‘Confident coal continues to build’, is not the headline of some airy-fairy, greeny newsletter; it comes from the coal industry’s own online, self-congratulatory forecast.

‘Australian coal miners remain confident in their outlook with fifty-six projects worth $23 billion undergoing feasibility studies and pre-feasibility studies’. [What ever could a ‘pre-feasibility’ study be?]

These figures come from an Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) report, probably sitting under a ‘2008 Lucky Lump’ award or some such, on a desk somewhere over at Resource Minister Martin Ferguson’s department.

Let’s hope that Penny Wong at Climate Change and Peter Garrett in Environment can find the time to pop around to see what Martin in Resources has planned for Australia’s future.

The Resources Minister said last week that he would: “finalise the world’s first legislative framework for carbon sequestration within months, clearing the way for greenhouse gases collected from coal-fired power stations to be injected through the seabed and captured in geological formations similar to those in which oil and gas are found”.

Well that’s a relief. All we had to do was pass enabling legislation for carbon storage and now it’s all going to go down and stay down, no worries. Martin says he’s been assured that Geoscience Australia has identified numerous sites where greenhouse gases could be stored. How about this for a cosy quote?

“As to capacity to safely store it, I’ll tell you what. We’ve been storing oil and gas for a long time,” Mr Ferguson said. “We’ve spent a lifetime now trying to extract it.”

Oh, come on Martin. Surely you’ve watched the Beverly Hillbillies on TV where Jed shoots a hole in the ground and out spurts the oil. What about gushers and having to call Red Adair to cap wells that were venting furiously out of control?

The Resources Minister also announced that Australia now has treaties in place with fifty countries that can legally buy our uranium. Presumably the bar wasn’t set too high just to be on the safe side. It could well be easier to buy Australian uranium than to get a drivers licence in New South Wales.

Nevertheless, the treaty our prospective uranium customers must sign would presumably contain a clause about safe storage of radioactive waste. Hopefully there would be an undertaking that they would not, for instance, simply dump the waste at sea in forty-four gallon drums.

The nuclear industry has, quite rightly, been held back by its inability to show that its waste can be safely stored. So why is coal exempt from waste storage scrutiny?

The huge tonnages of carbon being added to the atmosphere each day come largely from burning coal and pose a far greater immediate threat than nuclear waste. How is it then, that our coal customers are under no obligation to sign any treaty or demonstrate any waste-disposal best practice?

Coal is our addiction in this consumerist junky society and as the heavy metal band Steppenwolf used to sing:

“But the pusher don’t care,
Ah, if you live or if you die.
God damn the pusher man.”