The news yesterday that the proposed coal mine at Konin, Poland has been suspended is a huge relief to all of us at Greenpeace. The mine became the focal point of our international coal campaign as Poland hosted the United Nations Climate Change meeting last December. We took our Climate Rescue Station to the site, supporting hundreds of locals in a peaceful protest and took direct action ourselves at the site.
Ultimately, our challenging the legality of the mine’s assessment process forced a decision from a Polish court that the process contained illegalities and the mine could not proceed.
And a damn good thing too! That’s 50 million tonnes of CO2 that won’t be going into the atmosphere and adding to global warming. If only the same was happening in Australia, where export coal ports are looking to double – some triple – in size and a raft of coal mines have been proposed.
Both Australia and Poland use coal to dominate their electricity supplies and both countries need to urgently implement an Energy [R]evolution to decarbonise their energy sectors and make sure they stay in step with a world acting with a sense of urgency to cut emissions.
The big difference between Australia’s and Poland’s coal industries is that Australia is the world’s great peddler of dirty coal. Australian coal burns in power stations in many countries around the world – including a few we often like to criticise for not acting on climate change – and saying that we want to expand our coal exports sends entirely the wrong signal to the rest of the world.
Not only does the government need to go back to the drawing board with its CPRS, delivering a policy that genuinely reduces Australia’s emissions as fast as we can manage, but we need to immediately place a moraotium on new coal power stations and mines, telling the world that we have turned a corner and it’s time to wean ourselves off this polluting fuel.
