If, as the environment movement contends, fossil fuels are the new tobacco, then Australia has cast itself as a sort of swaggering Marlboro man, puffing away contentedly as the rest of the world looks on quizzically.
As other countries look to transition to low-carbon alternatives with one eye on crunch climate talks in Paris later this year, Australia is pushing ahead with an expansion in coal extraction that its conservative prime minister Tony Abbott insists is “good for humanity”.
A series of huge mines planned for outback Queensland would, at capacity, produce nearly enough coal to match Germany’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
The federal government has just approved another mine, further south, on the fertile farming plains of New South Wales. It will be allowed to operate until 2046, a full 26 years after the point when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests the world should stop emissions rising to avoid disastrous global warming.
The mine, to be operated by Chinese state-owned firm Shenhua, has caused consternation among farmers, with agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce rebelling against his own cabinet colleagues by branding the approval “absolute madness” and “dopey”.
Both mines will liberate coal to further escalate Australia’s huge export industry, predominantly to India and China. The government’s rationale is clear – coal is here to stay and there is a moral imperative to provide it to the world, ideally reigniting Australia’s fading mining boom in the process. Any contrary view, such as the Pope’s, has been branded “unchristian” in the Abbott-friendly, Rupert Murdoch-owned press.
“For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of prosperity,” Abbott said late last year. “Coal is the foundation of the way we live because you can’t have a modern lifestyle without energy, you can’t have a modern economy without energy.
“So if we are serious about raising people’s living standards in less developed countries, if we are serious about maintaining and improving living standards in countries like Australia, we have to be serious about making the best use of coal.”
Indeed ! Why do you hate poor people, environmentalists ? Stupid Malthusian Marxist Big-Government Bureaucrats standing in the way of basic human progress and prosperity ! Why shouldn't developing nations be allowed to play as much a part (full knowingly) as we played (somewhat knowingly, perhaps) in destroying the ability of the planet to support advanced ecosystems, and human civilisation ? And while we're at it, we should also encourage every nation to develop nuclear weapons. Why should the developed nations have a monopoly on the power to destroy all of humanity at the touch of a button ?
According to recent polling by the Lowy Institute, 50% of Australians agree that “global warming is a serious and pressing problem” – up 14% since 2012. Asked what Australia’s primary energy source should be in 10 years, 43% of respondents cited solar power. Coal was selected by only 17%.
But it is doubtful whether Abbott will be swayed, either by scientific or economic evidence or, despite his undoubted ability as a political survivor, poor polling.
As he wrote in his book Battlelines: “To a conservative, intuition is as important as reasoning; instinct as important as intellect. A way of life has far more demonstrative power to a conservative than a brilliant argument.”
Earlier, in
the article, Abbott is referred to as a '
a poor man’s George W Bush'. Bush was never so eloquent, but that sentiment in bold, scares the shit out of me. That kind of anti-rational bullshit might well serve as the epitaph on our species' tombstone.
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