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Australia has a key role to play in global CO2 reduction – Can that be improved?


Essay by Eric Worrall

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia can save the world by producing cheap goods using green hydrogen.

Not related to global decarbonization? No, Australia is very important to it

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor

The coalition has spent more than a decade training Australia to fall into a state of learnable helplessness against any action on climate change.

One of its most effective arguments is that Australia emits only 1% of total global greenhouse gases, so even if they eliminated all of them it wouldn’t make a difference. What is the point of trying?

In fact, Australia has the potential to cut global emissions by 8%, according to new research by renowned economist Ross Garnaut.

By what magic arithmetic can Australia eliminate 8% of the world’s emissions if it only emits 1%? By acting as a major world supplier of zero-carbon goods and services, this will allow the rest of the world, and China in particular, to cut its emissions.

One of the book’s co-authors, ANU professor of economics, Ligang Song, said that “using Australia’s renewable electricity and hydrogen produced from renewables to convert [iron ore] into iron and steel would reduce global emissions by around 2% – almost twice as much as Australia would eliminate its own emissions.”

Read more: https://amp.smh.com.au/politics/federal/irrelevant-to-global-decarbonisation-no-australia-s-crucial-to-it-20221003-p5bmnv.html

To my knowledge, no one has figured out how to convert expensive green hydrogen into competitively priced blue steel and silicon.

Although in theory hydrogen could be used instead of coal to reduce ore to iron and silicon, in practice hydrogen is a bad substitute.

In steel, hydrogen impurities in steel are a disaster, they cause hydrogen deposition.

Hydrogen mixed with silicon can be even worse than using hydrogen to reduce iron ore. Toxic silicon and hydrogen silanover the years has caused a number of significant fatal industrial accidents.

Why do Australians fall for such ridiculous green stories?

The reason seems to be that many Australians yearn for the days when Australia was a boom manufacturing hub, before Australia’s manufacturing industry crashed 60 years ago (see chart at top of page). The story of the green industry that serves as this aspiration.

The reality is that the drop in Australian production won’t be solved with a few solar panels.

As far as I can tell, the decline in Australian manufacturing was due to a combination of greedy tax increases by the government, and then, in the ’90s, increased energy costs, after the government Australia is obsessed with renewable energy.

Expensive government-subsidized green energy will not fix these problems.

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