Greenpeace is fed up over coal down under

The UK government is not the only one trying to kick start a new coal era. In South Australia the premier is on the verge of approving two new coal projects.

Of course the government justification in Oz sounds much the same as it does here, with proponents arguing that they will capture and store the carbon produced. But the trouble with carbon capture and storage is that no-one knows when - if ever - it will be commercially available. At the moment there are only a few small scale demonstration plants. The industry in Oz has admitted that the technology won’t be ready until at least 2020, if at all.

Time to meet hot air with, well, hot air.

"It was a bleary-eyed start to the morning, as we grumbled our way out of bed at 4am to make it to our launch site, an hour away in the upper Hunter Valley. As we passed through the morning showers, nobody was ready to talk about the possibility of not being able to fly but I must admit, it was looking pretty grim. However we arrived at our launch site and the weather conditions looked perfect! Our balloon took a spectacular ride, first past the Liddell power station, then Bayswater," wote Julien on the Greenpeace Australia blog after he was back on land.

The team of Greenpeace volunteers flew a hot-air ballon over one of the Hunter Valley’s biggest coal-fired power stations and a major source of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Julien says "the sooner the government realises that there is no future in coal, the better. We need a forward thinking government to plan ahead now and make the transition from coal to renewable energy smooth and just. We need to take full advantage of the massive opportunities in job creation and investment that come from rolling out large-scale renewable energy." Sounds like it could work here too.