Move ahead on climate – or get out of the way

Barnaby Joyce is indulging in pure sophistry when he calls for a “plan” before he will agree to targets for carbon usage. Imagine if John Kennedy in 1960 had said “We choose to go to the moon – sometime, whenever”. Instead, his 10-year time frame unleashed the research and the urgency that led to the moon landing in 1969. Scott Morrison is right when he says technology will be our saviour. But to say, as Barnaby does, that it’s not the role of government to create that technology – well, who does he think the CSIRO or NASA is? To quote another icon of the 1960s, “The times are a-changin’. Get out of the new world if you can’t lend a hand.” Barnaby, move aside if you can’t give us the leadership needed.

David Lanham, Yeronga, Qld

Steve Denner (Letters 13/8) is partly right, in that achieving reductions of greenhouse gas emissions does need costly reliance on solutions like electric cars, storage batteries, and variable and intermittent sources of power. But it does not need us to go down the rabbit hole of nuclear power. Researching the nightmare of the new nuclear plants in Finland and the UK will show why. Austria is one country without nuclear that has embraced a national policy of implementing energy efficiencies, plus development of renewable power, heat and transport fuels, with about 50 per cent of all energy consumed by 2040 to be from biomass (with most of the other 50 per cent from hydro). Denmark has no nuclear power and is aiming by 2040 to be zero carbon and by 2050 to source half of all consumed energy from biomass. As with Austria, energy efficiency plays a major role, along with expanding managed forestry. Sweden, as it closes its nuclear plants, is replacing that power supply with energy from waste and biomass and power from biomass fuelled district heating plants. Finland gets some power from nuclear but its largest source of energy consumed is biomass, and it is a great model for how a country can achieve economic success plus reduce emissions due to intelligent, long-term, coherent policies. Australia should adopt the smart and cost-effective approaches of these and the other countries on the same pathway.

Andrew Lang, senior consultant World Bioenergy Association, Lismore, Vic

The Australian Energy Market Commission just ruled that networks will be allowed to charge solar households a sun tax for sharing their clean energy. It is unfair to charge solar homes and businesses when big coal and gas generators don’t have to pay for pumping electricity into the network. Solar households will have to pay up or have their ability to export slashed, leading to less renewable energy in the grid.

When we know it is so urgent to stop climate damaging CO2 emissions, we should be encouraging more rooftop solar, not penalising people.

Simon Ives, North Bondi, NSW

Future tense

As children in the early 1960s, particularly at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, we were oblivious of the detail of the circumstances that almost saw “the end of days”, but we were certainly conscious of the unease of our parents and their generation. As historians have speculated, those who lived through this period adopted a come-what-may attitude to life that spurred the cultural revolution. As Henry Ergas has documented (“It’s the end of the world as we know it – again”, 13/8), humanity finds a way to embrace calamity. Fortunately, at least to this point it, it has found a way to muddle through.

Kim Keogh, East Fremantle, WA

Ganging up

You have to hand it to the gang of five (Palmer ads, 13 /8), who on the one hand acknowledge that freedom of expression is a Thomas Jefferson self-evident truth while on the other declaring that we must temper that freedom by the responsibility we all have of maintaining “civic duty”. By whose authority does the gang impose that upon us?

John Dorman, Toowoomba, Qld

Reading the letter from crossbenchers about the Palmer ads brought a smile to my face. When they criticise News Corp for publishing the Palmer advertisement for profit, don’t they realise that it is via profit that taxes are raised that pay their salaries?

Anthony Anderson, Templestowe Lower, Vic

Reality check

Having pushed commonwealth debt to more than $600bn, the Treasurer must be worried. That’s a lot of debt to leave for our children and grandchildren to pay off. Or maybe we won’t hear much about the commonwealth debt levels because Josh Frydenberg has finally accepted that as a nation that issues its own fiat currency the debt is nothing to worry about. He could also encourage members of the Coalition to stop using other bits of meaningless rhetoric such as “a waste of taxpayers’ money” and “running up the nation’s credit card”.

Rod Wise, Surrey Hills, Vic