90 degrees above them? Also those inverters will most likely not last as long as the panels and they have much shorter warranty. If my understanding of the market is still right, a 5kw system will cost a household over $5000 out of pocket and almost 1/3 of that is for the inverter.