The whole concept of blaming the government, not the energy companies for this mess is an odd one, because there’s damn little seperation between the two. Governments roll over for large energy corporations regularly. If a large energy company wanted to invest time and energy in alternate fuels, they couls ask the government, and even ask the government to subsidize them.

They’re *not* doing that. The only reason I can think of is that they don’t want to.

And, of course, that is what Kyoto attempts to do, and what Australia and the US are unwilling to do.

Australia is well placed to be an innovator in clean energy, with its cloudless skies and wide-open spaces ready for solar and wind power.

If this is true - if this is empirically true (and I have no reason to doubt that it is), then there will be a commercial market for clean energy.

Here is the basic question you have to ask:

Am I free to go out into the desert somewhere, build ten acres of solar panels and a big ol’ transformer on my own land, and sell the power that I’m outputting?

If you are free to do so, and if Australia really is advantageously positioned for energy tech, then clean energy companies will spring up.

If you aren’t free to do so, then perhaps the problem is with your government and/or its laws, and not with fossil fuel exporters. Energy companies tend to think of themselves as energy companies. Exxon doesn’t hate solar power; Exxon would like to see some large-scale projects that it could use to sell juice. The numbers just aren’t there for those projects. Some cool pilot projects have demonstrated that it can be done - so there’s a certain amount of justified complacency about humanity’s prospects for energy in the long term. But right now it just doesn’t pay.

In the meantime, it makes perfect sense to use the fossil fuels we have readily available. There’s no need to set them all on fire at once. And certainly, let’s look at how and why we use them as we work on mitigating global climate issues.