Gas-tastrophe: the climate impact of the Government’s strategic gas basins
In 2020, the Morrison Government set out their plans to spend millions of dollars accelerating the opening up of five new gas basins across Australia as a key element of their plan for an economic recovery from Covid-19.
While they talked up the potential – and questionable – benefits of this approach, they failed to mention the massive climate impact that this move would have. So we got to work, digging up the numbers and showing that such a move would be a catastrophe for the climate.
What we uncovered
We found Government data on the amount of potential gas in each of these five basins and used it to calculate just how much of a climate risk they pose.
Our research showed that if the gas from these five basins was extracted and burnt, it would be equivalent to over three times Australia’s annual emissions, or 1602Mt of carbon dioxide equivalent.
We also compared these potential emissions with the Morrison Government’s flagship climate policies, the “Climate Solutions Fund” and the “Emissions Reduction Fund” and showed that opening up these new gas basins would wipe out the emission savings from these $4.5bn policies five times over.
The analysis was covered in the Guardian.
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