The time to move on from coal is now

First, clean coal is a furphy, the equivalent of “healthy cigarettes”. Coal is dirty, as even the prime minister has begun to acknowledge. And the claims being made by the coal industry that the technology to bury emissions is nearly available do not stand up to scrutiny.

The World Coal Institute recently conceded that by 2020 it was likely that only nine projects using carbon capture and storage (CCS) would exist. That's too little too late. We have about 10 years to start reducing emissions dramatically or we will likely pass the “tipping point” at which dangerous climate change will be unavoidable. By 2020 we need to have our emissions at about 30 per cent below 1990 levels.

Yet we may not even know if CCS works by then and, as the United Nation's expert panel on climate change stated in their recent special report on CCS, commercialisation will take even longer. So CCS is simply not even available during the next critical decade, and may never prove to be viable.

To use it as political cover to keep opening new coal mines, expanding our coal exports and refusing to support efficiency and renewables is unconscionable.

The real question now is not whether we have to quit coal, but how quickly we can make the transition and how we can ensure those people dependent on coal for jobs and income are not left stranded.

That, coupled with ambitious policies to stop energy wastage and promote renewables, will see Australia start to use the other resources with which we are “blessed”: sun, wind and ingenuity. Climate change can be solved, but not without quitting coal. The time to move on is now.