His interview with Energy Minister Chris Hartcher will send shivers through the collective Community spine. Listening to Chris Hartcher, all one can feel is absolute despair. He is going to “set up a whole range of measures” – So that mining and agriculture can “co-exist”? The only ‘measure’ in place is business as usual – as you would expect when the main beneficiary is also the umpire.
Liverpool Plains farmer Rosemary Nankerville told a Sydney rally very little of the power generated from CSG mining will be used in New South Wales because it is earmarked for export.
“So like the coal industry, New South Wales is letting in huge multinational companies to pillage our beautiful country, taking the spoils overseas and leaving us with issues which may never be resolved.”
In Western Australia, protesters gathered in Reuther Park at Margaret River, while in Queensland protests were held in Brisbane, Toowoomba, the Darling Downs, the Sunshine Coast and Gympie.
But if it comes to a choice, food must win out over energy.
If the choice does become necessary, it should not be made by default.
Decisions to exploit energy resources must not be made prematurely so that they pre-empt the decision to protect the best agricultural land in a continent where it is in short supply.
PRIME agricultural land in the black soil plains in northern NSW, regarded as the best in Australia, is being taken from farming communities by coal seam gas mining companies in a form of ”legalised theft”, a retired NSW Supreme Court judge told a public meeting in Gunnedah yesterday.
THE massive planned expansion of BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine would plague South Australia with radioactive waste and water overuse, say green groups, dismissing government assurances of strict environmental standards.
Willem Vervoort, professor of Hydrology at the University of Sydney, who has followed the plans, said he understood environmental concerns had to be balanced against economic opportunities but said BHP Billiton was missing an opportunity by not ending its use of Great Artesian Basin water altogether.
Doctor Pauline Roberts likened polluting mining companies to the tobacco industry 60 years ago, when the first studies came out attributing the smoking of cigarettes to lung cancer.
Dr Roberts said the response by the government to the tobacco problem then was to tax the product, and she asked the audience if this sounded familiar to the carbon tax debate.
Professor Howarth’s finding was that shale gas may in fact be between 20-100 per cent dirtier than coal once the latest science on the higher global warming potential of methane was factored in, and fugitive emissions during flowback and routine venting are taken into account. Howarth’s study didn’t even consider production of liquefied natural gas (LNG). ”Then you have real issues,” he told the Herald recently. ”The leakage from the compression and transport of LNG is incredible. That is probably the worst thing you can do with gas.”
A LEADING American investment analyst has criticised Australia for allowing China to buy large swathes of its natural resources in what he calls “resource imperialism”.
James Dines says Australia is in danger of squandering its “irreplaceable inheritance … traded for easily printed paper”.
He described natural resources, including farmland, as a source of real wealth that should be kept for “your descendants”.
Alan Jones talks about the massive Food Security Forum to be held in Gunnedah next Wednesday, 12th October, at 11 am. And he talks about what coal seam gas mining will do to our water and our farming land.
“The state governments have a massive vested financial interest in these projects going ahead. They don’t get any revenue or very little revenue from prime agricultural land, but they get hundreds of millions of dollars from these coalmines and coal seam gas,” Mr Turnbull said in a radio interview.
Losing energy as Gillard spins