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Saturday, December 11, 2010

Lignite letter-to-the-ed

For those who missed it, the just-released report on lignite by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment said don’t dig it up, leave it in the ground.
Jan Wright says that processing Southland lignite will create enormous amounts of greenhouse gas that will be hugely costly for the NZ taxpayer.
She says the diesel and urea produced from the brown coal will not be cheaper for New Zealanders and that our dairy and tourism markets will suffer from the damage done to our clean green image by lignite mining.
The Parliamentary Commisioner for the Environment titled her report ‘Lignite and climate change: The high cost of low-grade coal.’ and if you read it you’ll see why.

2 comments:

William Hughes-Games said...

What is interesting is that all those products can be made from wood waste from forests, saw mills and house and furniture manufacture. As such we would be recycling carbon dioxide rather than releasing sequestered carbon. We would also enhance our clean green image and support our rail system.

robertguyton said...

Seems sensible William. Consequently we'll have to fight tooth and nail to make it happen!
The whole issue of trees and foresty is 'up in the air' at the moment, with Nick Smith playing it truculent at the climate change talks.