Tim Flannery has an interesting, but demoralising, look at the prospects for clean coal, now arguing that we'll need it (retrofitted to existing plants) regardless because of the huge size of the installed base - The coal conundrum. His closing comments - "Do not assume from any of this that I believe clean coal technologies to be safe or cost-effective. In some circumstances they may prove to be as dangerous as nuclear power and as expensive as solar panels" - hardly inspire confidence that this is anything other than a disaster waiting to happen.

The enormous growth in energy generation in China, most of which is coal-fired, adds to the urgency of the need for a clean coal solution. Power generation capacity is projected to rise from 442,000 megawatts in 2004 to 920,000 by 2010 - a doubling in just seven years. That equates to the installation of around 1300 megawatts of power capacity each week, about the equivalent of a new Yallourn-sized power station.

It is obvious that enormous investment in electricity generation infrastructure will dictate key elements of the world's climate response. China will not simply knock down its newly constructed power plants in response to the need for emission reductions. Instead, carbon capture will have to be retrofitted to these plants, and ways found to cover the costs. The bad news is that such retrofitting is even more economically and technologically challenging than building a FutureGen clean coal project from square one.

Just how the required technology will be developed, and such a huge retrofit financed, is far from clear. The challenge is all the more difficult because in China electricity prices are capped. Power companies cannot pass on rises in the cost of power generation to consumers; nor, given that recent increases in the price of coal are leading to financial losses, is it feasible for the companies to invest in the new technology themselves.

Despite the effect on future investment, the central government is reluctant to raise electricity prices because inflation, driven by rising food prices, is already straining social harmony. The only feasible solution in such a case is for the developed world to help shoulder the cost burden of reducing the pollution.

One way of achieving that is to allow transfer of funds through a Clean Development Mechanism, such as the one available in the European trading scheme, which allows polluters in Europe to pay for emissions abatement in places such as China if that is more cost-effective than reducing pollution themselves. Unfortunately, there are strong signs that in a future carbon-trading scheme the US will allow no such transfers, believing they are tantamount to helping the opposition. More fundamentally, while carbon capture remains an unproven technology, no funds transfer can occur under any scheme. Therefore, there's an urgent need for someone to invest in the development of carbon capture technology.

With the fate of their industry dependent on investments in new technology, why, you might ask, are the coal companies waiting for government agencies (such as the US Department of Energy) to foot the bill for clean coal? After all, the price of thermal coal - the kind used in power plants - is expected to double this year to about $US112 a tonne. Coking coal used in steelmaking is doing even better, bringing $US300 a tonne, up from $US97 a year before. With such windfall profits accruing to the industry, there's plenty of latitude for investment in technologies that promise to secure its future. Thus far investments by coal companies in clean coal technologies have been insufficient even to fund a single large-scale demonstration plant. It seems that leadership, vision and will are more sadly lacking in this industry than in government.

Of course there are reasons for this. Coalmines and coal-fired power plants often have different owners, so while the mines are making a profit, the power generators might be feeling the squeeze. Yet they are ultimately interdependent and you'd think that the coal industry's peak body would be busying itself to find a solution. In fact nothing effective is happening, and it's clear that government must take on the responsibility. In this year's budget the Rudd Government promised $500 million of taxpayers' money to develop clean coal technology.

This is not enough. Coal exports are said to be worth $23 billion annually to Australia's economy. If a surcharge of just 10 per cent was placed on such exports (and who would consider that unreasonable in light of the GST we all pay?), a war chest of $12 billion could be built up in only five years.

If clean coal is to become a reality, this is the sort of money required, and it's morally right that the coal companies, rather than the Australian public, should pay it. Following this, Australia could pool its funds with reliable partners such as the German utility RWE, whose 450-megawatt power plant is scheduled for commissioning in 2014, to really speed progress towards a clean coal solution.

One other aspect of clean coal technology is worth touching on: the reliance on appropriate geological structures to store CO2 underground. Where such structures exist near coal-fired power plants, the cost of clean coal will be much reduced. If, however, we envisage replacing every conventional coal-fired plant on earth with clean coal, things look very different, for the amount of pipeline infrastructure required to do this is staggeringly large.

Indeed, it probably rivals the entire existing pipeline infrastructure deployed by the oil and gas industries. The required pipelines cannot be in place by 2030. Of course, this kind of argument could be applied to any energy technology that requires rapid ramping up, as all face severe bottlenecks of one sort or another. I merely note it here to make the point that clean coal technologies can never be a complete, worldwide replacement for existing coal facilities. Globally, renewable energy will have to take a significant portion of conventional coal's market share.

Do not assume from any of this that I believe clean coal technologies to be safe or cost-effective. In some circumstances they may prove to be as dangerous as nuclear power and as expensive as solar panels. My point is that the world, and China in particular, has gone so far down the road of using coal as an energy source that we have little choice but to pursue a solution that involves it.

The Guardian has an essay from Tim Flannery on the current state of play for global warming - Words Of Warming.

A sophisticated understanding of the great climatic cycles has permitted a new approach to the climate problem that finds its closest parallel in the "wiggle matching" used by stock-market analysis. William Ruddiman is a climatic historian whose book Ploughs, Plagues and Petroleum, published by Princeton in 2005, uses this approach to identify evidence of human impact on the climate system, by identifying precisely where we are in the current cycle and comparing the trend with earlier ones. We are, he explains, 12,000 years into a cooling phase which, judging from previous cycles, should continue for tens of thousands of years more. Instead the world is warming. But what is most remarkable about Ruddiman's work is the evidence it provides for an initial disruption to the climate system that occurred long before the industrial revolution - around 8,000 years ago.

It was then, at the dawn of agriculture, that the "wiggle" of the current cycle first departed from earlier patterns - for instead of cooling, Earth's average temperature remained remarkably stable. Ruddiman thinks that this was caused by carbon and methane being released into the atmosphere from early agriculture and the destruction of forests. In his account, human activity and the great cycles struck a delicate balance that allowed the flowering of civilisations. He also sees evidence in the ice cores for the consequences of the Black Death (a drop of around two parts per million of CO2 as forests grew over abandoned fields, absorbing carbon from the atmosphere), as well as other historic events. Aspects of his work remain highly contentious, yet I believe that Ruddiman's realisation that the gaseous composition of Earth's atmosphere is an exquisitely sensitive barometer of changes to life itself represents a great breakthrough.

Now that the majority of politicians, industry leaders and the public are convinced there is a climate problem, the focus is on what to do. The most influential assessments of the problem's scale are doubtless those of the IPCC, whose projections of various outcomes form the basis of global negotiations and national action plans. One of the most influential of these projections concerns the extent to which Earth's surface will warm over the next century. The lower bound is 1.4°C; the upper bound is 5.8°C. This is an extraordinary range of possible impacts - 1.4°C poses some threat, but 5.8°C is widely recognised as sufficient to induce a Lovelockian Ragnarok. The chance of either outcome, according to the IPCC, is small - less than 10%, and so political dialogue has come to concentrate on the mid-range of the projections.

The moment of truth will arrive in December 2009, in Copenhagen, when the world's political leaders will come together to decide the basis of a new global treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol. It's no overstatement to say that the Copenhagen protocol, as it may well come to be known, will play a large role in deciding the fate of humanity. It will come into force in 2012, and if it fails to deliver we'll have to wait until 2020 for a replacement. That will be too late. ...

In his analysis, Nordhaus does identify one economically effective strategy worth pursuing. Called the "low-cost backstop", it revolves around identifying and developing some as yet unknown technology to combat the problem. Possible candidates include "low-cost solar power, geothermal energy, some non-intrusive climatic engineering or genetically engineered carbon-eating trees".

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson has explored the unappealing option of such trees. The graph that first alerted humanity to the climate problem - drawn up by Charles David Keeling to show the CO2 increase from 1956 to the present - might, Dyson argues, hold the key to the solution. The graph has a generally rising line, with jags, like saw teeth, along it, which indicate a spike in CO2 each autumn in the northern hemisphere and a dip each spring. The difference between the minimum and maximum each year is around six parts per million, and it is due to the growth, then leaf fall, of the forests that grow across North America, Europe and Asia. It turns out, Dyson says, "that about 8% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year".

If only a way could be found, he muses, to permanently sequester that carbon, we would go a long way towards solving the climate crisis - hence the genetically modified trees. But the truth is that all trees are carbon eaters. They grow from the air by drawing CO2 into their leaves, and there solidifying it to build their wood, bark and leaf tissues. Trees are congealed CO2. What we need is a way of transforming the carbon they capture into an inert state. It turns out that humanity has had the capacity to do this for thousands of years, and is now on the brink of doing it on a very large scale.

The process of charcoal-making is called pyrolysis, and involves the heating of any biological matter in the absence of oxygen. The result is the generation of a synthetic gas, or a crude-oil like material, and charcoal. If the gas or oily matter is captured, it can be used to generate electricity or power transport. The charcoal is largely carbon (representing one-third to half of the carbon in the biomass) and it is inert. Indeed, the tenacity with which charcoal resists rotting, even when buried in the soil, is clear from C14-dating, which uses ancient charcoal from hearths or fires as much as 60,000 years old.

Modern pyrolysis involves machinery that captures flue gas or oil, and needs no external inputs to run the machine (some of the gas being used to heat the biomass). It's already being used on a small scale on farms, for urban garbage disposal (where 1,000-tonne units are deployed) and in forestry. On farms it has multiple benefits, for the charcoal can be ploughed back into the soil, where it balances acid soils, aids soil moisture retention, adds nutrients and acts as a habitat for soil fungi and bacteria. A farmer pyrolysing crop waste gains four benefits: 1) as usual, he gets to sell the commercial part of his crop; 2) he gets to generate electricity or transport fuel; 3) where carbon is traded, he can potentially sell the carbon he sequesters; and 4) by adding charcoal to his soil, he will increase the chances of getting a better crop the following year.

With so many benefits, why is pyrolysis not more widely used? Because pyrolysis machines are expensive, and farms are mostly still family businesses. If farmers are ever to be able to afford the machines, they'll need to be paid around $37 per tonne for the carbon they create. They'll also need to be living in areas with carbon trading schemes that allow charcoal as a recognised method of carbon sequestration.

Tim Flannery has an opinion piece in today's SMH looking at some of the bleaker scenarios for the fate of the Murray Darling river system.

In the report's preamble Garnaut notes that the Australian economy has ridden the wave of development sweeping Asia - the very development that's accelerating climate change. Australians are therefore in a better economic position than ever to pay the costs of emissions abatement, and to assist those less well off to adjust to the changes. With the partial exception of a few exporters, he warns that exempting any industries from the scheme would be catastrophic, and of course all must pay for their pollution permits, rather than be given them.

Garnaut argues that quick, effective action is urgently required, and that delays will only magnify the risks we face, as well as making action far more expensive. In fact he thinks that we should have acted years ago, and in this respect the Opposition's attempts to delay the carbon trading scheme in order to perfect it harks back to failed policy: the truth is that the issue is so complex, yet so urgent, that we have no choice but to learn on the job.

In determining the level of risk we face from climate change, Garnaut relies on the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sadly, new data indicates that the Earth's climate system is changing faster than those projections allow. Indeed, for the rate of warming, rate of sea-level rise, and extent of CO2 accumulation, the real-world data lie outside the panel's envelope of projections on the high side. This indicates that we're heading towards a catastrophic scenario, which the panel rates as being less than a 10 per cent probability. One specific risk highlights what's at stake. Models developed by the CSIRO indicate that climate change will continue to reduce stream flow in the Murray-Darling basin, with a 10 per cent probability of the river system drying up almost entirely. Garnaut does not assess the economic impact of this 10 per cent risk, yet what we see in the real world seems to be more consistent with it rather than less catastrophic outcomes. For the second year in a row there's been zero water allocation to many irrigators in the basin, and the lower Murray is in crisis, with parts of the system on the verge of turning hypersaline or acid. ...

Garnaut recognises that we will need far more than just carbon trading. Political leadership which aspires to profound transformations in electricity and transport infrastructure, incentives to develop new technologies, mandated efficiency programs, technological transfer and a rationalisation of government powers will all be required if we are to reduce the pollution stream that's changing our world. I've just returned from a meeting in Denmark where I saw a model of how some of this might be achieved. A wind energy pioneer and an electric car company, have teamed up and are working with the Danish Government to accelerate the uptake of electric cars. Nationwide battery exchange stations and kerbside power supply will be in place by next year, as will the first new generation of fully electric vehicles.

A former Coalition MP has hit out over the Opposition Leader's declaration that Australia should not commit to an emissions trading scheme without support of the big emitting countries.

Susan Jeanes, who was a federal Liberal MP from 1996 to 1998 representing the South Australian seat of Kingston before she became an adviser to then-environment minister Robert Hill, says she believes the Opposition's decision is fool-hardy.

"I am afraid it is a rather unwise decision," she said. "I think it is time that the Coalition tackled the hard question, I think we have been ducking this for too long now. We have walked away from a lot of work that we had done on what an emissions trading scheme should look like earlier in the decade."

Beyond Zero Emissions has a talk with Tim Flannery about Terra Preta (via Energy Bulletin).

Look I think we should start with the knowledge that there is 200 gigatonnes of excess carbon floating around in our atmosphere. Now that is a very large amount of carbon. I won't explain what a gigatonne is but it's a lot, and that started to accumulate at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as we burnt the coal and put the carbon into the atmosphere.

Now, it has become very clear that we have to find a way of drawing down that carbon stock in the atmospher. So we've got to not only reduce our emissions, so get rid of the burning of coal and so on and so forth, we've have to draw down the existing gas and people have been searching for ways of doing this. Some of your listeners may have heard about proposals to re-grow tropical forests for example or forestry's "I'll plant a tree and off set your emissions" and this sort of thing.

Well these Terra Preta solutions are in some ways or certainly for some purposes are a better solution, a superior solution to anything that's been brought up so far. What the process basically involves is taking any biological material, that could be crop waste or corn stalks or whatever, forestry waste, even human sewage, and partially burning it in the absence of oxygen so that you get a synthetic gas at one end of the process that you can then burn which is hydrogen rich, not so much carbon in it, but hydrogen rich, you can burn that for transport purposes or to generate electricity and at the other end of the process you get charcoal. And the great thing about charcoal is that it is a very stable form of carbon.