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Our government provides over 9 billion dollars of benefits to the coal industry each year- entrenching the most climate polluting form of energy on the planet. The burning of fossil fuels such as coal to create energy is the biggest problem that threatens our planet with extinction . We need to give up our addiction to fossil fuels, and fast. |
John Butler "We can make it the moon and do amazing things when we use our brains but still it takes the polar caps to melt, winter conditions in the summer , Droughts in the winter , and islands going under water before us human beings, as a collective, catch on to the simple lessons. Its a pity we always learn the hard way." Ben Fink Shellshocked Shellshocked is the expression of my great sorrow, anger and disbelief I felt when I stumbled upon a late night doco on TV about the Ogoni people in Nigeria. By the end I was in tears, shaken by the images of bodies hacked apart in Nigerian army dawn raids. The Ogoni's subsistence way of life was decimated by the oil and gas pipelines Shell Oil laid across their lands in the Niger Delta without their permission or consent. Their fields and water were contaminated and polluted, thus their way of life. On November 10th 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni colleagues were executed by the Nigerian state for campaigning against the devastation of the Niger Delta by oil companies. |
End Fossil Fuels 
The Low Down Remember, the carbon we produce now will be causing global warming for 200 years. Whatever else we do will be of little use unless we reduce the amount of coal and oil burnt. We need to leave it in the ground. Opening windfarms will be of little use unless they are accompanied by closing carbon-spewing coal-burning power stations. Tell your politicians that we need to cap, and then phase out Australia's reliance on coal fired power, and coal exports. Australia's biggest contribution to climate change is the burning of the coal we export overseas. Each tonne of coal emits 2.6 tonnes of CO2 and each tonne of CO2 causes A$110 damage to the global economy (according to the Stern Report to the British Government). Coal use is highly subsidized and does not add up. Call for an investment shift from dirty coal to clean, renewable energy. Vast political change is required. We in the developed world could get rid of all our cars and electric appliances and it would achieve nothing unless we can also stop the pulse of carbon from China and India. This means rewiring the entire planet with renewables and this requires unprecedented political will. Clean coal...? There is a lot of talk about coal carbon capture and storage or 'geosequestration', where pollution from burning coal is captured, piped and stored underground. Apart from the fact that it won't be commercially available for another two decades or so, it is problematic due to unresolved issues around whether the technology works, who owns the underground reservoirs, what it will cost and who is responsible for making sure the carbon doesn't leak. Despite this, Australian governments are putting most of their eggs in the carbon capture basket. Given the urgent need for action we simply can't afford to waste more years waiting to see if it even works and we should instead be adopting cleaner, smarter and proven alternatives like energy efficiency savings and renewable energy. Carbon capture and storage is also likely to be expensive and would burden future generations with thousands of years of management of the stored greenhouse pollution. It may have a role in the future but climate change demands action now if we are to make the dramatic cuts to greenhouse pollution levels the best science is telling us is needed. Read about the problems with carbon capture |
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Read all about it...why coal is king? How it came to be that a country as wealthy and educated as Australia is so far behind other nations when it comes to the challenge of climate change is now explained in a new book by Clive Hamilton, director of the Australia Institute. As Hamilton himself sums it up, Scorcher: the dirty politics of climate change is about greedy corporations, craven politicians and public disengagement. Hamilton, a long-term critic of the Federal Government, argues that it is partly Howard's heavy reliance on bureaucrats closely aligned to fossil fuel industries and his close personal relationships with coal, oil and aluminium smelting chief executives that has led him to protect them. That protection, Hamilton says, has come at the expense of renewable industries, the gagging of government scientists, and confusion in the public mind about the seriousness of the threat posed by climate change. "In the tight little world of greenhouse lobbying, the Prime Minister saw nothing improper in going to the country's biggest greenhouse polluters to ask them what the Government should do about greenhouse policy, without extending the same opportunity to other industries, not to mention environment groups and independent experts," he writes.
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