The Carbon Sense Coalition has awarded its Inaugural Golden Fleece Award to former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia and coal industry leaders for "flagrant fleecing of community savings in futile 'research' on Carbon Capture & Sequestration - a costly and complex process designed to capture and bury carbon dioxide gas produced by burning carbon fuels such as coal, oil and gas".

It is obviously possible, in an engineering sense, to collect, separate, compress, pump and pipe gases, so new "research" is largely a waste of money. Engineers know how to do these things, and their likely costs. But only foolish green zealots would think of spending billions to bury a harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in hopes of cooling the climate some time in the century ahead.

About 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burnt in a power station. To capture, compress and bury it could take at least 30% of the electricity produced, greatly increasing the cost of the limited amount of electricity left for sale - more coal used, increased electricity costs, for ZERO measurable benefits.

We have come to expect stupidity from politicians, but coal industry leaders who agreed to waste money on this should be sued by shareholders for negligence. Maybe they were just drooling at all the extra coal they would sell in order to produce the same electricity?

Kevin Rudd wins this award for "a Flagrant Fleece of $400 million taken from tax payers to fund the fatuous Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute." There is little to show for the millions already spent except a lot of receipts for high class salaries, consultants, travel, entertainment and "operational expenses".

Pumping gases underground is sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to drive oil recovery from declining oil fields.

Normally, however, CCS will just produce more expensive electricity.

This result is not needed as politicians have already invented dozens of ways of doing just that.