“I encourage businesses in (my electorate) to apply for the ($75 million Re-Tooling for Climate Change) grant and to contact my office for support.

It will be interesting to see how successful various electorates are at accessing that money. Batman will be right up there, you think?
He doesn’t list it as a “Current Issue” there, and he reckons elsewhere “aviation contributes just 2 per cent of greenhouse emissions” ( y’know, piffle), but the Indian press is reporting him being there, signing an MOU and discussing ” various matters relating to bilateral cooperation in tourism sector (such as ) the carbon tax imposed on the aviation sector by some developed countries to discourage emissions (being) not good for tourism.”

That said, gentle subduction zones (which are seismically active) seem to be good candidates for CCS. This adds complexities to developing rules.

However, the use of CCS to mitigate against the effects of burning brown coal is fairly counterproductive, from a 2007 Scientific American Article:

The difficulty is capturing it at the power plant without sapping too much energy or pushing electric costs up too high… Adding carbon capture technology to that plant sucks up 40 percent of the power it can produce and adds at least 2.7 cents to the retail price of that electricity. …. But even the small projects are already turning up surprises, such as the relative permeability of various rocks and the ability of CO2 to mix with saline and form carbonic acid, which eats away surrounding rock.

That said, I do have a fair bit of sympathy with that scientist. It’s fair enough to worry about “unknown unknowns”, but the general public’s attitude to risks is often almost exactly arse-about. They worry about the million to one risk (example: I will be killed by an acolyte of Osama bin Laden) and ignore much bigger ones (I will be killed by a drunk P-plater crossing the road) precisely because they’re familiar.

You can’t get insurance against a comet crashing into the Earth. Doesn’t mean we need to panic about it.

I’m certainly not advocating panic, but just outlining a yawning chasm in understandings of risk. Simply bracketing my objections off as ‘panic’ just doesn’t capture my position on technology generally and risk specifically.

Your’s and Luke Weston’s definitions of risks and risk understanding assume that risk meanings are “not constructed meanings, but objectively given ones”, to quote Brian Wynne from a 2002 paper. My problem, which Wynne goes on to articulate as follow, is that these entrenched epistemic positions

“… exhaustively define the objective meaning of the public issues of technology. A striking contemporary resonance is to be found between this scholarly understanding of risk, and the predominant understanding of the domain of lack of control, or ignorance, exposed by Grove-White (2001) in an exchange with the chair of a key UK government scientific advisory committee. As a member of the UK Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission, Grove-White was questioning the institutional scientist at a public hearing. The relevant passage was as follows (Grove-White, 2001: 471):

[Grove-White, GW]: ‘Do you think people are reasonable to have concerns about possible ‘unknown unknowns’ where GM plants are concerned?
[Scientist]: Which unknowns?
[G-W]: That’s precisely the point. They aren’t possible to specify in advance. Possibly they could be surprises arising from unforeseen synergistic effects, or
from unanticipated social interventions. All people have to go on is analogous experience with other technologies . . .
[ Scientist]: I’m afraid it’s impossible for me to respond unless you can give me
a clear indication of the unknowns you are speaking about.
[G-W]: In that case don’t you think you should add health warnings to the advice you’re giving ministers, indicating that there may be ‘unknown unknowns’ which you can’t address?
[ Scientist]: No, as scientists, we have to be specific. We can’t proceed on the basis of imaginings from some fevered brow . . .

This nicely delineates the dominant, entrenched, cultural-institutional mind-set in which any consequence that may lie outside prevailing scientific risk-knowledge cannot be described – by definition, because it is a matter of scientific ignorance – and cannot therefore be given any standing, even as a general category, of which there are many real, costly, examples. Responsibility for such possible effects is thus pre-empted and externalized, and anyone who might wish to refer to their relevance suffers from ‘a fevered brow’. The public meaning of the issue is thus very tightly confined to what we can control, practically or intellectually, with the institutionalized discourse of risk.”

Excuse the cynicism, but what is stopping a company pumping huge amounts of CO2 underground at a nice profit while most of that CO2 escapes from some unknown location after a short amount of time? Why would they care, especially with this legislation? Perhaps traces of signature isotopes could be added to CO2 as it is being pumped underground, but even then, how would you detect the location of a leak and what could be do about it if we do find out it is leaking? Zip in all likelihood.

Is it an irony that while while talking about pumping liquid CO2 (under pressure and probably below a freezing temperature depending on the amount of pressure it is under) another alternative source of energy that is commonly mentioned is geothermal? With geothermal you assume a near endless supply of thermal energy underground and you extract that energy by pumping water down there and using the steam that comes back to the surface to generate electricity – in basic terms. Some places are more suited to geothermal than others, obviously. Are the conditions underground adequate to keep the CO2 in a liquid state or if it does mix whatever underground, what happens when it is supersaturated? Would even a minor earthquake be liable to set most of the CO2 to escape into the atmosphere like a fizzy drink that has its cap seal broken?

I don’t know how you could give this technology the benefit of the doubt. If it were for just small volumes, sure. But to store years’ worth of waste generated in coal power stations…

Not that that’s a terrible thing, merely noting that it’s the case, and might also be the case in the long term with sequestration.

“I imagine you’re right – Carbon sequestration is uninsurable in much the same way as nuclear power. Ulrich Beck made much of this latter point in his seminal work in the late 1980s on Risk Society. In this sense, government as insurer of last resort is nothing new at all.”

In the very beginnings of commercial nuclear energy in the United States, insurance companies wouldn’t provide insurance, because they didn’t have quantitative understanding of the risks associated with nuclear energy.

That’s what all insurance is all about – quantitative understanding of risks. If they don’t understand the risks, quantitatively, then they cannot make money selling insurance. Once they had a better understanding, however, commercial insurance of nuclear power became commonplace – all nuclear power utilities in the US are required by law to provide their own very large insurance pools, and the US taxpayer has never paid out any money to anybody under Price-Anderson.

Just like commercial insurers wouldn’t insure commercial nuclear energy in the early days of that technology, I doubt commercial insurers will deal with carbon dioxide geosequestration until they know enough about the risks of CO2 escaping to allow them to quantitatively assess the risks.