Twenty years ago, on this day, September 12, 2003, the Newspaper Herald, in the heart of New South Wales coal country, reports on coal industry leaders promising cleaner coal…
ANY “sunset” scenario for the Hunter’s coal industry would be a cleaner one, industry leaders said yesterday.
Using Coal21, a paper put together by the state and federal governments as a starting point, panellists looked at whether the billion dollar industry had a use-by date a “sunset”.
NSW Minerals Council executive director John Tucker said many in the industry believed the move to more diverse energy sources would start to occur in big numbers in 40 to 50 years.
Hennessy, C. 2003. Future Of Coal Looks `cleaner’. The Newcastle Herald,13 September
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 375ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Australia was in the middle of an enormous minerals boom and becoming very wealthy indeed. Mind you not everyone – the Gini Coefficient was going up and up the minerals boom included coal exports. The fear that eventually there would be restrictions on coal use meant that there were all kind of wheezes about “clean coal” and forums were being carried out. This was one of them.
What I think we can learn from this is that a lipstick will always be found if the pig is particularly valuable. That is to say people will always try to slap the word clean or green or sustainable on whatever on very unclean ungreen unsustainable crap that they are doing. Partly so they can sleep at night, partly so they can recruit more people into the industry, get investors. And partly to make it harder to regulate them.
And there are entire industries made up of individuals and companies who will assist in this lipsticking. And we want to believe those lies, because then we don’t have to do anything particularly difficult or uncomfortable, we can just go with the flow and still get what we want.
What happened next
Twenty years later they are still selling coal from the Hunter. And we’re all going to die. Why? Because these coal mines are death factories.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.