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OT: BZE 21-Apr-2011 At 11:33:26 AM evanbb

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On 21/04/2011 maxdacat wrote:
>The subsidy in coal fired power is because the government built and owned
>them in the first place.

Not entirely true. Check out the list of supported projects from Infrastructure Australia, Government funded infrastructure projects totalling something like $4bn. Many of those, and this has been going on for years, are coal infrastructure projects like improved ports and improved rail. There are papers around on the indirect subsidies to fossil fuels in Australia if you're keen.

>You are speculating that the costs of mitigating
>climate change effects will be greater than an upgrade to renewable. I
>could just as easily speculate that they won't.

Yep, and your speculation wouldn't be worth very much, because you're not an expert. All of the expert reports I've read suggest the cost of repairing the damage from climate change outstrips the cost of changing to clean tech by several orders of magnitude.

Think about it; imagine that one of the outcomes of climate change is that the Murray river stops flowing and salts up the bottom 500km, (which may not be an actual outcome, thought exercise here). How much would it cost to fix that? Natural systems supply us with a lot of stuff for free which if we privatised the service would cost us an astonishing amount of money. Consider desal; $4billion gets us 25% of Sydney's water needs. Rain gives us all of it for free.