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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

Is the correct strategy to wait to regulate gas usage until every country on earth does the same? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Someone always has to be last.

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If you want to help the environment, you regulate both gas usage and exports. The goal is to keep gas in the ground, where it belongs, not to move it to other countries.

Except gas exports are largely being used to retire brown coal burning which is even worse for the environment than LNG. This isn't an all-or-nothing deal even with exports. The richer countries should take on the costs of better efficiency first and we can trickle those technologies down to other nations as they become cheaper than LNG and coal.

It is stupid, with less Gas available on the LNG Market other LNG Producers will increase production or they will use other Energy sources such as coal.

It's banning the installation of NEW LNG appliances in homes in Victoria.

It doesn't impact commercial use of LNG, or the extraction or export of LNG.

Banning domestic gas usage while a significant proportion of you electricity supply is produced by burning coal seems beyond absurd..

Except that it won't be that way forever. 30% of that generation goes away in 4 years. The rate of solar and wind generators coming onto the grid is massive, putting pressure on the brown coal generators.

We are also not talking about ripping out the existing install base of appliances.

It will take at least a decade or two for that switch to reach a critical mass. That's the point when it becomes uneconomic to continue operating the domestic piped LNG network in Victoria.

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