July 2010
31st of Jul, 2010
Government accused of cover-ups on gas pollution incidents
The State Government must come clean about its cover-ups of pollution incidents involving both coal seam gas and underground coal gasification projects in the Surat Basin. In the latest incident in Kogan Creek, landholders had alerted the Bligh Government to mercury levels 5 times the acceptable limit in January, but departmental officers did not respond until July. That is plainly unacceptable.
Six Degrees spokesperson on coal seam gas Drew Hutton said these incidents had followed one after another so that a pattern of cover-up and complicity was clear.
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29th of Jul, 2010
Parliamentary protest update: Our Land, Our Water, Our Future
Farmers, environmentalists and concerned citizens will take their voices to state parliament at midday on Wednesday the 4th of August to demand that the Queensland Government protects Queensland’s cropping land, ground water and rural communities from coal and coal seam gas mining.
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23rd of Jul, 2010
Gillard’s climate announcement: moving backwards
A spontaneous community protest has interrupted Julia Gillard’s climate change announcement at the University of Queensland this morning.
The policies being proposed by the ALP this morning will not prevent the construction of new coal fired power stations around the country, and will not bring down Australia’s greenhouse pollution.
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21st of Jul, 2010
Government Advisory Committee worried about coal seam gas industry
The Great Artesian Basin Co-ordinating Committee, a group set up to advise state and federal governments on the Great Artesian Basin (GAB) says it is worried coal seam gas and coal mining and exploration activities could damage the resource unless guidelines are in place to protect it.
The basin underlies more than 20 per cent of Australia, including most of Queensland, and is the only reliable source of water for much of the inland.
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19th of Jul, 2010
Industrialisation of the best farmland in Queensland
On the 19th July, Six Degrees and Friends of the Earth spokesperson Drew Hutton was interviewed by Steve Austin from 612 ABC Radio. The interview outlines the full extent of the risk to some of Australia's best farming land from the range of coal extractive industries.
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19th of Jul, 2010
Cancer risk makes coal gasification a non-starter
Contamination of groundwater at Kingaroy by the cancer-causing chemicals benzene and toluene from the Cougar Energy Underground Coal Gasification (UCG) plant has highlighted the health risks of a proposed coal-to-fuel project at Felton, 30km southwest of Toowoomba.
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18th of Jul, 2010
Coal Seam Gas: why we demand a moratorium
Six Degrees demands that the Queensland State Government impose immediately a moratorium on all further coal seam gas (or CSG) development until it can be unequivocally demonstrated that they will not have unacceptable social and environmental impacts. These include the risks to freshwater supplies in shallow aquifers and to the structural integrity of the Great Artesian Basin.
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17th of Jul, 2010
Stateline Interview: Mining Contamination Shock
Six Degrees spokesperson Drew Hutton appeared yesterday on Stateline to outline the reasons for our call for an end to Queensland's dangerous experiments with coal seam gas and underground coal gasification. As Mr Hutton says in this interview, "our beautiful state is in the process of being wrecked and turned into an industrial waste land by government irresponsibility."
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16th of Jul, 2010
Underground coal gasification plants must all be shut down now
The decision by the Department of Resource Management to shut down Cougar Energy's underground coal gasification (UCG) plant at Kingaroy is welcome but far too late.
In fact, this plant and two others like it should never have been given the go-ahead by the Queensland Government in the first place given what is known (and what is not known) about the impacts of this technology.
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14th of Jul, 2010
Garrett to correct Bligh Government's shoddy approvals process on Coal Seam Gas Projects
The Commonwealth Minister for the Environment Protection has been forced to intervene and call for a review of the impacts of two Queensland coal seam gas projects on our water supplies and landscapes, and their potential to contaminate the Great Artesian Basin, one of the only reliable sources of fresh water in inland Australia.
The unseemly haste with which the Bligh Government has sought to fast-track approvals of controversial coal seam gas projects in the Surat Basin has caught up with them.
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