The Greens have introduced a bill into the NSW Upper House seeking to prohibit new coal mines and expansion of existing coal mines.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
If passed, the Mining Amendment (Climate Protection - No New Coal Mines) Bill 2016 would stop projects including the KEPCO coal mine in the Bylong Valley, the Shenhua Watermark coal mine in the Liverpool Plain and the Drayton South coal mine in the Hunter Valley.
This is the first time a bill to ban all new coal mines has been introduced into an Australian Parliament.
Greens energy and resources spokesman Jeremy Buckingham said the bill puts the issue of coal and its impact on the climate on the NSW Parliament’s agenda.
The bill will not cancel 175 existing coal exploration licences or 333 existing coalmining licences, but will stop two assessment lease applications, five exploration licence applications, and 57 mining licence applications from being approved, he said.
“Currently there are applications for an additional 1.8 billion tonnes of new coal mining in NSW,” Mr Buckingham said.
“For too long governments have made excuses while the coal industry rapidly expanded.
“For the sake of the climate we must deal with coal and the first step is to ban new coal mines and mine expansions, and then to implement a transition strategy to shift from coal to renewable energy and diversify regional economies.”
In his speech to parliament, Mr Buckingham said at current production levels, hard science says coal mining should cease within three years in order to avoid dangerous climate change
“The science says that 95 per cent of NSW’s coal must stay in the ground if we are to have a 50 per cent chance of avoiding two degrees of global warming,” he said.
“Continuing to mine huge amounts of coal is simply incompatible with addressing climate change.
“If we had started to shift away from coal after the 1992 Rio Earth summit, we could have had a gradual transition. Now we are two minutes to midnight on the climate clock, the carbon budget is almost spent, so need to act with urgency.
“It’s not the Greens who say we must rapidly phase out coal, it is the science.”
“We hope this bill will provoke a debate about the future of coal and climate change, because it is obvious that the NSW Government is wilfully ignoring this profound problem.”
The Bill should be debated when Parliament resumes sitting in November.