When it comes to global warming, Premier Carr has no clothes

Premier Bob Carr’s outpourings on global warming have delivered him to the international stage. At a London conference in February this year, to devise policy initiatives for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Premier regaled participants with his concerns about how “We’ll lose the Great Barrier Reef. Kakadu could be swamped with salt water. … Species extinction. Droughts hotter and drier …”

His words fell on fertile ground. In Britain the alarm bells are ringing about the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. That country’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Dr David King, hit the headlines recently when he described global warming as a bigger threat than global terrorism. The Blair Government is committed to a 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050.
 
So impressive was Carr’s London performance that he was offered membership of the International Climate Change Task Force, and he will host the next meeting of this body at NSW Government House in November this year.
 
But the Premier will have to be careful. Strutting the international stage is easy for someone as eloquent as Carr; back home, however, his government’s open-door policy to the coal industry is set to blacken his “global warming crusader” image. When the Task Force comes to Australia, Carr’s double standards on global warming could be exposed.
 
The Carr government has approved, or will soon approve, nine new coalmines in the Hunter Valley alone. The coal industry knows the pressure is on to wind back its operations, and is thus planning for six more coal-fired power stations in NSW. The plan helps lock in long-term markets and ensures this state’s dependency on a dirty fuel.
 
The encouragement given to the coal industry makes it hard to take seriously the Premier’s hand-wringing over greenhouse gas emissions. After more than nine years in the job, Carr has done little to elevate clean, green energy options past being the Cinderella to the mining corporations.
 
The Labor government’s tardiness in leading energy production and manufacturing away from fossil fuel dependency is also proving costly on the jobs front.
 
The Sustainable Energy Development Authority, a Labor government initiative, has found that NSW risks losing more than 4,000 jobs and $500 million in revenue unless it focuses on green energy.
 
Yet even this didn’t wake the Premier and his ministers from their complacent torpor.
 
The reality is that the all-powerful coal industry is in the ascendancy and the Premier won’t rock the boat. It is extraordinary that Bob Carr can speak with such passion about the impacts of global warming but will not tackle the industry that has been identified as one of the main contributors to this crisis.
 
Clearly any reduction in coal production would impact on jobs and state revenue, and the Premier has a responsibility to consider and respond to that challenge. But the SEDA report is conclusive: by sticking with the energy source of previous centuries, the Premier is in fact restricting employment growth as well as walking away from making a meaningful contribution to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
 
In a world of soaring international demand and rising oil prices, coal companies operating in Australia have never had it so good. With coal contracts written in US dollars, the weak Australian dollar further boosts the windfall profits coal exporters are pulling in.
 
As a result of this, and also changes in this year’s mini-Budget, revenue from the NSW coal royalty regime will put more money  - about $100 million a year - into the public purse than ever.
 
Meanwhile, residents of Australia’s biggest coal mining region, the Hunter Valley, are in a David and Goliath fight. The multinational coal Goliaths are doing very well with the state government on their side. This once beautiful region is now deeply scarred, as open-cut mining rips out coal seams that were once seen as uneconomical.
 
As the giant coal extractors and monster trucks move up the Hunter Valley, communities around Anvill Hill, Mt Pleasant, Bickham and Mitchell’s Flat – all marked out for mine operations – are saying "No". Local people, with not much support from outside their region, are working to save native habitats, beautiful farmland, Aboriginal heritage and river systems.
 
Hunter communities have traditionally been strong backers of the coal industry. For over a century it has supplied jobs and fuelled the economy. But support is fading now that the industry is highly mechanised, the union is locked out of many sites and the local environment is being destroyed.
 
While the effects of global warming are yet to play out, the impact of coal mining operations are now starkly apparent. To date Premier Bob Carr has been quite successful in wearing the mantle of global warming campaigner, while looking after the coal industry in NSW. But when the International Climate Change Task Force jets into Sydney in November, there will be plenty of people ready to reveal that this emperor has no clothes.