Get Ready for the Australian Coal Show-Down

While the momentum of the Fossil Fuel Resistance Movement has grown from strength to strength across the United States, it’s worth noting that a similar sort of momentum is now brewing across Australia. 

Just four months into the year and we’ve already seen many climate wins here.

In Newcastle activists successfully stopped the expansion of the world’s largest coal port, in WA plans to build a gas hub on James Price Point were withdrawn and companies have been pulling out of coal seam gas operations across New South Wales.

There’s been even more this month. Just last week the Uniting Church of New South Wales and ACT announced it was divesting from the fossil fuel industry and in the middle of the month the small town of Bulga in the Hunter Valley won its court appeal to block a new coal mine. On Wednesday six Greenpeace activists climbed aboard a coal ship on the way to South Korea to demand a stop to our coal exports.

There’s a fantastic groundswell building, and now through Bill McKibben’s Do the Maths Australia tour in June, we’ll be launching a new wave of campaigning to divest Australia from the coal industry, and to do our part to bring on the global age of renewable energy. Naturally, this has started to get the coal industry worried.

On Wednesday the Australian Coal Association, writing in The Australian, took aim at 350.org and Bill McKibben, saying “Foreigners coming to Australia to campaign against our national economy can do a lot of damage if their claims go unchallenged.”