Planning Commission must refuse burning native vegetation for electricity at Redbank Power Station
The Independent Planning Commission (IPC) will be holding a public meeting today and will hear from prominent climate and environment scientists that re-starting the Redbank Coal Power Station with a modification to burn native vegetation for electricity will directly and significantly drive the worsening climate and extinction crises.
Greens MP and spokesperson for the Environment and Climate Change Sue Higginson said “The proposal to burn native vegetation for electricity at Redbank is a dangerous plan and will extend and deepen climate pollution in NSW. The fact that this proposal also plans to burn 850,000 tonnes of native vegetation every year, while land clearing and biodiversity in NSW is at crisis levels, beggars belief,”
“Burning native vegetation at Redbank has already been knocked back by Singleton Council in 2021, when the community and civil society organisations rallied against this reckless idea. Verdant Earth Technologies, a company with strong connections to the fossil fuel sector, have now brought this project back and the community has again said ‘No’. Now the IPC needs to respect the community, listen to the climate and environment science, and refuse this dangerous project,”
“Verdant Earth attempted to overturn Singleton Council’s decision to refuse the project in 2022 in the Land and Environment Court, and they lost. They are now seeking approval for essentially the same development. It’s bad faith and abuse of the planning system and the community,”
“If the project goes ahead, NSW will be even further from meeting our legislated emissions reduction targets with an extra 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide being emitted by Redbank annually. These carbon emissions will come directly from our state’s existing carbon stores and will essentially convert our native vegetation directly into the climate crisis. If you wanted to design a project to make our ecological situation worse, Redbank burning biomass is the perfect project,”
“The decision by the Minister for Planning, in directing the IPC to hold a public meeting, will at the very least give the community future legal options if the IPC fails to make the right decision and allows the project to go ahead. The Minister should take this approach on board when issuing directions to the IPC for other climate wrecking projects so that the community can defend themselves from corporations that are intent on destroying our climate,” Ms Higginson said.