Eighteen years ago, on this day, March 13th, 2007,
Australia’s coal and power generation industries must shoulder a large part of the cost of developing clean coal technologies, investing ”billions not millions” to mitigate climate change, ACTU secretary Greg Combet says. ”We are talking about companies that make multibillion-dollar profits from coal mining. It is only fair that a slice of those profits be directed to the research and development needed to substantially reduce greenhouse emissions,” he said. Speaking from the Hunter Valley, where he was launching a clean coal discussion paper with Opposition environment spokesman Peter Garrett, Mr Combet called for the Federal Government’s Minimum Renewable Energy Target for green electricity generation to be boosted.
Beeby, R. 2007. Put power profits into clean energy: Combet. Canberra Times, 13 March.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the ALP, in opposition federally, was using climate as a big stick to beat Prime Minister John Howard with. It had the added advantage of squaring the circle of their support for coal miners and coal mining; they needed something like geosequestration, CCS. So here we have Greg Combet, who would end up as Gillard’s Environment Minister, but that’s for the future, spouting guff about “the industry has to do X or Y,” and this is the classic triangulating position of seeming to be a friend of the worker and chiding industry bosses. It’s all nice theater.
What I think we can learn from this that CCS is an extremely useful way of squaring various circles.
But I think we’re now entering the world of nobody really bothering to pretend. We’re into the unmitigated disaster phase of it all.
What happened next Rudd bunged 100 million of Australian taxpayers dollars at a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Initiative. So, money well spent.
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.
Also on this day:
March 13, 1989 – UK Energy Department shits all over everyone’s future by dissing Toronto Target
March 13, 1992 – Australian climate advocates try to get government to see sense… (fail, obvs).
March 13, 2001 – Bush breaks election promise to regulate C02 emissions…