Do you know what runs this website? Coal-fired power stations. Do you know what your house frame is made from? Timber from native forests. Go into a greenie's house, do you know which timber they're featuring? It isn't plantation softwood!
All-powerful Mother Gaia seems terribly concerned about a few coal-fired power stations. Here's what would keep atmospheric carbon from increasing: hydro-electric and nuclear power stations.
The clear and present danger is not climate change, it is Green dogma. How many pensioners, warming themselves by a roaring candle, will it take to appease the voracious Green demagogue?
Let's ask Tasmanians shall we.
It is an undeniable fact that the vast majority of non-fossil fuel electricity production globally is from nuclear and hydro which collectively account for close to 40% of total generation.
It is also a reality that with present technology, intermittent renewables are an alternative to fossil fuels only in conjunction with hydro. Without that, they are limted to merely supplementing what necessarily remains a predominantly fossil or nuclear system.
That said, if we continue pursuing constant growth on a finite planet then we could dam every last creek on the planet, build thousands of nuclear reactors and still end up with rising CO2 emissions. Growth is the real problem here, only after that is fixed is there any hope of really reducing emissions with nuclear, hydro, wind, geothermal, solar etc.
As for Tasmanians, a few observations:
1. Public support for large scale hydro construction was almost absolute for many decades, before declining to about 54% amidst the great dams debate of the early 1980's. It hovered around 70% through the 1990's until recently when (anecdotally) it seems to have moved upward again.
All that said, there is no current proposal to build any large dam for power generation in Tas and the Hydro no longer has any construction machinery or a construction workforce, all of that being sold off or made redundant as construction on the last two schemes wound down in the early 1990's.
2. The vast majority of greens I have met in Tas burn wood for heating at home. That is to the point that one prominent green went into business manufacturing wood heaters during the dams debate era. The official line from the greens at the time was that Tasmanians should switch to wood heating rather than electric, noting that a major shift away from oil-fired heating was underway due to rising oil prices and was in fact the reason the controversial dam was proposed in the first place. A decade later, Tasmanians were fed up with smoke filled air and embraced electric heating, which now has 70% of the home heating market (conventional firewood 25%, gas 3%, oil 1%, wood pellets 1%).
3. There wouldn't be too many people in the entire state who think that the overall goings on in the power industry have worked overly well. That's to the point now of power workers being abused on the street, such is the level of community frustration over rising prices. Sales of solar power and solar hot water systems are booming that is for sure, although they are still only used by a minority at this stage.
As for Smurf, well I don't agree with the greens. But I'm far less keen on "dam the lot" than you might think. Halt growth first, then there would be a point in considering new dams, nuclear etc. But if we keep going with growth then we'll burn all the coal anyway, in which case we might as well have a few nice rivers and some uranium left for future generations.