The latest evidence of the Queensland government’s blatant coal protectionism is a CSIRO report which has been sitting on Energy Minister Geoff Wilson’s desk for a year.
The report finds that large-scale renewable energy plants could provide ALL of Queensland’s electricity needs, and recommends that the Queensland government start funding renewable technologies with some of the royalties it earns from coal. The government’s reaction has been to ignore this inconvenient report, underlining once again the absolute lack of political will to tackle climate change.
In the meantime, community opposition to the coal industry continues to grow. Yesterday a local community in Northern NSW blockaded a property to prevent test-drilling for a coal mine, joining hundreds of others who in recent weeks have stood up to protest the ongoing government support for the industry.
This latest CSIRO report adds more fuel to the fight for a transition to renewable energy: those who say that renewables can’t do the job are finding they have increasingly less and less ground to stand on. Unfortunately, the people we really need to hear support for an Energy [R]evolution from are the politicians, and it is obvious where their loyalties still lie.
