2019-12-18
It’s time that the fossil fuel companies whose products are responsible for the climate crisis start footing some of the bill for cleaning it up. A $1 levy per tonne of carbon pollution from the country’s biggest polluters, proposed today by the Australia Institute, is the very least that these companies can do, said Leader of the Australian Greens Dr Richard Di Natale.
“Fossil fuels like coal are the biggest cause of climate change, and yet despite raking in billions of dollars in super profits each year, the companies that dig up and sell them aren’t paying enough towards cleaning up the mess their products help to cause. That needs to stop” said Di Natale.
”Houses in Australia are on fire today. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of bush land is on fire today. Temperature records are being broken across the country today. It’s not too much to ask that fossil fuel companies contribute some of the money we will need to clean up the mess.”
“Coal will kill us. The producers of disaster inducing coal, oil and gas cannot get off scot free while their product contributes to deadly fires and oppressive heatwaves,” said Greens Climate Change spokesperson Adam Bandt, MP.
“The costs of these climate induced extreme weather events are skyrocketing. If this government was serious about protecting the Australian economy and saving Australian lives, they’d introduce a pollution levy to properly equip our emergency services and prepare our cities and towns.
“The Liberals just sabotaged global climate talks for the sake of dodgy credits they now say they don’t need. The government has been shamed by the rest of the world and is now trying to crabwalk out of its unlawful carryover credit debacle. If the Liberals say they don’t need their dodgy carryover credits then they should rule out using them and apologise to the rest of the world for scuppering the Madrid climate summit.”