Gas Watch 91: AGL ENERGY awarded Green Globe Awards - by NSW Government
Date: 30-Jul-10
Author: Hunter Valley Protection Alliance
Hypocritical Joke?
NO.
AGL Energy should be ashamed to accept these awards.
The NSW Government should be ashamed to have bestowed these awards and the Minister for the Environment and Climate Change should revoke them.
The NSW Government has awarded two Green Globe Awards to AGL Energy, as it aids and abets the sacrifice of the beauty, the agriculture, the health and the environment of the Upper Hunter Valley to the fossil fuel industry.
Anyone who has earned such awards in the past, has had the worth of those awards undermined by this disgraceful act by the State Government.
The Department of the Environment has given these awards even knowing that AGL is
- drilling for coal seam methane gas in the Upper Hunter, an unsustainable fossil fuel;
- threatening the fresh groundwater relied upon by farmers in the Upper Hunter;
- the subject of noise complaints from generators operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week only 200 metres from the village of Broke;
- pumping hundreds of thousands of toxic saline water from deep coal seams to the surface and is unsupervised as to how it disposes of that water;
- threatening to build a gas treatment plant adjacent to quiet villages;
- threatening to build a gas field on prime agricultural land with wells possibly as close as 200 metres apart;
- is threatening the health of the people who live in the Upper Hunter;
- is threatening the land value and the livelihoods of hundreds of Hunter residents and businesses.
On top of all this, AGL refuses to initiate an Environmental Assessment looking at the cumulative impacts of its activities. Where is the environmental conscience of AGL. It's simply not there.
Shame on AGL Energy for accepting these awards. Shame on the NSW Government for bestowing them.
PO Box 120 Broke NSW 2330
www.huntervalleyprotectionalliance.com
July, 2010.
Tel: 02 6579 1062
