From the ABC:
Federal Industry and Science Minister Ian Macfarlane says there is “a war of ideology” between mining supporters and environmentalists.
Mr Macfarlane made the comment while addressing some of the leading figures of the mining industry who were in Canberra for Minerals Week staged by the Minerals Council of Australia.
In his prepared speech the Minister stated that iron ore and coal would continue to be a “vital export for Australia”.
Hmm, I don’t think so, Minister. What we are increasingly seeing is a war between miners not them against the rest as the super-glut looms in just about everything.
This morning I reported Woodside’s comments attacking coal, joining its international peers in seeking carbon prices to displace coal with gas. This afternoon Glencore fires back, from the AFR:
In a rare public speaking appearance in Melbourne, [Glencore’s] Mr Freyberg called on governments and policymakers to do more to shore up coal’s future, saying “there needs to be acknowledgement that coal is not going to be wished away”. Building coal-fired power is “still the cheapest way of bringing people out of poverty”.
…”We also need policy which addresses the funding gap to facilitate the build of high efficiency low emission power stations. There has been significant populist policy over the last decade – this populist policy avoids talking about coal…If all the newly installed coal-fired power capacity added between 2000-2010 (about 550GW) had been deployed using state of the art, ultra-supercritical technology, we would have achieved 2 billion tonnes of carbon emission reductions.
One of the reasons a carbon price made so much sense for Australia was that it represented a much more manageable path of decline for coal than without it. That was partly due to trading permits but also because the price would incentivise innovation like clean coal technology, which is now pretty much dead in the water without it.
In short, coal committed a kind of perverse suicide when it opposed the carbon price so whining about it now as other miners move to take its market share is all a bit of karma.
Twiggy Forrest has set some kind of benchmark for the industry in his recent rentier chunder and his rivals and colleagues suddenly can’t wait to join in.
