Global warming will be worse even that we think

According to this article in Green Left Weekly, the South Australian government is going to support a coal gasification project for the desertified northern agricultural regions of South Australia.

Underground coal gasification is a technique used to create fuels akin to natural gas from large coal seams too deep to be profitably mined. It has already been developed in Uzbekistan, but the plan near the town of Orroroo is the first example from a non-Muslim nation.

What Renfrey Clarke demonstrates is that underground coal gasification is extremely greenhouse-intensive and likely to eliminate entirely pressure for improved fuel efficiency in cars in Australia. Greenhouse-spewing four-wheel-drive vehicles will become even more the dominant mode of transport for cities that sprawl over even vaster deserts than Phoenix or Tucson ever have or will – and quite likely a more arid desert than Arizona, too.

The message Green Left Weekly give is dreadful. One must despair that the nation requiring incomparably the world’s lowest per capita greenhouse emissions has and always will have the highest. Nonetheless, the simple truth is that brains that could develop renewable energy have been drawn like a magnet from Australia by the surfeit of exceptionally cheap fossil fuels and land, whilst tightly-bound families have been driven away from countries ecologically able to support far larger populations by greater housing space and cheap electricity and cars.

This is one thing that Green Left Weekly – just as much as the other side of politics exemplified by Human Events and suburban Australia – have no hope of grasping. They (both) are wedded to the cultures where they originated, and have no experience of the possibilities offered by different ways of doing things. The result is that they – just as much as Human Events do with Europe, Canada and New Zealand – hope for culturally and economically impossible outcomes, no matter how desirable they stand ecologically. How the immense majority prefer this low-quality, slow-paced, limited-choice lifestyle to the high-quality, mass transit-based, hectic, “big choice” lifestyle the free market gives to Europe and East Asia is only grasped by specialised economists. Sensitive feeling types simply cannot handle this fast pace or crowding, so they are drawn to Australia and Red America in huge numbers to escape it. These same economists can and do show the intellectual thinking types who support journals like Green Left Weekly as elitist in the extreme and having no knowledge of what Australia’s masses want – or at all events want most.

That the gap between Australian emissions and European or East Asian one will grow and grow there is, with the discovery of underground coal gasification, no doubt at all.

That families will be lured to sprawling desert cities in Australia and away from the more pleasant (even for the migrants themselves) and ecologically more sustainable climates of Europe, Canada and New Zealand there is equally little doubt.