THE idea that coal-fired electricity generation can continue to be the major contributor to global electricity generation and the world can still restrict carbon dioxide emissions to a level constant with holding climate warming below 2 degrees is a fairytale, according to letter in the premier science journal Nature (published online, May 7, 2008). Vaclav Smil, of the University of Manitoba, in Canada, makes a new point that is critical to the debate as it is being run by state and federal governments in Australia: "Carbon geosequestration is irresponsibly portrayed as an imminently useful large-scale option for solving the challenge. But to sequester just 25% of carbon dioxide emitted in 2005 by large stationary sources of the gas we would have to create a system whose annual throughput by volume would be slightly more than twice that of the world's crude-oil industry, an undertaking that would take many decades to accomplish." And yet the Brumby and Rudd Governments persist in pouring money into geosequestration research at the expense of developing solar energy, among other renewable alternatives. Last month Premier John Brumby announced a $127 million package to develop "clean coal" including a $110 million fund to establish new large scale, pre-commercial carbon capture storage demonstration projects. These latest commitments will take Victoria's total clean coal investment to more than $244 million since 2002. Geosequestration is not only prohibitively expensive, it is energy-intensive and potentially unsafe even by comparison to the cost of storage of the nuclear waste byproduct from nuclear power generation. More damning still is the fact that, even if research could produce a safe and economical method of sequesting carbon dioxide, its widespread operational use would come too late to prevent atmospheric carbon dioxide rising to beyond 450 parts per million where scientists say global warming would move beyond human capacity to manage. The main benefit of the investment in geosequestration is that its promise, no matter how nebulous, provides an excuse for "business as usual" for the highly profitable coal industry. If the Brumby Government's real concern was the people in the Latrobe Valley, it would be spending the money developing a regional economic policy for Gippsland, involving an audit of the region's competitive strengths and encouraging the establishment and development of those industries the region could potentially best exploit. If the Government wished to buy time, it could look at prospects of switching the existing power generators from brown coal to natural gas as a transitional measure. Longer term, there is the prospect of integrating the generators with concentrated solar thermal plants where the solar energy can be stored as heat to generate base-load power. While Gippsland isn't the sunniest part of Victoria, it has the advantage of the transmission infrastructure already in place to reticulate electricity to the bulk of the Victorian electricity market. Based on recent reductions in the cost of renewable energy and industry forecasts, it is expected that the cost of renewable generation