The Greens have condemned the Albanese Government’s Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023, calling it a naked attempt to facilitate more oil and gas development in our oceans.
Greens spokesperson for healthy oceans, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson said:
“This Bill is a naked attempt to facilitate more oil and gas development in our oceans through legitimising carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a commercially viable and effective climate solution.
“This is despite evidence identifying CCS as a public relations and delaying tactic for the coal and gas industry to pretend it is doing something other than jeopardising our future on this planet.
“Pumping carbon under the sea from gas rigs or storing it underground just doesn’t stack up. The importing and exporting of carbon dioxide for sub-seabed sequestration risks turning Australia’s oceans, and those of our near neighbours, into the dumping grounds for the world’s pollution. Meanwhile, the CCS industry has largely been a ploy and a distraction designed to greenwash a dirty industry and delay the inevitable.
“The Greens are incredibly concerned that this legislation appears to be motivated to primarily facilitate the Santos Barossa project, its related Bayu-Undan CCS projects and other fossil fuel projects off Australia’s northern coastlines, as well as provide this government and its mates in the fossil fuel cartel political cover to open up new areas of our ocean to fossil fuel exploration.
“The Albanese government should be taking tangible, meaningful steps to fight climate change by ending the expansion of new fossil fuel projects. Instead it has taken the valuable time and energy to draft and bring forward a Bill that appears to be written by the fossil fuel industry, for the fossil fuel industry.
** See the Greens’ dissenting report to the Bill’s inquiry here.