Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Interestingly enough, in the last parliament I was on the Standing Committee on Science and Innovation evaluating the technology of geosequestration. I have had further information about geosequestration subsequent to that. There are a few interesting things about geosequestration. One is that the coal industry itself acknowledges that the cost of carbon will have to be $50 a tonne in order to make geosequestration commercially viable. One of the questions is: why would people change their behaviour if there was no cost associated with it? In other words, if the cost of carbon is not $50 or more a tonne, there is no reason the coal-fired power industry would get involved in a geosequestration project. There are a few problems associated with geosequestration. One problem is that you pump it underground—carbon dioxide itself is very corrosive—and no-one is 100 per cent certain what will happen to it in the long term. However, we do know that the release of carbon dioxide into the environment in large doses can have very, very serious consequences. An example of that was the natural eruption, if you will, of carbon dioxide at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 and 1,500-odd people died. If you pump carbon dioxide underground into geological reservoirs, there are risks associated with that. We are told by people who want to get involved in geosequestration, ‘Well, we will constantly monitor it.’ The question is: what will be the cost of that constant monitoring into, basically, the infinite future? People talk about the problems of storage of nuclear waste, but at least that is very clearly contained in a small geographical area. With this, you are talking about areas all over the place where you are storing the carbon dioxide.

The other issue is that the power industry says that they will not take on forever the responsibility of the continual monitoring and potential consequences of a leak of carbon dioxide into the environment. They would probably accept responsibility for about 50 years, but after that it would be up to the government to cover the costs of potential leaks. So there are very serious potential costs with this. Even if you go along with the so-called consensus view of climate change, having an emissions trading scheme with a high cost of carbon could potentially result in the loss of jobs and industry in Australia. This is before you even get into the issue of it actually having a negative effect in terms of overall global emissions.

Everyone has acknowledged that this is a global problem—you cannot geographically confine the atmospheres all over the planet. Let me give you an example of this. In my state of Western Australia, there is an aluminium-smelting industry. At a cost of $50 a tonne, it may well be that Alcoa decide it is not viable for them to smelt aluminium in Australia anymore. The aluminium-smelting industry in Western Australia use gas as their source of power generation. So what are they likely to do in that case? They would be likely to ship their industry to China. So we lose the industry, we lose the jobs but—here are the factors that are very damaging for Australia—we also have not only the monetary costs associated with decommissioning an aluminium smelter in Australia and commissioning a new one in China but also the carbon costs. You need to then transport the bauxite from Australia to China, which has a carbon cost associated with it. In addition to that, it is highly likely that the power generation method for the aluminium smelter in China would be coal. The overall result is that we have introduced an emissions trading scheme, we have shipped jobs and industry overseas and we have actually contributed to increased carbon dioxide output. That is fraught with all sorts of consequences and it needs to be considered very carefully.

I have heard many on the other side spouting about science, scientific consensus and so on. For instance, we have the member for Kingsford Smith calling himself a lay scientist. I wish he were in here so I could educate him a bit about what the scientific process actually involves. Science is about falsification. You put up a hypothesis and other scientists are duty-bound to try to prove that hypothesis wrong. That is what science is about. It is not about accepting a hypothesis because it feels great; it is about trying to prove it wrong. What we have, for instance, with the IPCC is the idea that everyone should be sitting around the table singing Kum ba yah from the same songbook. That is a stupid way of going about it and, quite frankly, science has never been about consensus. Science is about data and it is about evidence, and it is about evaluating that data and evidence and seeing whether it falsifies a theory. The point here is that there is a lot of criticism of anyone who dares to question the consensus view. This reminds me a little of the 1930s. Hitler could not stand quantum and relativistic physics because he saw it as Jewish science. As a consequence, he hated the theory of relativity. So he commissioned a book called One hundred authors against Einstein—Einstein being, of course, a German Jew. Einstein was asked how it felt to have 100 eminent scientists questioning the theory of relativity—and didn’t that give him cause for concern? Einstein’s response was that it doesn’t take 100 scientists; it takes one fact. And that is the problem here.

There are also problems with some elements of statistical studies and so on. A lot of climate science is about statistics, and a lot of climate science is about computer models. Then there is the problem with the whole business of ‘Okay, how does the peer review process work?’ We hear a lot of discussion about peer review, as if, once a thing is in a peer review journal, it is unarguably correct. Let me give you an example of how peer review works and how science works.

Let us assume you have an epidemiological study, a statistical study, and let us assume you want to correlate, for example, cancer clusters with high-tension powerlines. Let us make the assumption that there is, in fact, no correlation and that high-tension powerlines do not cause an increased incidence of cancers. The nature of statistics is that you might have 100 studies, and 20 studies would show positive correlation: yes, indeed, there is a correlation between high-tension powerlines and cancers. You might also have another 20 studies which show there is negative correlation: that proximity to high-tension powerlines actually results in fewer cancers. Then you might have the middle 60 studies showing effectively no correlation whatsoever. Remembering that scientific journals want to sell their journals, obviously they want to sell stuff that is interesting. As such, the no-correlation-whatsoever papers that might be submitted to the journal would not even go out for peer review, because they would not be seen as something that the journal would want to publish. The negatively correlated studies would be likely to have close to no chance of getting published, but the positively correlated studies—the interesting stuff—would be published. So then the consensus is: yes, there is this effect. Then you would have a metastudy, where someone would go through the peer reviewed papers and say, ‘You know, of 100 papers that I have reviewed on this, 95 of them show that there is a positive correlation between cancer and proximity to high-tension powerlines.’ This becomes the strong consensus for something where there is no effect whatsoever. This is the danger of not understanding how this entire process works.

The point is: it comes down to journals wanting to publish what is interesting, but it also comes down, to a certain extent, to an old boy network. I will give an example of my own. When I was working with the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, off my own bat—

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