Climate expert urges dropping clean coal

A climate change expert has urged Australia to step away from the development of clean coal technology for power generation in favour of natural gas and nuclear energy.

Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York, has also bagged renewable fuels like solar and wind power saying while they may be renewable they were not really environmentally friendly.
Mr Ausubel said a big mistake many environmentalists made was to think that renewable fuels were more friendly to the environment.

On a scale that mattered, he said, renewable fuels like ethanol and wind power required large areas of land which had to be developed at the expense of nature.

“I want more land left for nature, I don’t want hundreds of millions of hectares around the world planted out to provide whisky for my Toyota,” he said.

“I think that’s a horrible idea. I want land for bears or tigers or kangaroos.”

The Australian