End the fraud of empty promises on climate change

Thank you to Ron Boswell for highlighting the problem with outsourcing greenhouse gas emissions (“No virtue in rich nations outsourcing their emissions”, 24/9). The disparity between pledges to cut emissions and actual greenhouse gas emissions is alarming.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has just released the synthesis report for “nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement”. The report incorporates most nations’ pledges to cut emissions and concludes that global emissions are set to increase by 16.3 per cent above 2010 levels by 2030.

The gap between this and the need to have decreased emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 is shocking. Accounting tricks have got to stop. Each and every individual, corporation and government should be accountable for our contributions to global heating across the supply chain.

Dr Amy Hiller, Kew, Vic

Dave Sweeney (Letters, 24/9) is incorrect. Nuclear power has always been the safest way to generate electricity. Deaths from nuclear are about 0.0001 per terawatt hour of electricity generated compared with coal 15, gas 4, solar 0.44, wind 0.15 and hydro 0.01. If not for the effects of the anti-nuclear protest movement, we could now be using small modular reactors instead of the enormous one gigawatt-plus reactors. They would be factory manufactured, delivered to site, installed and powering the grid within about three years, not 10 to 20 years, and they could be supplying power at about 15 per cent of current cost.

Peter Lang, Griffith, ACT

The hypocrisy of the nations chiding Australia for not making similarly insincere commitments to zero emissions by 2050 is breathtaking. The irony is that they simultaneously let China off the hook while attempting to bully a nation that contributes 1.3 per cent of emissions.

Canada talks big and does little, New Zealand exempts agriculture from the equation, and Britain laughably vaunts its renewables credentials by burning woodchip to generate power.

Unfortunately, the Morrison government is wilting on its commitment to gas for so-called transition in the face of opposition from Labor states and virtue signalling from the finance sector.

John Morrissey, Hawthorn, Vic

The solar farm project you reported (“$30bn Aussie solar link gets approval”, 24/9) is based in the Northern Territory, will cover an area larger than the ACT and involves a 4200km undersea cable from Darwin to Singapore via Indonesian territorial waters.

A project of this size should be great news – and a big wake-up call to our manufacturing industry. Normally we would export the raw materials required to China, and then import the finished products.

Surely this is the opportunity to develop the capacity to build it all here, thus providing thousands of new manufacturing jobs and retaining the value-add in Australia.

John Burns, Hall, ACT

Dave Sweeney needs to factor in a few more realistic variables. We are not self-sufficient in infrastructure for any of our renewable energy supplies.

We do not, and seemingly cannot, make our solar panels or our wind turbines; our main supplier of these manufactured goods, using our raw materials, is China. What is Dave’s solution to the possible loss of these supplies should China throw another trade tantrum and refuse to supply us with these items to bring us to heel?

If we have closed (and maybe demolished) our fossil-fuelled 24/7 dispatchable power supply and refuse to even contemplate the construction of small, stand-alone modular nuclear power generators (widely expected to be available this decade), how could we power up and retool for the manufacture of our own supplies?

Ros Tooker, Bald Knob, Qld

Reading Ron Boswell’s article was like a breath of fresh air. No wonder the developed world has turned a blind eye to China – one of the most powerful nuclear countries, with its own space program, is classified as a developing country.

If the powers that be were fair dinkum about lowering emissions they would insist on China, which produces more emissions than all the developed countries combined, shutting down its coal-fired power stations.

Glenys Clift, Toowoomba, Qld