Climate, technology and chaos Blog

There has been a recent report which suggests that fossil fuel mining in Australia accounts for 5% of global greenhouse emissions, as well as being one of the highest per capita producers or greenhouse emissions. It is possible that with the new coal and gas mines Australia could be responsible for something like 17% of Global emissions by 2030.

see RenewEconomy and The Guardian

Obviously the country hits well above its weight, and the argument that we shouldn’t do anything because our contribution to the problem is trivial, is completely wrong.

One potential response is to suggest that we are just not going to stop because its so economically important, but as previously suggested its doubtful we make that much from this type of mining, due to export of profits overseas, low royalty rates, massive tax concessions and decreasing employment in the industry.

But, if we recognised that fossil fuel mining and burning is a problem, then another possible response is “someone has to stop fossil fuel mining first, if we are going to survive in our society, and so it might as well be us.”

However, I suspect that the real question, may well be “should we go about increasing the amount of fossil fuel mining we are doing, so that we become the one of the world’s biggest exporter of emissions, and one of the biggest causes of ecological destruction on the planet, or should we begin to phase fossil fuel mining out?”

If people agree that is a real question, then we can begin to stop opening new mines, especially mines that threaten water supplies and agriculture as do the Adani mines, and the mines in the Sydney catchment areas, and when that is done we could stop expanding existing mines into agricultural regions, and then start phasing them out altogether.

If we are about to increase exports to provide 17% of global energy emissions, then it might well appear that the rest of the world is cutting back by comparison. Certainly some countries plan to phase out coal mining. So why not us as well?

This may not happen because the parties are bought by miners…. but we probably should not let corruption stop us from doing the sensible or moral thing. Behaving morally is not always easy, and won’t always make you as much money as behaving immorally.

Tags: Anthropocene, economics, Energy, free markets, technology

This entry was posted on July 10, 2019 at 4:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.