Friday, September 24, 2010

Coal and energy generation

ABC Radio's This World Today (listen here) had a program yesterday on California's push to have one third of their energy generated by renewables in the next decade, as part of their legislation-backed attempt to cut their emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Its interesting that in the US, especially the seaboard states, and Europe pretty much no governments are approving new coal power stations but in Australia this debate is not really even happening - old style coal power plants are still being approved. The article notes that this might be as electricity in Australia has traditionally been largely coal fired (80+ %) that its much harder to get the debate started here,, and much harder to put in place aggressive state backed measures.

If we had a government that actually backed climate action, its fun to speculate how they would engage citizens in this debate. I'm presuming citizens assemblys wouldn't be part of it!

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