Whether or not you think human industrial activity is responsible, it seems that many of the proposed counter-measures will not help and may even worsen the problems. For example, federal and state governments are keen to give substantial financial incentives for people to install solar hot-water systems and solar cell arrays. All the environmentalists are very enthusiastic about these measures and they cheer on the politicians, albeit with the rider: "They’re not doing enough on climate change!" or "John Howard’s asleep on climate change!" or something similarly inane. In the face of such a barrage, is it any wonder that the politicians and bureaucrats are anxious to be seen to be "doing something".

However, as described in this and last month’s article on "How to Cut Your Greenhouse Emissions", pushing solar hot-water and solar cell arrays is probably not the best way to go. Using solar cells to generate electricity in domestic installations is simply a poor economic decision. Similarly, a recent proposal to make some Sydney schools "carbon neutral" by installing large solar cell arrays is a crazy economic decision. It would make far more sense for those schools to do the best they can in cutting back energy consumption and then use their hard-earned budgets to improve their teaching resources.

This is not to say that Australia should not invest heavily in solar power generation; simply that giving substantial financial incentives for small domestic installations is probably not the best allocation of scarce financial resources. Of course, to suggest this as alternative government policy is likely to bring forth catcalls from the environmentalists with such emotive labels as "climate change denier".

Similarly, setting up carbon trading schemes seems quite pointless when you think about it. Planting trees is fine and good for the environment. Trees do take quite a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere while they are immature but the trees must exist for all time for the carbon to have been permanently removed from the atmosphere. The only way to make a permanent carbon removal is to bury the tree after it dies – not very practical!

Carbon dioxide geo-sequestration is also likely to be extremely costly, even if it does become workable on a large scale. To us, geo-sequestration seems to be a futile attempt to postpone the eventual acknowledgement that coal mining and coal burning do present serious problems.

Ultimately, as pointed out in the Greenhouse Emissions articles, we really should make major cuts in carbon dioxide emissions from our existing coal-fired base-load power stations, particularly those using brown coal in Victoria. And while gas-fired and nuclear power stations could certainly lead to major cuts in emissions, a better way for the long term will be to use our huge geothermal reserves or so-called "hot rocks" such as in the Cooper Basin in South Australia. While this requires enormous investment to provide and exploit, the pay-off will ultimately be huge, both in economic terms and for the environment.

Leo Simpson