Why get worked up about our climate responsibilities when Australia’s contribution to global emissions – around 1.5% of the total - is small? Here is the usual reply. Australia’s domestic greenhouse gas…
The Queensland Government has decided to raise coal mining royalties. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? A review of Queensland Pty Ltd by Peter Costello revealed a precarious balance sheet. Time to get things…
Researchers from Stanford University say there’s enough wind potential to serve the world’s energy needs by 2030.
AAP
Around 4 million wind turbines, the majority located over water, could deliver half of the world’s power demand according to researchers from Stanford University. In a new study exploring the potential…
If closing brown coal power plants is part of the lowest cost mix of emissions reduction opportunities, then they will close without additional payment from the government.
ccdoh1/Flickr
This week the Australian Government announced that the “payment for closure” element of the Clean Energy Future package would not proceed. The decision has saved taxpayers a multi-billion dollar outlay…
Why hasn’t human health been considered in the push for expanded coal facilities?
AAP Image/Paul Miller
A massive expansion of Newcastle’s coal export terminal has been proposed by Port Waratah Coal Services. Approval is likely soon, but the expansion’s effect on human health has been ignored in the project’s…
Refrigerating coal emissions would reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals in the air. According to research by a team of…
The Federal Government has given the go-ahead to the Alpha coal development (this picture shows the existing trial mine), but will it ever be built?
Greenpeace/Andrew Quilty
Picking who is right in political disputes is often hard but this one is different. Queensland Premier Campbell Newman was clearly wrong in stating that the Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke is standing…
With Australia’s highest carbon intensity, Victoria’s Hazelwood coal-fired power station is a prime candidate to close down part of its generating capacity.
AAP
Under its Clean Energy Future, the Federal government will negotiate to close 2000 MW of the dirtiest fossil fuel power generating capacity in Australia by 2020. With the price on carbon now in operation…
Who’s paying for this? You, probably.
Uday Phalgun
As we are so often reminded, Australia has abundant reserves of high quality coal. Mining magnates, industry lobbyists and politicians all talk up the value of coal for the Australian economy, with exports…
Coal’s toll? A Newcastle church cupola damaged in the 1989 earthquake serves as a memorial for the 13 people killed.
Flickr/OZinOH
This week’s 5.3 magnitude earthquake that struck near Moe in Victoria’s brown-coal mining region of the La Trobe Valley brings to mind the 5.6 magnitude quake of 1989 in another coal-mining heartland…
The ones on the left are on their way out.
Richard Brand
In our Conversation article, King Coal dethroned, we suggested that renewable energy investment was now outstripping fossil fuel power investment. Many welcomed the news that the future was arriving sooner…
Minister Tony Burke is slowing down coal development in Queensland, but there’s more to it than saving turtles.
Landfeldt/Flickr
The halt in the Alpha Coal Project approval process shows the Commonwealth is taking very seriously UNESCO’s recent report threatening downgrading the status of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area…
John Gardner, US Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare joined Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet in 1965 to help create a ‘Great Society’ to end poverty, promote equality, improve education, rejuvenate cities…
Australia is on the lookout for new ways to dig up and burn coal without blowing our emissions budget.
AAP/Wesfarmers
From time to time, new technologies are proposed to help us use even more of Australia’s abundant coal. Many of these technologies are designed to reduce emissions, either by drying the coal or capturing…
Plans to transform Victoria’s Latrobe Valley into a mining export hub are misguided.
AAP
If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. And if wishes were new technology, then Victoria’s Latrobe Valley would be a mining export hub to rival the Pilbara. But wishes are neither horses nor new…
Melting Arctic Sea ice should be the warning we need about expanding coal exports.
Michael Sonnabend
Despite peak global temperatures in 2005 and 2010 (unprecedented in the instrumental record), a recent sharp plunge in volume of the Arctic Sea ice and a spate of extreme weather events, coal mining, coal…
Smoking is sickening, but coal and coal-fired power stations? Don’t you worry about that.
AAP/Greenpeace
Tens of thousands of Australians live and work close to coal-fired power plants. The cocktail of gaseous and particulate pollutants arising from coal power generation is injurious to human health. All…
More fossil fuel is out there, but if policy doesn’t stop us, physics will.
EvolveLove/Flickr
In his recent Quarterly Essay, Man-made world: choosing between progress and planet, economist Andrew Charlton presents technological innovation as the solution to climate change and the route to unbounded…