These issues get reported in mainstream media but are falling on the deaf ears of monumentally ignorant Turnbull Government minsters, senator and MPs.
ABC News, 27 November 2017:
The woman who led the world to a global climate change agreement has a message for Australia: "You really do have to see that we are at the Kodak moment for coal."
Christiana Figueres, until last year the executive director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, doesn't mean happy snaps for the family album.
Rather, the decimation of the once dominant photographic company Kodak by digital change — in the same way that coal-fired power is being eclipsed by renewable energy.
She hopes to see coal, like those sentimental moments in time captured in photographs, confined to history — with the world remembering the contribution the fossil fuel has made to human development, while recognising the need to retire it as a fuel source because of its contribution to global warming.
And, she says, it's happening.
"The fact is that we are already seeing the decline of coal, we are seeing more and more countries phasing out of coal," Ms Figueres, who is based in London, told the ABC.
"We just had 25 countries come together [at the latest international climate change talks] in Bonn to say that they are moving out of coal in the short term.
"That does not include Australia or India or China, but you can begin to see the trend…..
Which makes arguments that India needs the coal from Adani's planned mega-mine in North Queensland — and the Federal Government's determination to see the mine ahead — baffling to Ms Figueres.
The Government's Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, or NAIF, is considering Adani's request for a subsidised loan of up to $1 billion to help it build a railway to connect the Carmichael mine in outback Queensland to the Abbot Point Coal Mine near Mackay, which Adani also owns.
By law, the NAIF is not permitted to make loans for projects that would damage Australia's international reputation.
Earlier this month, Ms Figueres wrote to the NAIF arguing that providing such a loan for a project that would significantly add to greenhouse gas emissions would do just that.
"I wrote to NAIF because I am very concerned about the fact that NAIF could still be considering giving a concessional loan to the Adani Group to allow them to extract profitably from the Carmichael coal mine and transport that coal all the way to the Abbot Point Coal Terminal," Ms Figueres said.
"First of all, it has huge environmental impacts. The more coal we burn, the further away we are going to be from the targets established in the Paris agreement [to keep atmospheric temperature rises well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels].
"But also, the more coal we burn around the world, independently of where it is going to be burned, the more negatively we are affecting public health.
"Now we have this issue of the Carmichael coal mine which, if it goes ahead, would frankly blow completely out of the water any emissions reductions that Australia has committed to.
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