Questions are being asked about why energy giant AGL is being allowed to get away with designating a pitiful amount of funds to rehabilitate its coal-fired power stations and coal seam gas operations, writes Zane Alcorn.
AGL Energy
Fossil fuel corporations have already planned production to 2030 that will exceed the global carbon budget by 120%, writes Peter Boyle.
The Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Senate Committee released a report on May 19 into the implications of climate change for Australia's national security, which warned that climate change poses a "current and existential national security risk" to Australia.
The report defined an existential threat as “one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development”.
The union representing workers at the ageing Liddell power station has welcomed AGL Energy’s plan to transition it to a clean energy hub, even as pro-coal Coalition MPs called on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to amend competition laws to force AGL to keep it as a coal-fired facility.
For a long time, Australian governments have believed that the private sector should run the electricity sector. Successive governments have used market instruments to incentivise reducing emissions, by supporting renewables, discouraging coal use, or both.
AGL CEO Andrew Vesey likes to paint himself as a sort of “greenie” who is shifting the company in the right direction in these “carbon constrained” times.
AGL CEO Andrew Vesey likes to paint himself as a sort of “greenie” who is shifting the company in the right direction in these “carbon constrained” times.
About 200 people protested #DirtyAGL outside its AGM in Sydney on September 28.
AGL claims to be "green" but it is Australia's Number 1 fossil fuel polluter, owning three of Australia's most polluting coal fired power stations. It also runs NSW's major unconventional gas plant in Camden, south west Sydney.
As AGL announced a $400 million loss on August 10, anti-gas protesters assembled outside its headquarters to demand it close its Camden coal seam gas (CSG) project in south-west Sydney.
AGL's Camden Gas Project, in the Macarthur region of south-west Sydney, has 144 coal seam gas (CSG) wells, of which 96 are currently in production. Twenty of the wells are close to the Nepean River and the upper canal, which carries drinking water from Nepean Dam to Prospect Reservoir. One well is just 40 metres from the river. AGL's CSG mining alongside the Nepean River risks contaminating this water with carcinogenic chemicals and volatile organic compounds.
Activists from Stop CSG Sydney and the Australian Student Environment Network toured the AGL Camden CSG gasfields on April 17 to see for themselves how close gas wells are to homes. AGL has promised to end gas mining in Camden by 2023. Residents want them shut down now.
The NSW government has said that gas wells cannot be drilled within two kilometres of homes, but it is happy for Landcom, the government's own developer, to sell house and land packages within a few hundred metres of major gasfields.
Anti-coal seam gas (CSG) activists took direct action on March 2 to prevent Transpacific Waste Water from accepting waste water from AGL's coal seam gas operations in Camden.
Members of the Knitting Nannas Against AGL, CSG Free Western Sydney, Stop CSG Sydney, Stop CSG Penrith, Stop CSG Camden, Stop CSG Blue Mountains and Stop CSG Hawkesbury showed their concern about Transpacific's handling of AGL’s waste water by blockading their trucks.
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