Whoa Nelly, not so fast!
People in positions of power know that burning coal is one of the worst forms of energy in terms of carbon emissions. So, you would have thought with our global leaders creating a collective action to reduce our carbon emissions to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees that we would focus on reducing our use of coal. Apparently not!
Our global use of coal has increased on average 5% per year since 2001 and 3% per year since 1990, the year we use as our benchmark for carbon emission reductions.
Source: Peakfish.com
While we are on benchmarks – the target that was assigned to Australia within the Kyoto agreement in 1997 was a 8% increase on 1990 levels, not a decrease on 1990 levels an increase. So how are we going? Well since 1990 thanks to our abundance of and excessive use of coal we had increased our emissions in Australia by 51.8% in 2009. Nuff said.
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blooming heck! (sorry, not an informed answer. more of a knee-jerk.)