Gas pollutes, damages our land and water, and won’t provide the best future-proof jobs.
Renewable energy is better than gas — for us and for our planet.
Sunshine, wind and storage can meet our energy needs with cheaper, cleaner, reliable power. The last thing we need is more gas.
Mining and burning gas damages our climate and our environment.
Gas is mainly made up of methane — which is a greenhouse gas way more potent than carbon dioxide and a dangerous contributor to climate change.
If fully unleashed — Australia’s gas resources could be responsible for up to three times the annual climate pollution of the entire world.
Gas extraction is also unsafe, and damages our climate at every stage of its supply chain, even before it’s burned.
It poisons our water and wrecks prime agricultural land, impacting farmers’ livelihoods and our access to food and clean water.
Drilling and fracking gas can also destroy sacred sites, and many of Australia’s First Nations people are saying no to gas.
Just like coal, gas is a dangerous fossil fuel that belongs in the past. Our environment is safer and healthier with renewable energy.
Global methane emissions are on the rise - and it’s supercharging the climate crisis. 👎
— Australian Conservation Foundation (@AusConservation) March 2, 2023
Why exactly is this greenhouse gas so nasty? We’ve got you covered with this handy explainer. pic.twitter.com/aI3vXYWPNt
Just like coal, gas pollutes and is dangerous for our climate. Gas is mostly made up of methane, the main climate pollution produced by burning coal. So burning more gas just makes our climate more unsafe.
On the flipside, clean energy is here now and ready to take off so we can power our homes, protect our water and land, and solve the climate crisis at the same time.
Like coal and oil, gas is a fossil fuel. It is formed from the ancient decomposed remains of plants and animals.
Over millions of years, this decomposition creates gases (mainly methane) that become trapped in rock formations, deep underground. That gas must then be extracted by drilling, mining and fracking.
There are not many jobs in gas. And the ones that do come up are boom and bust jobs.
The Boom and Bust cycle — in the context of coal, gas and oil — is a feedback loop that often locks communities into economic dependency.
Boom and bust occurs because of supply and demand. Prices can go up and down a lot. When they go up, it causes a rush of investment and when they go down or the supply in an area dries up, they can leave communities behind.
As an example of how volatile gas jobs can be, in March and April 2020, due to Covid and a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, the Australian oil and gas industry lost more jobs than any other sector of the economy, shedding 40% of its employees.
But clean energy like wind and solar can create 124,000 jobs in construction in the next 5 years, as well as more than 22,000 on-going jobs in operations and manufacturing.
Gas is a fossil fuel that is extracted by drilling, mining or fracking. It is non-renewable. It has a limited supply that once used up is gone. It is highly polluting and damages our climate.
You may see references to ‘renewable gas’, but that is a completely different fuel made by using energy from renewable sources — like wind and solar — to split hydrogen from water. The result can be stored and transported. More common names include green hydrogen. The only people who call it ‘renewable gas’ are the gas industry.
The gas burned and exported in Australia is methane gas, a fossil fuel.
Australia is one of the sunniest, windiest places on earth — we have huge opportunities to power our lives with clean, renewable energy and export our sunshine to the world.
Sunshine, wind and storage can meet our energy needs with cheaper, cleaner, reliable power. The last thing we need is more gas.
The solutions are here, now and ready to scale. Let’s get on with it.
Help solve the climate crisis and shift to clean energy.
Sign the open letter: Let’s renew with climate solutions
Header image credit: Leonid Ikan/Shutterstock.com