Australia approves vast coal mine near Great Barrier Reef – “An act of climate vandalism that represents everything that has gone wrong with politics in Australia”
By Andrew Beatty
13 June 2019
(AFP) – Australia approved Thursday the construction of a controversial coal mine near the Great Barrier Reef, paving the way for a dramatic and unfashionable increase in coal exports.
Queensland’s government said it had accepted a groundwater management plan for the Indian-owned Adani Carmichael mine—the last major legal hurdle before construction can begin.
The project, fiercely debated for almost a decade, comes as investors and even energy companies are moving away from fossil fuels amid concern about the climate.
Opponents warn it will create a new generation of coal exports—which will be burned in India and China—contributing to further degrade the planet.
The vast open cut mine is slated to produce up to 60 million tonnes of coal a year, boosting Australia’s already vast exports by around 20 percent.
Coupled with the construction of a railway link, it could open up a swathe of Queensland to further exploitation and new mining projects.
“If all the coal in the Galilee Basin is burnt it would produce 705 million tonnes of climate pollution each year, which is more than 1.3 times Australia’s annual pollution from all sources, including cars, industry, energy and agriculture,” said the Australian Conservation Foundation. […]
Thursday’s decision draws a line under a rancorous debate, which reached boiling point during the latest Australian general election.
That vote took place amid discussion of brutal droughts, floods, and wildfires that had highlighted the country’s susceptibility to climate change.
Victory for the incumbent conservative Liberal Party had virtually assured the project would go ahead.
In Queensland, voters swung hard to the government fearing a Labor government would curb mining projects and cost them jobs. [more]
Australia approves vast coal mine near Great Barrier Reef
The world’s most insane energy project moves ahead
By Jeff Goodell
14 June 2019
(Rolling Stone) – Thanks to President Trump and his transparent and perverse desire to enrich his golfing buddies in the fossil fuel industry and to accelerate the climate crisis, the U.S. is the most notorious climate criminal in the world right now. But the Aussies are giving us a run for our money.
Exhibit A: the decision this week by the Queensland State government to allow a big coal mine in northeastern Australia to move forward. The project, known as the Carmichael mine, is controlled by the Adani Group, an Indian corporate behemoth headed by billionaire Gautam Adani. If it ever opens, the Carmichael mine would not be the biggest coal mine in the world, or even the biggest coal mine in Australia. But it may be the most insane energy project on the planet, and one that shows just how far supposedly civilized nations (and people) are from grasping what’s at stake in the climate crisis.
The site for the Carmichael mine is in the Galilee Basin, an unspoiled region of Queensland that Adani has been itching to get his hands on for at least a decade. The battle over the mine has been the usual sordid tale of fossil fuel industry development, in which a rich, powerful, politically connected corporation gets its way with weak and corrupt politicians. (Australian writer James Bradley has a great backgrounder on the mine here.)
But of course there are a lot of stupid and destructive energy projects in the world right now. What makes Adani worse than the others?
Let’s start with the Great Barrier Reef. The Australian Marine Conservation Society called the approval of the mine “bad news” for the reef. That’s an almost criminal understatement.
The approval of the Adani project is an aggressive attack on the 1,600-mile-long reef in two deadly ways. First, by condoning the mining and burning of coal, which is heating up and acidifiying the oceans and killing coral reefs, Australian politicians are essentially saying they are willing to sacrifice one of the great wonders of the world for a few jobs for their pals and some extra cash in their pockets. In fact, a key part of the Adani project is a new coal terminal on the Queensland coast, which is right at the edge of the Barrier Reef. That means more industrialization in the area, more water pollution, more coal barges floating over the reef, more risk of disasters that would dump dirty black rocks on one of nature’s crown jewels.
I spent a few days diving on the Barrier Reef last year, and I can tell you, there are few sights more surreal to anyone who cares about the fate of the planet than watching a ship loaded with coal heading out over the Great Barrier Reef. Healthy coral reefs are the rainforests of the ocean, teeming with life and vital to the underwater ecosystem. I saw stretches of brightly colored coral crowded with sharks, starfish, urchins and even a Manta-ray. But I also saw vast expanses of bleached coral that looked like underwater deserts. A 2018 Nature study described the reef on the verge of collapse. “We thought the Barrier Reef was too big to fail,” one researcher said, “but it’s not.” […]
What the coal industry does have is money to pay off corrupt politicians. In the past 10 years or so, the Australian mining industry poured well over half a billion dollars into lobby groups that push coal and fossil fuels. That has been a good investment: Between 2008 and 2013 in Queensland alone, the government laid out more than $8 billion on projects to benefit the coal industry. [more]
The World’s Most Insane Energy Project Moves Ahead
How Australia’s coal madness led to Adani
By James Bradley
1 April 2019
(The Monthly) – Head west from Townsville and time seems to shift. As the sudden hills of the coast give way to open country the terrain spreads out: forest replaced by vagrant woodland and scrubby brigalow, the deep red shapes of termite mounds protruding from the grass like countless miniature megaliths. Above the road wheel black kites and wedge-tailed eagles; once a mob of red-tailed black cockatoos floats by, calling mournfully, their massive heads and bodies suspended aloft on slow-beating wings.
For the Aboriginal people whose country it is, this is a living landscape, a web of meaning and obligation given shape by the stories that connect them to the land. Out here those stories feel close at hand, their presence palpable. Time inheres in the landscape, a reminder of the depth of human habitation, of the lines of story and cultural knowledge that connect the present day to the deep past.
Yet the memory of another past is also inscribed in this land. Along with the Bowen Basin to the east and the Cooper Basin to the south-west, this region – the Galilee – is part of a vast basin system stretching through Queensland’s interior, whose sandstone hills and lowlands obscure huge reserves of coal, much of it formed more than a quarter of a billion years ago during the Permian. […]
Officially at least, government support for Carmichael has been driven by its supposed economic benefits, and claims the project will create at least 10,000 jobs and generate $22 billion in taxes and royalties.
It’s not difficult to see why the promise of jobs resonates in Australia’s north. In Townsville, unemployment hovers above 9 per cent, compared to around 6 per cent in Queensland as a whole, while in inland areas it is even higher. Youth unemployment is particularly acute: in September 2018 in Townsville 17.7 per cent of people aged 17 to 24 were out of a job.
Yet the claims made about Carmichael’s economic benefits are highly questionable. When asked in court in 2015, Adani’s financial controller, Rajesh Gupta, not only conceded that government revenue from the project was unlikely to exceed $7.8 billion, he repeatedly declined to rule out taking advantage of tax minimisation schemes to shift potential profits offshore to tax havens and lower-tax jurisdictions such as Singapore. Other witnesses, such as energy analyst Tim Buckley, went further, arguing that Adani was “going to lose money at … the operating level [so] it actually won’t pay any tax”. Similarly when former Reserve Bank economist and Adani consultant Jerome Fahrer was pressed on the question of jobs, he admitted the figure of 10,000 was “extreme and unrealistic”. Instead, Fahrer argued that, at the peak of construction, the project would employ approximately 2400 people, but because many of these jobs would come at the expense of those elsewhere, the number of jobs actually created would be considerably lower. Instead, Fahrer said that over the life of the project an average of 1464 full-time equivalent direct and indirect jobs would be created.
It is possible even these estimates overstate the project’s benefits. [more]
How Australia’s coal madness led to Adani
Australia’s governments can’t cope with climate change
By Paddy Manning
13 June 2019
(The Monthly) – The Queensland government’s final approval for Adani’s Carmichael coalmine this afternoon is an act of climate vandalism that represents everything that has gone wrong with politics in Australia. In 2019, when responsible governments around the world are facing up to the climate emergency, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has panicked at the federal election result and, barely even pretending to look impartial, delivered Adani an approval that is bound to be challenged in court and, ultimately, on the ground. Whether the Carmichael mine proceeds or not remains to be seen – there are still many regulatory and commercial hurdles.
But even the beginning of construction work won’t mark the end of this saga, because the stakes are too high. Queensland Resources Council chief Ian Macfarlane, a former Coalition energy minister, spelled it out yesterday: if Carmichael goes ahead, establishing a rail line to the Galilee Basin, it will increase the likelihood of another six more mines in the region. That’s billions of tonnes more coal getting burned, generating greenhouse gas emissions that our oceans and atmosphere can no longer handle. Lemmings couldn’t come up with a worse decision.
Announcing the approval, Queensland Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch told parliament today: “Our state has some of the most rigorous environmental protections in the country and we do not apologise for that.” The truth is, although it’s taken nine years, politicians and regulators have failed to do their jobs at every step – and there has never been a requirement to consider the full climate impact of the project.
Today’s approval, along with the approval of management plans for the black-throated finch a fortnight ago, is only the latest bendover tactic from our elected representatives. There’s the federal environment department’s admission [$] in the Federal Court late yesterday that it had not considered all of the 2200 public submissions (some of which it had since lost) on Adani’s plans to build a 110-kilometre pipeline to the Suttor River to access up to 12.5 billion litres of floodwater a year, gifting a court win to the Australian Conservation Foundation. There’s the rushed pre-election approval of the groundwater management plan by former environment minister Melissa Price, which the Queensland environment minister herself said smacked of “political interference”, and which we subsequently learnt was highly conditional. Even The Australian today admits [$] that “questions rightly persist over the hurry up that was evidently issued to the Canberra bureaucracy”. Former environment minister Greg Hunt’s initial 2014 approval for the Carmichael mine was overturned by the Federal Court in 2015 because he failed to consider the impact on two threatened species – which was, literally, his job. Luckily for Adani, the same court found in favour of the minister a year later, ruling that Hunt was entitled to find any assessment of resulting carbon pollution on the Great Barrier Reef was “speculative”.
Greenpeace chief David Ritter tweeted a thread outlining how the approval “shows that the whole system is rigged and broken”. He wrote: “This is not about any specific allegation of corruption, but the rules of the whole system being unfit for purpose.” Even assuming it stands, today’s approval does not mark the end of the legal and commercial hurdles for the Carmichael project, even if it allows Adani to start clearing and break ground. [more]
Adani approved: Australia’s governments can’t cope with climate change
