Letter
Skullduggery vs science
Re Samantha Hepburn’s article: The Swiss village of Blatten was flattened by a collapsing glacier the day Murray Watt approved the North West Shelf gas project. The hanging glacier in Chile no longer hangs. The Manning River very recently reached its highest flood level ever. Whole villages in the Pacific face extinction by flooding.
There have been terrible bushfires in the US, Portugal, Canada and Australia. Where are you coming from Mr Watt?
In WA, we have just seen the science on pollution damage to the rock art from the existing gas plant deliberately manipulated by, or through, the WA Government. This, by eliminating from a graph produced by a Curtin University study the interim limit based on real world, not lab data. Five pollution stations exceeded the real world interim limit.
The decision is a second slap in the face to the Aboriginal people, after the Juukan Gorge cave debacle, and to anyone who values human cultural heritage.
Certainly, any expansion of the gas plant to accommodate the Browse field should be at the Maitland industrial area west of Karratha, as a study for the Shire of Roebourne recommended for the existing plant, before it was built.
— Geoff Taylor from Perth