What about Coal?
Australia has very large deposits of coal and especially very high quality black coal. 80% of this is exported and it is by far the largest Australian export worth $24 billion. In NSW and Queensland, most of the electricity generation uses black coal and Victoria uses brown coal.
The Coal Industry Association fully accepts the science about global warming and its responsibility to do something to manage their impact. They are voluntarily putting $1Billion over the next 10 years into research into clean coal technology and within 5-6 years they say there will be a near zero emission power station.
The issue remains about the old technology power stations, especially in the countries we export to, like China. The Coal Association justifies this by saying that the coal importing countries will continue to buy coal and there is less environmental damage from the carefully controlled Australian mines than from some of the low quality brown coal deposits if they were mined in some developing countries.
I guess I agree and acknowledge that this is a very difficult area. Western economies have a much higher standard of living and use far more energy per head than our neighbours and we cannot expect that they do not also have energy needs.
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