So, over the past few years the fight has been on over the Beetaloo Basin. This piece of ground in the Northern Territory, home to the Gudanji, Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Jingili, Mudburra and Alawa nations for tens of thousands of years, has the misfortune to be the site of a massive gas-field. Never mind that we are cooking the planet, and that the world is trying to grope its way towards reducing its emissions. Our massive energy companies and their flunkies in our parliaments are determined to 'open up' these gas-fields to fracking. The Commonwealth Government has so far subsidised this enterprise to the tune of close to $200m. The traditional owners don't want it and have been opposing it for years. They have succeeded in getting the Senate to mount an inquiry into the enterprise.
So I followed the prompting from the Australian Conservation Foundation and made a submission. You can do the same if you like, just follow the prompts here. Here's my submission - nothing profound or groundbreaking but one more shoulder to a very big wheel.
To: Senate Inquiry: Oil and gas exploration and production in the Beetaloo Basin.
From: Me
Dear
Senators
I am a
60-year-old grandfather from Queensland.
Over the past decade or more I have become increasingly concerned that
our governments are leading us into a climate crisis. The science has long been crystal clear that
burning fossil fuels is changing our climate, warming the atmosphere and
leading us towards a climate that is more hazardous and less productive of the
essentials of life. We can now see the evidence of this with our own eyes in
floods, droughts and bushfires, the early onset of spring and the late onset of
autumn. The more fossil fuels we burn,
the worse it will get.
Yet our
governments, of all persuasions, continue to talk and act as if we can keep on
expanding our extraction and use of fossil fuels indefinitely. It is time for this to stop. I don’t want to hand my two young grandsons a
world where they have to battle the elements to survive, and I will not stand
silent while others create that world.
There are four key reasons why I oppose the development of the Beetaloo Basin oil and gas fields.
It flies in the face of climate science.
We know
that the world needs to get to net zero by 2050 at the very latest. However, that is not the full story. To have the best chance of avoiding
catastrophic and cascading climate change, we need to cut hard and cut
early. The more we reduce our carbon
emissions now, the longer we will have to work out how to reduce them in the
harder-to-reduce sectors in the latter years.
Power is one of those areas we can reduce right now. We have mature technologies for producing electricity which do not emit, which we can deploy at scale right now. Instead of putting resources (including public money) into expanding oil and gas, we need to be putting them into solar, wind, battery and hydro projects and green (not fossil) hydrogen. We need to be ramping these up both for domestic consumption and for export.
It makes a mockery of global climate agreements.
In
November the nations of the world will be meeting in Glasgow to discuss
increased emissions reductions targets.
Australia, as a major producer and consumer of fossil fuels, needs to go
to this vital conference with real strategies for transition, not semantic
games over whether we are doing our share and weasel words about domestic consumption
which leave us free to export as much of the stuff as we like.
We also
run another risk. If other nations
follow through on their commitment to cut emissions in line with the Paris
Agreement goals, there will be no-one to buy the gas and oil we produce. We will set up oil and gas wells, with public
support, and then within a short time they will be abandoned. The local communities will be left to pick up
the pieces.
Which brings me to my next point.
The traditional owners strongly oppose this development.
The Traditional Owners of the Beetaloo Basin have long made their opposition to oil and gas exploration and extraction abundantly clear. They have taken this message around the country over a number of years now. We are not in any doubt about their views. We need to respect their wishes as to what goes on in their own country, and stop the development now.
It is an inappropriate use of public money.
Our taxes
should be going into projects that improve our lives – into projects that
improve our health and wellbeing, protect our climate and environment and
support the people in our community who are least well off. They should not be going to support the ongoing
development of the fossil fuel industry, which is clearly damaging the climate as
it enriches global corporations.
This
year the G7 nations and the European Union agreed to end public financing of
fossil fuel projects. Private banks and
investment companies are increasingly moving in the same direction, recognising
that these industries don’t have a viable future. Our governments need to be moving in the same
direction, stepping out of financial support for the expansion of fossil fuel
production and use and shifting the funds into transition projects which wind
down existing fossil fuel infrastructure, support workers through the transition
and develop new clean industries to replace the ones we need to wind down.
***
Senators,
I would urge you to look to the future.
Within the next 30 years, preferably sooner, Australia needs to be a
country in which there is no oil, gas or coal mining, no gas or coal power
generation, and a range of replacement industries based on renewable energy and
regenerative practices. This is where
our public resources should be going. We
need to take our heads out of the sand and stop pretending we can go on forever
expanding our fossil fuel production.
Let’s start developing policies which accept the reality of our climate
emergency and plan accordingly.
Yours
sincerely
Jon
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