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When I was a little kid there was no such thing as pollution. Well, there probably was but it wasn’t until I started school that it was drummed into me that we all had a role to play in stopping the mess.
We had to do silly things like pick up papers at lunch time if we got a detention. We were not allowed to drop our waxed paper wraps from lunch time sandwiches on the floor. We had to draw pictures of fish and whales and put silly captions on them like “if it gets into the water it will get into them” and things like that.
In my teens I used to work in a supermarket and we packed items into heavy duty brown paper bags. They were free and Mrs. Smith always told us packers off if we put too much in one bag. “I’m paying for them so use as many as you like”. She would say.
Of course plastic bags came in later on and what a godsend they were. Light, fairly strong and easily disposed of. The only real drawback to them was you couldn’t put them around the base of your plants as mulch like you could with the brown paper bags.
When I got older I found it was quite OK to drop your cigarette butts on the footpath. After all who was going to police that? It was even OK to throw them out of the car window (unless, like me, you rode a motorbike and copped one down the front of your jacket). Still, there was no such thing as pollution.
Eventually I realised that even though I’m just one sorry mug in a very large world I really do contribute to the overall pollution burden each and every day. I drive a car (six cylinder, automatic), I use my PC, I listen to the radio, I do the laundry and vacuum the house. Each and every activity I do (even sleeping I have the clock radio on) contributes to the overall pollution burden our tiny and insignificant planet has to deal with.
But not so our Latrobe Valley power generators. No! They believe that they don’t contribute anything to the pollution that is turning our planet into an oven. Here’s what Loy Yang power had to say in a recent full page advertisement in the local paper.
Under the heading, “Loy Yang Power 2005 Report to the Community” they tell us that during 2005 they “continued [their] excellent environmental performance” even though they had 11 environmental “incidents”. Two were ash and effluent spills; two were storm water “events” and the remaining seven were “air emissions”. They also had five community complaints, four of which were “related to fugitive dust clouds from the mine”. “Fugitive dust clouds”. Sound likes a Hollywood blockbuster to me!
After rattling off this litany of corporate failures in the pursuit of bigger returns for their investors in the form of an “operating profit” they tell us that, “None of these [incidents] resulted in any measurable environmental impact”. Wow. You admit to breaching EPA guidelines 11 times and yet none of them affect the environment! That is truly unbelievable.
However, it is this attitude that exposes the strangle hold big energy has over governments, bureaucracy and sections of the academy. The revolving door of politics sees our former federal Labor member, Christian Zahra, working as a lobbyist for the power industry in Melbourne. We find out the new science advisor to the Howard government is a quisling to power and a friend of the PM – and an advocate of GE cropping and nuclear power to boot.
We find the people who write the guff Loy Yang comes out with, in an attempt to justify their polluting habits, were trained by the best academic minds in the fine art of spin and propaganda. Otherwise known as “corporate communications”.
Not only do they not impact on our environment, we read that Loy Yang won the “Gold Award for Best Practice and was Highly Commended for Community Engagement at the inaugural Strzelecki Earth Resources Sustainability Awards presented by the State Government.” They also received a “Highly Commended” in the esaa (Energy Supply Association of Australia) Sustainability Report Awards”.
The government gives an award thought up by the power generators and we’re supposed to believe it has some significance? Not only that, esaa, which is made up of big energy companies, awards one its own and we’re supposed to believe it means something? They can’t even stop the coal dust from blowing all over resident’s properties soiling their houses and potentially adding to their health problems and for that Loy Yang gets a gong or two!
When it comes to the environment Loy Yang, like all the other big energy companies is stuck in a corporate intellectual infancy. Like me before I started school, Loy Yang’s corporate captains believe that their contribution to pollution causes no “measurable environmental impact”. Like me before I started school, the highly educated, well trained and highly paid executives of Loy Yang still believe that their little power station does nothing to harm the planet and its precious cargo. Us.
Local, state and federal governments have spent billions of dollars over the years drumming it into little kids and adults that every little piece of paper, every cigarette butt and every little bit of rubbish we don’t dispose of properly contributes to the overall pollution burden on and around our planet. At the same time local, state and federal governments have decreased their spending on renewable energy resources and research, given out awards to their industry mates and provided corporate welfare to the tune of billions of dollars of yours and my taxes.
Don’t you think it’s time the highly paid and well educated corporate captains of Loy Yang and the rest of the energy industry grew up and realised that they are contributing to pollution and global warming and that unless they support renewable energy research and development it will be their kids and grandkids who will ask them, “why did you let it get so bad?”
I’m sure Loy Yang is not the only polluting brown coal generator that will claim to have won awards and been a really good corporate citizen. All big energy will do it. They clap each other’s back and say, “Well done. We completed another year without the public realising what we’re doing to their planet.” At the same time our governments continue to pay them huge subsidies and provide us with propaganda telling us how good coal power is for us.
When I was a kid I thought there was no such thing as pollution. I couldn’t see it, smell it or touch it. Now that I’m an adult I realise I have a role to play in trying to cut back on my contribution to it. The only way Loy Yang and its mates are going to learn they have to do something about their practices is if we educate them. By that I mean, by whatever means it takes, we have to make them grow up, own up to their “emissions” and change their polluting ways.