Fossil fuel marketing terms swamp the ABC and national media

Fran Kelly.

Hats off to ABC Radio National’s Breakfast announcer, Fran Kelly. On Wednesday, when picked up by a listener following an interview, Kelly said she was wrong to use the term “clean coal”, because it didn’t exist.

She was right. But then Kelly got into murky territory.

Better, she said, to use the term “low emissions” to describe the coal plant technology now known as HELE (high efficiency, low emissions). But why? It may not be as extreme as “clean”, but “low emissions” in this case is just another marketing term from the coal and fossil fuel lobby.

After all, these plants claim – at best – to emit between 0.7 tonnes and 0.8 tonnes of greenhouse gases for every megawatt hour of electricity produced. That sounds like high emissions technology to me.

It is only “low” in comparison to the incredibly dirty coal plants that preceded them, and their emissions are substantially higher than any other technology – including gas, but particularly solar, wind, hydro and nuclear.

Read the RenewEconomy story by Giles Parkinson - “Fossil fuel marketing terms swamp the ABC and national media.”