In fact, 40 per cent or 226 tonnes of Australia's greenhouse emissions come from the mining and burning of coal, and about 606 million tonnes of carbon dioxide is released when our export coal is burnt. That is a total of 832 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.

The political statements of both major parties increasingly rely on the promise that there will be a technology that will work and that will do so cost effectively compared to alternatives that we could be developing now. The problems with predicting that coal can be burnt without releasing carbon dioxide—that is, using carbon capture and storage techniques—are well known. First we face technological uncertainty. Simply put, the technology may never work. That is a common phenomenon with any developing technology. If we put all of our eggs into the clean coal basket and the technology does not work, we will have gone down a blind alley. Even if the technology works, it will be too late to address the urgent need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions before we inflict massive climate change on the planet.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology report entitled "The Future of Coal", which was very pro coal, states that the technology will not be available until 2025, and in all probability it will be much later than that. By then our emissions will have increased by at least 35 per cent if we do nothing else. In addition, we cannot build carbon-capture-ready technologies. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology report makes it very clear that it is impossible to build a coal-fired generator that is ready for a technology that does not yet exist. It is rather like trying to build a landing strip for unidentified flying objects without knowing what they look like. Further, the technology will not be available until 2025, and then only for new power stations. That will leave the existing stock of power stations still polluting the atmosphere.

Cost also needs to be addressed. Not only does the carbon dioxide need to be separated from a massive hot gas stream coming out of the power stations but it also needs to be transported to an appropriate burial site. The United States Department of Energy—not known as a hot bed of greenie activists—estimated a couple of years ago that it would cost $A140 a tonne to capture, transport and bury the carbon dioxide. That would blow the cost of electricity out of the budget of the average Australian. There is also uncertainty about the availability of burial sites. Regardless of the Minister for Energy's spin, there are no known appropriate burial sites in New South Wales. We could be faced with a very expensive—both in energy and money terms—task of transporting carbon dioxide all the way to the Cooper Basin. That is a massive amount of carbon dioxide. Once the carbon dioxide is buried there is also the risk of the storage site rupturing.

The biggest single problem is making decisions today based on technology that, at best, will not be available for 15 years. It is simply irrational to say that we can continue to turn out 58 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the electricity industry each year into the atmosphere on a promise that coal might one day be clean. By the time the Massachusetts Institute of Technology study says that clean coal will be commercially available, we will be putting 78 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. That is simply bad public policy.

The Greens were very disappointed by today's newspaper reports of statements made by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, the media commentator and scientist turned Senate candidate. It is admirable that he has corrected the error in his earlier statement that burying carbon emissions from the electricity industry would use about one cubic kilometre of land each year. The slipped decimal point means that it is only about one-thousandth of that amount. That is honest and appropriate behaviour on the part of a scientist. However, he then went on to reverse his position and say that carbon capture and storage could work as an interim solution until cleaner sources can be developed. He said:

"We're stuck with the fact that we have still got to make electricity in the short term from carbon of some sort. Something is better than nothing..."

That is difficult logic to follow. While Dr Kruszelnicki might have been wrong on the volume that needs to be buried, his statements completely ignore the other realities of clean coal. It is unfortunate that Dr Kruszelnicki has chosen to join the group of emperors without clothes and undermine the campaign for a genuine, zero emissions future.