Strategy is all about making choices about where available resources will be allocated, considering both the benefits and risks of alternatives in the context of opportunity cost.
In this country we have reserves of natural gas tied up in seams below some of our richest agricultural land, the Hunter Valley and Darling Downs being just two.
To liberate this gas, which has the potential to offer us an alternative to coal fired power for many years, we run the huge risk of destroying the agricultural land above it.
At some point, the community needs to acknowledge this choice, and make it recognising the consequences, and there are severe consequences whichever path we tread.
My concerns is that we make the choice unwittingly, by stealth as state governments and power utilities and exporters nibble away at the deposits, bit by bit, until we wake up one day the deed is done.
In this link to Business Spectator is a link to a documentary “Gasland” which documents what is happening in the US. OK, it presents one side of an argument, but that one side is truly scary. We need the debate in this country to be wider than just the local communities that will be affected, it needs to be the whole Australian community.
This strategic choice is perhaps the major one we face in the environmental debate, but is one that appears to me to have little in the way of oxygen in the community.
