Australia: Warning as coal front approaches

beatriz

Warning as coal front approaches
By James Button, London
March 11, 2006

"IT WAS a frenetic week for Tim Flannery. He spoke at three public meetings in London, met top climate change advisers to the British Government, and launched a British edition of his book on global warming, The Weather Makers".

Then, on Thursday, his wife, Alex, picked up a copy of The Sydney Morning Herald. Flannery read that Opposition Leader Kim Beazley had followed Prime Minister John Howard in announcing that energy from coal was Australia's future.

"It's like they're in a totally different space," he said. "When you travel the world, you realise that position cannot be sustained. In the Netherlands people are terrified. I would not like to live there."

This is the message he wants to bring home: Australia is disconnected from much of the world on climate change. He has seen how Denmark is using tax incentives to induce people to drive cleaner cars.

He thinks Britain has been "fantastic" on getting industry to reduce emissions, but could do more to reduce emissions in transport and households.

Australia, on the other hand, has "done an immoral thing" by selling coal to the world but taking no responsibility for reducing the worst effects of coal-burning by signing the Kyoto Protocol.
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He says people were so negative about uranium, yet a single coal-fired power station in NSW emitted more radiation than the whole underground French nuclear testing program in the Pacific.
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continue reading: The Age, http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/warning-as-coal-front-approaches/2006/03/10/1141701696109.html