flannery: 'No justification' for coal exports

February 08, 2007
From News.com (Aust).


AUSTRALIA can no longer justify its coal exports in the face of global warming fuelled by burning the commodity, Australian of the Year Tim Flannery said.

The Federal Government is counting on Australian-made clean coal technology being used to clean up coal-fired power stations in China and India.

With hundreds of coal-fired power stations due to be commissioned in developing nations in the coming years, the government has committed $6 million to help China work out how it can use new low-emission technology in their existing power stations.

But Professor Flannery said exporting coal could no longer be considered to be in Australia's national interest.

"That time has already come and the social licence of coal to operate is rapidly being withdrawn globally, and no government can protect an industry from that sort of thing occurring," he told ABC TV's Lateline program.

"We've seen it with asbestos, we'll see it with coal.

"We have to deal with that issue if we want a stable climate."

Prime Minister John Howard this week ruled out regulating Australia's lucrative coal exports to ensure it was only used in power stations employing cleaner technology, saying it would be a knee-jerk response that would damage the economy.

The Government should not bank on cleaner coal technology to solve the problem, Prof Flannery said.

"The technology is going to be too small and come too late to fix the problem," he said.

"The problem has grown too big now to be fixed. We need real investment from Government, real sacrifice at the moment for a better future."

Mr Howard also has said he feared that if China stopped using Australian coal the country would use a dirtier domestic product and make the situation worse.

Prof Flannery said that argument was "a false equation".

"The Europeans are already talking about tariffs, carbon-based tariffs," he said.

"As the situation unfolds and matters get more critical, the world is not going to allow people to pollute our common atmosphere.

"The social licence to operate those old polluting technologies would be withdrawn."

The Howard Government had made matters worse for itself by failing to ratify the Kyoto pact which dealt with the unwanted consequences of the coal trade, Prof Flannery said.

"If we'd done that 10 years ago we may have lessened the damage that was being done and we may have been on a trajectory that was healing the planet," he said.

"We didn't do that, so now the medicine we have to take has to be more radical."

Read the article.

Also see

• SMH - Flannery: coal will be the new asbestos