You have to hand it to Clive Palmer. Whatever money he invested to get himself elected to parliament with sufficient power to abolish the carbon and mining taxes was well worth it for him personally.
And now it seems that Clive is trying to take advantage of the government’s direction to the CEFC to fund clean coal.
Waratah Coal, the company owned by Palmer’s Mineralogy, confirmed to the ABC on Tuesday that it had made an application to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation last Friday to finance a proposed 900MW coal generator that proposes to use an unproven technology, carbon capture and storage.
No plant in the world has come close to making this a commercially viable proposition and the owners of the most advanced project, Kemper in Georgia, now admit it would be impossible to make money from coal generation and CCS.
Resources minister Matt Canavan has been particularly vocal in support of a new coal-fired power station in north Queensland. This proposal, from Palmer, is the only proposal in the pipeline. Most other energy investors in the area are instead looking to solar and wind farms.
Even the Energy Supply Council, which represents the country’s fossil fuel generators, admits that new coal power is now “un-investable”.
The Coalition wants such coal plants to be funded by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, but this has been dismissed on several occasions by CEO Oliver Yates, who points out that co-financiers would be impossible to find, and any such investment would require billions of dollars in government guarantees and indemnities against a future carbon price.
Palmer’s proposal relies heavily on the anticipated “500-600 MW” growth in electricity demand over coming years “as production from surrounding mines increases to meet future ore exports.” These clearly relate to the proposed Adani and Rinehart mines.
In order to spin this load of crap, Sid Marris, a former analyst with the Minerals Council of Australia, and a 16-year veteran of News Ltd, has joined Turnbull’s staff as an advisor.
Then, last week, the chairman of the Minerals Council of Australia, the most vocal coal lobby group, Vanessa Guthrie, was appointed to the ABC board despite not making the shortlist prepared by an independent panel.
Also last week, it was revealed that the Queensland Government appointed an Adani company director to chair the state-owned authority overseeing the Abbot Point coal port, despite being warned of “potential conflicts of interest”.
Mr Fish’s appointment as NQBP chair was made in September 2015 by Treasurer Curtis Pitt. He did not resign the directorship of the Adani-owned Abbot Point Operations until November 11, 2015.
Last November, Ian Macfarlane, who was until recently a coalition minister, was named as the new chief executive of the Queensland Resources Council (QRC).
While Gina Rinehart cultivates and bankrolls certain politicians, Clive scams the system for all its worth, and the Minerals Council infiltrates the highest levels of government and the media, emissions keep rising – over 7% since the repeal of the carbon price, the growth coming mainly from the electricity sector, due to increased coal-fired generation, and from the new LNG export facilities in Queensland, where more coal and gas is being burned to power the liquefaction of coal seam gas, so it can be shipped overseas.
On Friday, the Australian Conservation Foundation appeared before the Federal Court in Brisbane to appeal a decision last year that gave the huge Carmichael coalmine the green light.
The government lawyers argued that if the mine didn’t go ahead, the same amount of coal could still be produced somewhere else in the world.
ACF slammed this approach.
“Basically, the Government is using the drug dealer’s defence – the argument that if we don’t dig up this coal and burn it, somebody else will,” ACF chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said. “This drug dealer’s defence is unethical and mocks the efforts of countries that are working to reduce global climate pollution.
“The Great Barrier Reef is already under enormous stress, with scientists warning the Reef could be hit by coral bleaching for the second year in a row – the last thing it needs is a huge new coal mine.”
The full bench of the Federal Court will hand down its decision at a later date.
Research indicates that this year the reef is under even greater heat stress than last year when we saw devastating bleaching.
Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said “It’s alarming that the reef is bleaching so soon again, giving no time for recovery from the huge losses of corals in the northern third of the Reef in 2016. The scary part is that 2017 is not an El Nino year – and the period between these bleaching events is getting shorter, too short for recovery.”
Tourism connected to the Great Barrier Reef alone employs 70,000 people and generates $5 billion in revenue annually.
We don’t have time for this deliberate disinformation campaign funded by wealthy vested interests and facilitated by lying politicians who are purely thinking of their donations and political support now and employment after politics.
The sooner we give up this coal con, the sooner we can actually address the challenges we face.
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