Clean coal 'lies' would make Goebbels proud : Dr Karl

The celebrity science commentator and Climate Change Coalition candidate on Thursday said the major political parties were lying when spruiking the benefits of clean coal technology.

Claims carbon dioxide could be removed from burning coal and stored underground or underwater were a lie, he said.

Such technology would require one cubic kilometre of compressed carbon dioxide to be stored every day, something that was "physically impossible".

"That is the volume of compressed carbon dioxide that we have to get rid of - not every 10 years, not every year, but every single day," he said.

"It is simply a furphy, it's a porky pie to cover up the fact that there is no such thing as clean coal."

It was the kind of lie a Nazi propagandist would conceive, Kruszelnicki claimed.

"Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, said if you're going to tell a lie, tell a big one, and this is a beauty," he said.

Dr Kruszelnicki also said political policies such as a $20 million plan for exploration of underground caverns would be a waste of taxpayer dollars.

He claimed any storage facility would eventually wear down and would release the stored carbon dioxide back into the environment.

Australia must decide where it wanted to focus its energy prospects for the future, with the Climate Change Coalition recommending a 40 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 and a 70 per cent reduction by 2050, Dr Kruszelnicki said.

"We've got two choices in 15 to 20 years from now," he said.

"Either to make money, we sell dirt overseas, coal, or we sell the (renewable energy) technology without burning dirt (coal)."

Underground thermal energy accessed in South Australia could provide 100 per cent of Australia's baseload electricity for the next 75 years and then be supplemented by other renewables, he told reporters.

"If we tried really hard we could have all of the electricity in Australia made without carbon by 2020 using a mixture of renewable energies including hot rocks and the wind and the waves and the sun," he said.

Dr Kruszelnicki's running mate, Patrice Newell, challenged suggestions the coal industry would suffer major job losses if Australia made a dramatic switch to renewable energy sources.

"I know that for a fact that they would be quite happy to have a job in the renewable industry," said Newell, a resident of the Hunter coal mining region.

"It's not that it's a commitment to a coal job, they want a commitment to a job."