COAL: big, black & embarrassing

 

M.V. Meister

Six Greenpeace activists boarded the coal ship Meister bound for South Korea from Queensland's Abbot Point terminal, in a protest at the increased export of coal.     They then expected the captain to detour with his multi-million dollar loaded vessel and drop them off at their convenience!





Newcastle coal loader

Coal exports have become vital to Australia's economy since coal was discovered beside the Hunter River in 1797, but do such protesters understand or care?              H   e   l   l   o  ? ?  

How are you supposed to ignore global demand for a resource when Australia sits on the 4^th largest reserves, earning $60 billion annually? In fact, the world would grind to a halt without coal, with at least half of production used in the generation of electricity and another large proportion used in the manufacture of iron and steel, plus drugs, dyes and fertilizers.



Let’s leave others to haggle over global warming, 'carbon pollution' (all living things are made of carbon!), carbon footprints , carbon emission trading schemes and carbon credits, and see where this handy fossil-fuel came from. The claim is that peat below swamps has been continuously buried by sediment during 1 to 400 million years, forming coal. How well does this claim stack up?…

                

It takes 1 – 2 metres of plant matter to make 0.3 metres of coal but seams can be up to 120 metres thick! Where are you going to get a continuous depth of at least 400 metres of plant matter from a swamp?

Coal can be found on every continent, including Antarctica!

Coal lies under the oceans! Hunter Valley miners extract coal from underneath the ships that will transport it overseas!

After 200 years of large-scale mining there are still recoverable reserves of at least 1 trillion tonnes – enough for maybe 250 years!

Fossilized trees can be found in coal seams – still vertical!                  

Human artifacts and marine fossils have been found in coal seams!

In ideal chemical and temperature conditions it takes only a few months to form coal!

What are logs of trees, not found growing in swamps, doing in coal seams?

Why are large deposits of pollen sometimes found under coal seams?

Would you say that the Earth must have been once covered with lush vegetation which was suddenly buried under global cataclysmic flooding?
Urrr…where have we heard that story before? Perhaps coal is really an embarrassment – a vital resource that tells a story people don’t want to know.

Recommended viewing: www.undergroundcoal.com.au
www.youtube.com/watch?v=649dZPCTD30
                                       
Acknowledgements:
World Book 2005 
en.wikipedia.org                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        www.australiancoal.com.org     
Photo credit: M.V. Meister / greenpeace.org