Al Gore - who was famous for losing to George W Bush in the race to be US President - was in Australia spouting off about his version of inconvenient truths about coal.

 

Gore said India was not interested in coal anymore and that Adani's proposed Carmichael coal project being slated for Queensland's Galilee Basin did not have a future. 

 

"You want to sell coal to India?" Gore asked.

 

"Good luck with that.

 

"India is now getting bids for electricity produced from solar that is one-quarter lower than electricity from coal.

 

"That is one of the reasons why not a single global financial institution, after doing the financial analysis, would put any money up for the Adani mine, not a single cent.

 

"May I just say. This is nuts. But I doubt [Adani] is ever going to happen anyway."

 

This is despite the project being overwhelmingly supported in the recent federal election by the people of Australia.

 

Gore should stick to making boring films about climate change and leave the coal commentary to business and energy analysts who really understand the growing need for energy in all its forms to sustain a growing population and industrial base in India.

 

This week we saw also young Aussie rich-lister and Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes - who these days spends most of his time cruising around in his electric vehicle - tell the Morgan Stanley Australia Summit that we needed to replace the "dying" coal and gas components of our mining exports with clean energy.

 

"People say mining is a problem, mining isn't a problem for Australia," he said mentioning rare earths, iron ore, lithium, nickel and silver as positives.

"Mining is great.

 

"[But] somewhere between 15 and 25 years [from now], all the coal is going to be done, it's going to be worth zero," he is reported as saying in the Sydney Morning Herald. 

 

Cannon-Brookes reckons Australia is well-positioned to replace its $70 billion coal industry with renewable energy such as solar power because "it is sunny".

 

Really? Has he been to Melbourne lately? 

 

"We could power the entire planet five times over just from sunlight ... And we also have one of the best wind resources on the planet," Cannon-Brookes said.

 

"The Minerals Council of Australia does not describe the sun and the wind as a resource, which is nuts."

 

Hey dude, get this: coal is made from vegetable matter that harnessed sunlight millions of years ago.

 

While this fact might not win people like Cannon-Brookes brownie-points in coffee shops in Sydney or Silicon Valley, it should be remembered when eco-evangelists tell us what to do with our coal.