On coal and poverty

Peter Matters writes: Re. “Debunking the ‘coal will rescue the world from poverty’ lie” Aside from Tony Abbott, everybody else — including the managements of coal miners — is aware that coal as power fuel is well and truly kaput. To still push Carmichael simply amounts to the Tony Turnbull Government not being prepared to face the obvious.

However, the real point of the kerfuffle is the greed, stupidity and total lack of integrity of big money managements generally in refusing to accept that their first responsibility is to the community at large, not to their share holders. Nobody has the right to indulge in business practices which cause grievous damage to all of us,  particularly in health.

The root cause of global warming, pollution, etc is the out of control, decadent, profligate consumer society. To control global warming is only the first step. We have to learn to recover our values within us and discard the current values which we have bought at the shopping centre to have any chance to prevent our small globe to turn into a half dead garbage dump and save us and much other life from perdition.

Greg Poropat writes: Further to Bernard Keane’s piece about the coal lobby’s claims that coal will lift the poor from poverty, earlier this year The Guardian ran a series of articles describing its genesis. It was a public relations campaign developed by Peabody Coal and its agency, Burson Marsteller. If any of your readers are interested in the articles, just search on “truth behind Peabody’s campaign”. And if your readers have even more interest and time, they could do much worse than to have a look at The Guardian’s excellent “Keep it in the Ground” campaign.

 

SA Premiers

Peter Hamilton writes: Re. “The life of John Bannon, a martyr but no milksop” (yesterday).  The longest serving premier of South Australia (so far) was Tom Playford. Bannon is the longest serving Labor premier; again so far.