Greenpeace campaigner John Hepburn says a move away from coal to renewables is essential and urgent. That’s why his organisation is shifting up a gear to make it happen.
With a tripling of coal exports over the next 10 years, Hepburn says it is more important than ever that Australian communities are prepared to examine mining proposals in their local area.
Responding to the recent controversy over plans for a $6 million fund to challenge the expansion of the coal industry, Hepburn tells 3Q that communities need to have legal assistance to do due diligence on the thousands of documents which accompany new mining proposals.
At the same time, Australia needs to invest in renewable energy technologies, especially as the prices of wind and solar come down while coal and oil prices go up.
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A recent international study ranked Australia 16th out of 19 countries in being ready to deal with a low-carbon world — ahead of just India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
The International Energy Agency – a conservative organisation not known for being ‘green’ – released a report earlier this year concluding that, if we are to have any chance of staying below the 2 degrees Celsius limit governments have set, the last coal fired power station in the world will have been built by 2017 and global coal use will plunge between then and 2035.
Greens senator Christine Milne says Greenpeace’s legal challenge is legitimate despite the condemnation it received from politicians and the coal industry.
Greenpeace has released this blueprint for changing from a dependence on coal to renewables with breakdowns for each year