Professor Andrew Blakers, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems at the Australian National University, says that Australian energy policy is currently driven by short-term considerations in favour of the fossil-fuel industry, to the detriment of the renewable energy industry. In the keynote paper on Sustainable Energy for the progressive internet conference In Search Of Sustainability, Professor Blakers says that wind energy, solar thermal and photovoltaics are the only truly large-scale sustainable electricity generation technologies available.

"These technologies are relatively free of adverse environmental impacts, and will come to dominate the traded energy market over the next 50 years," said Professor Blakers. "The Federal Government is ignoring Australia's natural advantage in this area and placing most of its faith in the future on the policy of "geosequestration", where the CO2 produced by combustion of coal is buried to prevent it from contributing to the greenhouse effect".

In another paper on the Energy theme on the conference web-site, Dr Mark Diesendorf is also critical of government support for geosequestration. He says it is dangerous to place our faith in this unproven and potentially dangerous technology while safe and available sustainable sources of energy are being ignored.

In another paper, Chem Nayar notes that a single wind turbine prevents as much carbon dioxide from being emitted each year as could be absorbed by 500 acres of forest. And Peter North warns that in a world with rapidly diminishing fossil fuels, natural gas that supplies the feedstock and energy for the production of synthetic fertilisers, global food production will be at risk unless alternative methods are found.