While the Gillard Government puts the finishing touches on the climate policy Prime Minister will apparently not unveil tomorrow at the Press Club, the prosaic reality of a carbon-addicted economy chugs away all around us.

The biggest source of CO2-equivalent emissions in Australia is our power generation industry, courtesy mainly of its reliance on coal. In 2008, according to National Greenhouse Gas Inventory figures, coal-fired power accounted for 31.4% of our entire CO2 emissions. Lower emissions-intensity gas-fired power accounts for another approximately 3.5%. The electricity sector’s share of our emissions has slowly grown over the decade. It was around 33% in 2003.

While we casually refer to the electricity industry, coal-fired power is an unusual sort of industry – one dominated by state governments.

By capacity, around 62% of our coal-fired power industry is owned by state governments. The biggest are the NSW Government’s Macquarie Generation and Delta Electricity, which between them control nearly 9GW of coal-fired generating capacity. The next biggest is Western Australia’s Verve Energy, which controls around 2.2 GW. The Queensland state-owned companies Stanwell, Tarong and CS Energy together control around 5.7 GW.

British company International Power, through ownership of Hazelwood Loy Yang B, controls 2.6 GW and Hong Kong-based CLP owns Yallourn (1480 GW). Alinta controls around 850 MW of coal-fired power out of its overall generation portfolio of about 3 GW. Loy Yang A in Victoria is controlled by a mix of foreign and local interests.

And it is state governments that are driving the growth in coal-fired power. Burning coal to make power is anything but a dying industry.

As Crikey revealed in March, there are plans for up to a dozen new coal-fired power stations across every state except Tasmania, which together would add 7% to our national emissions total from 2008.

In NSW the Bayswater 2 and Mt Piper 2 expansion projects – worth 2 GW each – are controlled respectively by Macquarie and Delta, and caught up in the NSW Government’s Sisyphean electricity privatization process. Both are ostensibly set to be either coal or gas-fired, but the chances of their being gas-fired are remote. The Mt Piper site doesn’t even have adequate access to gas supplies.

And on Monday the WA Government approved three projects involving new or redeveloped coal-fired plants. Resources company Aviva wants to build a 450 MW plant at Eneabba; the Bluewaters expansion plants (400 MW total) at Collie is, according to reports in today’s Fin Review, set to be sold to Verve Energy following the collapse of the Griffin Group, and Verve has also received approval to redevelop and bring back online the mothballed 240 MW Muja A and B plants.

The Queensland Government is also investing in new coal-fired power stations under the cover of as-yet unproven CCS technology. It is putting more than $100m into the Stanwell-owned Zerogen project  for a 580 MW coal-fired plant, and Stanwell is working with GE on the Wandoan project, which will use coal from Xstrata’s Wandoan coal mine.

In fact, all new state government coal-fired projects have a thin coating of greenwash. WA Environment Minister Donna Faragher said the new coal-fired stations in WA would have “a greenhouse gas abatement program” that “will require the power stations to achieve continuous improvement in net greenhouse gas emissions.”

While public debate has been, and continues to be, focused on Federal Government climate change policies, state governments have been critical in driving the growth of coal-fired power. They’ve driven growth either directly through state-owned corporations developing new coal-fired power plants, or through subsidies for unproven technologies to mitigate the emissions of new coal-fired plants, or through environmental approvals of new coal-fired plants.

You could see the distraction at work in Faragher’s press release, in which she “re-confirmed that greenhouse gas abatement was best addressed through a national approach and the timing and details was a matter for the Federal Government.”

But it’s not the Federal Government that is driving the growth in coal-fired power. It’s state governments. They should no longer escape scrutiny as the key decision makers in our continuing addiction to coal.