Munmorah, NSW Central Coast, Thursday 8am 15 November 2007: I’m just touching base from the roof of Munmorah coal fired power station, where my fellow climbers have painted the message ‘Coal Kills’. And that’s exactly why we’re up here – because coal kills. It’s killing our planet, it’s killing our economy and it’s killing our future.
This week the world’s top climate scientists are telling us our planet is in a critical state and we have no time to waste. And yet both major parties in Australia have climate policies that will see our emissions continue to skyrocket. We can’t afford to let this happen.
The solution is simple – we need to start weaning ourselves off our addiction to coal, and replacing it with smart alternatives like renewables and energy efficiency. It’s time to start phasing out old dirty power stations like this one, for the sake of all our futures.
This morning, in stark contrast to Howard’s decade of inaction, we’ve taken action. By locking onto the conveyer system and preventing coal feeding to the plant, we’ve taken peaceful action to shut down this dirty old power plant. Because unlike Howard and Rudd, myself and the other Greenpeace activists here have taken the world’s top scientists’ call to action very seriously.
But this is only the beginning. To save our planet the next federal government must take responsibility and develop policies to quit this nasty addiction of ours once and for all.
