But if it comes to a choice, food must win out over energy.
If the choice does become necessary, it should not be made by default.
Decisions to exploit energy resources must not be made prematurely so that they pre-empt the decision to protect the best agricultural land in a continent where it is in short supply.
PRIME agricultural land in the black soil plains in northern NSW, regarded as the best in Australia, is being taken from farming communities by coal seam gas mining companies in a form of ”legalised theft”, a retired NSW Supreme Court judge told a public meeting in Gunnedah yesterday.
THE massive planned expansion of BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine would plague South Australia with radioactive waste and water overuse, say green groups, dismissing government assurances of strict environmental standards.
Willem Vervoort, professor of Hydrology at the University of Sydney, who has followed the plans, said he understood environmental concerns had to be balanced against economic opportunities but said BHP Billiton was missing an opportunity by not ending its use of Great Artesian Basin water altogether.
Doctor Pauline Roberts likened polluting mining companies to the tobacco industry 60 years ago, when the first studies came out attributing the smoking of cigarettes to lung cancer.
Dr Roberts said the response by the government to the tobacco problem then was to tax the product, and she asked the audience if this sounded familiar to the carbon tax debate.
Professor Howarth’s finding was that shale gas may in fact be between 20-100 per cent dirtier than coal once the latest science on the higher global warming potential of methane was factored in, and fugitive emissions during flowback and routine venting are taken into account. Howarth’s study didn’t even consider production of liquefied natural gas (LNG). ”Then you have real issues,” he told the Herald recently. ”The leakage from the compression and transport of LNG is incredible. That is probably the worst thing you can do with gas.”
A LEADING American investment analyst has criticised Australia for allowing China to buy large swathes of its natural resources in what he calls “resource imperialism”.
James Dines says Australia is in danger of squandering its “irreplaceable inheritance … traded for easily printed paper”.
He described natural resources, including farmland, as a source of real wealth that should be kept for “your descendants”.
“The state governments have a massive vested financial interest in these projects going ahead. They don’t get any revenue or very little revenue from prime agricultural land, but they get hundreds of millions of dollars from these coalmines and coal seam gas,” Mr Turnbull said in a radio interview.
Jeremy Buckingham said that no decisions on the future of the CSG industry should be made until independent research about emissions from Australian coal seam gas operations had been published and peer-reviewed.
”It is disturbing that the government is relying on this secret industry data,” he said. ”The Worley Parsons report must be made public so that the assumptions and the science can be tested.
”The whole impression this submission gives is that the government has already made up its mind about this industry before the inquiry is finished.”
COAL seam gas was once regarded as a major hazard to coal miners because of the risk of explosion. Today it’s become a major hazard to graziers and farmers as the rush by mining companies encroaches upon the very land they are trying to make a living out of.
Governments throughout Australia are set to make billions of dollars in royalties from the rush and appear to be turning a blind eye to the possibility of major ecological damage caused by the fracking process used to extract the gas. The process reportedly is already banned in China.
THE scope of the coalmine and associated infrastructure project envisaged by Indian company GVK Power is a whole lot bigger than was proposed by Hancock Coal, but not all the benefits are going to flow to Australia.
Thousands rally against CSG mining