Federal government urged to act “immediately” as major report finds Australia well behind international best practice on measurement and reporting of methane emissions.
IEEFA found Australian coal miners were underestimating their methane emissions by 81 per cent and gas companies by 92 per cent
Oops! How could this accident have happened!
Even if there were fines for this (which apparently there weren’t), fines would just be a cost of doing business. People in charge need to face potential jail time when signing off on things like this. I would bet even a relatively minor sentence, say a month behind bars, and estimates would suddenly be a lot more accurate.
What sucks is that Australia is a sovereign state whose economy is largely dependent on resource extraction. That means the country is incentivized to ignore its own impact on climate change because that helps its economy. So, they don’t really want to punish the companies extracting resources. The only thing that motivates them is looking bad in the international community (or pissing off the urban Australians who are embarrassed by the fact their country relies on selling natural resources so much).
Oops! How could this accident have happened!
Even if there were fines for this (which apparently there weren’t), fines would just be a cost of doing business. People in charge need to face potential jail time when signing off on things like this. I would bet even a relatively minor sentence, say a month behind bars, and estimates would suddenly be a lot more accurate.
What sucks is that Australia is a sovereign state whose economy is largely dependent on resource extraction. That means the country is incentivized to ignore its own impact on climate change because that helps its economy. So, they don’t really want to punish the companies extracting resources. The only thing that motivates them is looking bad in the international community (or pissing off the urban Australians who are embarrassed by the fact their country relies on selling natural resources so much).