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February 15, 2009
If it is a contest between carbon austerity and fossil-fuel energy then the latter will win hands down under Rudd Labor. More coal-fired stations will be built in Queensland, NSW and Victoria, even though the climate is nearing a tipping point. The rhetoric will be that emissions will be reduced, there will be soothing words new carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities, the new coal-fired power stations will be retrofited when technology become available.
Matt Golding
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True, a realistic green vision of future energy consumption would need to include coal in some capacity, and so a method must be found to render it less toxic by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The spin from the Rudd Government---others such as the UK + the US--- is that they are working on "clean coal" or that they will build power plants that are "capture-ready" in case technology is ever developed to capture all pollutants. The reality is that the Australian government only pretends to be green because coal interests have great power in Australia, as in the US.
Coal provides nearly 80 per cent of Australia's electricity need and the emissions from coal-dominated electricity generation rose 50 per cent between 1990 and 2004 and they have continued to rise since. with most of thencrease in emissions from coal-fired generators Geosequestration technology is the great hope for the coal industry, even though it cannot be fitted to existing coal power stations, only new ones.
Although geosequestration technology for coal power should be pursued in the longer term, without generating more power from natural gas and renewable sources there is no hope of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades.
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Australia is addicted to coal for power generation. With all the concern about climate change one would think that coal power, the highest emitter of greenhouse gases, would be on the ropes.