It’s about baby steps.  You can’t just make multiple changes all at once.  In the future coal as we use it today will be largely dead overseas.   It’s a commodity and Australia is making money out of it for the benefit of our economy.

Coal can be consumed with a relatively new process called coal gasification as well as being burned directly into electricity.  Gasification is a way less polluting process and allows direct sequestration of CO2, while also producing other Oil products such as fertilizers, plastics, diesel and syngas for electricity production.  So the fact that we are mining coal is not a direct contributor to climate change other than the mining practices we use to actually take the coal out of the ground and the transport to move it around the world.  Coal gasification provides a good alternative to oil while we are still in a transition from our current infrastructure to new electricity based infrustructure so that potentially in the future we don’t have to allocate agriculture to ethanol crops which competes against food supply.  It is now common knowledge that oil reserves are dwindling.

If there is a need for a commodity it makes good economic sense that we mine it and sell it, but how we use the coal is what really matters, and that’s what the carbon tax will assist with.  Making investment and current day-”clean technology” more competitive against inefficient and dirty technologies that have been around  and have a monopoly in our present economy since the start of the industrial age.

In a nut shell!

The way we use oil and coal in todays economy is not economic (eg. Where is the economics of someone driving to work in a hummer in comparison to another person going to work with the train Why do we buy things that cost very little but we end up not using or hardly use the product and then wind up discarding the product after a couple of years?).

The fact that the above instances are taking place means our economy is mainly being run by processes and technologies that encourage inefficiency.  The carbon tax is about putting the economics back into the economy. (eg. I need a fridge so that my food lasts longer and it makes ME more economic)

Climate change is an interesting topic because of the potential size of the problem but its also a very controversial one.  If a skeptic believes the scientific data on warming then they believe its the sun that causes warming, and if a skeptic does not believe in warming then he believes the whole thing is a hoax.  Crazy Ideas, during crazy times, but I believe man will only make serious changes once something dear is taken from us…  Our technology is our saviour, renewable energy and sustainability must be ever more apart of our future.