Is any bank dumb enough to fund the Galilee Basin coal project?“Let’s play a fun game called, ‘which is the dumbest bank on the planet?’ There’s plenty of competition, of course … But in 2015 the prize would definitely go to the bank that decides to underwrite the first Galilee Basin ultra-mega-coalapolooza … The question is, what about Australia’s ‘big four’ banks, who have yet to say anything in public one way or the other. Everyone knows that Adani must be asking them for money, since they can’t find anyone else and since the new Queensland state government seems at least a little less gullible than the last one when it comes to publicly financing such risky and destructive projects,” writes Bill McKibben in The Guardian. Suggested Tweet: @billmckibben: Is any bank dumb enough to fund Galilee Basin #coal? http://bit.ly/1chSdri @CommBank @NAB @Westpac @ANZ_AU Inside the war on coal in the US“The war on coal is not just political rhetoric, or a paranoid fantasy concocted by rapacious polluters. It’s real and it’s relentless. Over the past five years, it has killed a coal-fired power plant every 10 days. It has quietly transformed the US electric grid and the global climate debate,” writes Michael Grunwald in Politico. Suggested Tweet: Inside the war on #coal in the #US http://politi.co/1PMz830 The Rise and Fall of the FutureGen ‘Clean Coal’ Plant in the US“When the US Department of Energy pulled the plug in February on a $1 billion subsidy to build FutureGen, a ‘clean coal’ plant in Illinois, it put a merciful end to a twisted tale that had been unravelling for years. The coal industry peddled influence at high levels among both Democrats and Republicans to move the project forward, but in the end it was killed – and rightly so – by economic realities,” writes Sandy Buchanan from the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis. Suggested Tweet: The rise and fall of the FutureGen ‘clean #coal’ plant in the #US http://bit.ly/1J2FCGZ |