Press release – 31 January, 2017Sydney, 1 February 2017:Prime Minister needs to come clean and admit coal obsession driven by politics
The Prime Minister’s obsession with coal-fired power in his National Press Club address today was a sop to his party’s climate-deniers and fossil fuel donors, says Greenpeace.
“The Prime Minister is not looking at energy policy agnostically – he’s being swayed by the climate deniers that rule his government and his party’s fossil fuel donors,” Greenpeace Clean Energy Campaigner Nikola Casule said.
“Saying coal can be clean is like saying cigarettes can be healthy. Burning coal pollutes our air and water and drives dangerous climate change. False solutions like ‘carbon capture’ are prohibitively expensive and in the rare cases that they have been used, they have failed to reduce carbon pollution in any meaningful sense.
“Economically, we’re better off investing more in renewable energy and storage, rather than pouring money into this dying industry that threatens our Great Barrier Reef and drives extreme weather events.
“Even Shell, which has invested in just two carbon-capture coal plants globally, has refused to fund more because of the prohibitive cost.
“The jobs of today and the future are in renewable energy and storage, not in propping up the dying coal industry with expensive technology that only deals with a tiny fraction of the climate pollution from coal-fired power stations,” Dr Casule said.
Contact – Monique Vandeleur 0419 588 430