Millions of people live without access to electricity. Now it’s a battle between coal and renewables to bring cheap power.
Miners were fired by a sense of solidarity but also by dangerous working conditions, which produced high death and injury rates.
Janet Lindenmuth/Flickr
Miners were among the first workers to organise into trade unions from the middle of the 1700s, battling a lack of legal recognition and resistance from the mine owners.
Coal powered the machinery and lit what English poet William Blake described as ‘dark satanic mills’.
Sam Leighton/Flickr
Despite its insidious influence on the climate and our health, coal has a lesser-known positive side to its otherwise dark soul. It has provided us with some stunning fossils.
As coal energy loses market share, major U.S. coal companies are filing for bankruptcy. One multi-billion-dollar question: will taxpayers be forced to pay for cleaning up abandoned mines?
Building more renewable energy will be part of the effort to decarbonise energy systems.
David Clarke/Flickr
Phasing out fossils fuels would go a long way to stopping dangerous climate change – but it might be harder than we thought.
Labor has promised 50% of electricity will come from renewable sources by 2050, but has left the detail for after the election.
Wind turbine image from www.shutterstock.com
Labor’s detailed climate policy is ambitious, but it remains to be seen if it will capture the voters.
An LNG tanker leaves Gladstone, Queensland. Gas development is one of the drivers behind Australia’s increasing emissions and electricity demand.
AAP/Dan Peled
The granting of a mining lease to the Carmichael coal project, despite the huge potential greenhouse emissions, shows that ministers need to consider the wider consequences of their approvals.
A river flows into the Indian Ocean along South Africa’s Transkei coast, where residents are resisting a titanium mining project.
Epa/Nic Bothma
Longannet, the last coal-fired power plant in Scotland, has closed. It might be good news for climate change, but it also signals major problems ahead.
Graphite can be converted into synthetic diamonds used in manufacturing.
Yves Herman/Reuters