Miners reveal a poverty of thinking on coal – by Richard Denniss (The Age – November 8, 2014)

 http://www.theage.com.au/

Richard Denniss is the Australia Institute executive director.

In a world in which war is waged for humanitarian reasons but sending doctors and nurses to prevent an outbreak of Ebola is considered too risky, almost any spin seems possible. But surely the mining industry’s claim that the best way to tackle global energy poverty is to build more coal mines takes the biscuit.

Coal companies have been very vocal in recent times about the billions of people around the world without access to energy or safe cooking facilities. The CEO of coal mining company Peabody Energy went as far as to say that tackling energy poverty is “the world’s number one human and environmental crisis”.

Now, after a century of making a fortune selling coal to those who could afford it and ignoring those who couldn’t, the mining industry has had an epiphany. Poor people in poor countries lack many of the necessities that Australians take for granted. And, according to their PR firms at least, the miners really want to do something about it.

The world’s greatest hearts and minds have long wrestled with the issue of how to lift people out of poverty. Mahatma Gandi, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates – they’ve all spent years pondering where best to start and how best to help. Is it by educating the masses, preventing aids and malaria, providing micro finance, or just cutting taxes and letting the market rip?

The coal miners have stumbled onto a much simpler solution. We just need to sell more coal.

A cynic might argue that the miner’s newfound interest in the poor seems to have occurred at precisely the time that rich countries have started turning away from coal. A real cynic might argue that blaming climate activists for ruining the lives of poor people was too good a wedge for the miners to ignore.

But a well-paid spin doctor working for the miners can take such cynicism in their stride. Any industry that can fund climate sceptics to accuse NASA of being part of a ‘warmist conspiracy’ can easily keep a straight face while blaming environmentalists for global poverty.

It would be easy for sensible people to ignore the well-funded, globally coordinated strategy of selling coal as the solution to ‘energy poverty’. But, of course, it was easy to ignore the climate sceptics when they first started their well-funded, globally coordinated strategy of attacking science also.

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