Three more coal projects have been ticked off this week by the NSW government, all of which are extensions of Glencore’s existing coalmines — Mount Owen, Liddell Coal Operations, and Ravensworth Coal Operations.
They follow Plibersek’s stamp of approval last week for the short-lived Isaac River mine, which got a five-year deadline to dig out metallurgical coal for steelmaking, a project her spokesperson noted received no submissions during its consultation period.
The three NSW projects will “improve the management of water and waste across adjoining coalmines in the Hunter Valley”, a Planning and Environment Department spokesperson told Crikey, and showed “feasible” measures to reduce emissions.
It means four separate coal projects in four days have been greenlit in Australia.
The world’s top energy body, the International Energy Agency, has repeatedly advised that “no new coalmines or mine extensions” can be approved if we want a shot at limiting global heating to under 1.5 degrees.
Just six days earlier, Plibersek proudly tweeted about rejecting two Queensland coalmines over lapsed applications, declaring: “If companies aren’t willing to show how they will protect nature, I’m willing to cancel their projects — and that’s exactly what I’ve done.”
Australia Institute research director Roderick Campbell replied asking whether she would be “willing to cancel a project due to climate impacts, not just overdue paperwork” — but got no response.
Campbell tells Crikey there are decisions made every day that facilitate fossil fuel expansion in Australia, and “if we took climate science seriously, every one of the answers would be no”.
“It’s quite rare to see a yes or no decision from a federal government minister in the spotlight, but every week state planning agencies and federal environmental agencies are doing so,” he says. “It’s the hundreds of smaller decisions that build momentum within the many stages of project approval and that paints Tanya Plibersek into a corner where she has to say yes.”
Plibersek told ABC’s Radio National yesterday that her decisions were bound by national environmental law, and that the Isaac River mine met standards under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) “as it is at the moment”.
The current nature of the act does mean Plibersek’s hands are tied, but that doesn’t mean things couldn’t be different. In fact, they could’ve changed more than 20 years ago.
Devil is in the detail
In December, the Albanese government conducted a review of the EPBC Act, in its consultation stage with laws to be introduced later this year or early next. In a statement, the Climate Council questioned why coal approvals had not been put on hold in the interim.
“The environment minister has a responsibility to scrutinise all risks of harm to the environment, and it is irresponsible that she has refused to look at the immense and indisputable climate harm that all new coal and gas projects pose,” head of advocacy Dr Jennifer Rayner said.
The problem, Melbourne University Law School PhD candidate Ella Vines tells Crikey, is that Plibersek has to play the ball as it lies. Vines is researching whether the Paris Agreement is creating legal pathways to halt Australian coal extraction and consumption.
“The environment minister has only limited scope to consider climate change impacts of a proposed coal project under the EPBC Act and therefore cannot refuse a coal project due to the GHG emissions associated with the project,” Vines explains.
The reason lies in our EPBC Act — it says the minister must personally approve any project that will have an impact on nine “matters of national environmental significance (MNES)”, which include threatened species, migratory species, water resources, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and world heritage properties.
But crucially, a project that will cause high emissions is not an MNES in and of itself, Vines says, and coal projects are considered against the nine other MNES instead.
“What this means in practice is that greenhouse gas emissions associated with a proposed coal project continue to be considered in ministerial decision-making under the EPBC Act but are insufficient grounds to refuse the development.”
Also crucially, the government’s reforms did not include an all-important climate trigger — a piece of policy that has, across the past 23 years, been floated across party lines, and been killed each time.
The unlikely architect of the climate trigger
In November 2000, then environment minister Robert Hill surprised his colleagues by releasing draft regulations for a “greenhouse trigger” under the EPBC Act, despite his cabinet having sidelined the plan earlier that year after the concept of a possible application of a trigger had first been floated in a government consultation paper in 1999.
In a media release at the time, the Liberal senator said that “under the draft regulations, the EPBC Act would be triggered by major new developments if they are likely to result in greenhouse gas emissions of more than 0.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in any 12-month period”.
The push received intense backlash from the industry which found it “grossly unfair”, and from then deputy prime minister John Anderson and industry minister Nick Minchin.
‘Time to act’, says Albo
In 2005 a certain Labor environment spokesman by the name of Anthony Albanese introduced the Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change (Climate Change Trigger) Bill. It proposed a trigger would kick in if a project released more than 500,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
“The glaring gap in matters of national environmental significance is climate change,” Albanese’s rousing speech reads. “This bill closes that gap. The climate change trigger will enable major new projects to be assessed for their climate change impact as part of any environmental assessment process and will ensure that new developments represent best practice.
“It is time to act. It is time for procrastination to end.”
The private member’s bill failed.
The Greens take up the trigger
Fast forward to now and the Greens are pushing for a much lower cap of 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year before the trigger kicks in, but they’ve also floated an emissions intensity threshold which basically proposes a “quality over quantity” approach to emissions.
A 2020 review of the EPBC Act by the former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel indicated a trigger would be effective if the onus was on businesses to publish their own emissions forecasts, but fell short of recommending that the minister should enforce it. Samuel’s position was that environment laws should not duplicate other policies meant to regulate emissions and the government continues to cite that reasoning.
Plibersek broadly supported the Samuel review, declaring Labor’s “reforms are seeking to turn the tide in this country — from nature destruction to nature repair”, and in turn Samuel expressed “complete elation and unqualified admiration and respect” for Plibersek’s policy response.
But a climate trigger, as it has for the past 20-odd years, remains a bridge too far.
We are fast approaching tipping points. Only ignorant people will justify extra CO2 emissions. They will bleat about energy security, sovereign trade risks, and windfalls from coal/gas exports. Their arguments are moot. They should shut up until they understand atmospheric physics and coupled Earth systems properly. The last thing we want is ignorant politicians in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry making really stupid decisions. The climate does not care about antiquated and silly laws written by politicians. Only the laws of thermodynamics matter here.
The reason reasonable people do what they do, WC, is not because they are ignorant, greedy or rude.
You yourself are a typical example. You care about the environment, and yet you continue to consume fossil fuels. We know that because you are typing into a computing device that is made from mining products, and powered by coal.
I’m not saying this to criticise you — just to help you to see yourself they way you choose to see others.
An individual somehow opting out of anything which involved fossil fuels would make no difference to global warming, obviously. Effective action at scale must involve government, and of course it’s politicians who appear not to care about global warming that are the target of @Who_Cares’s anger. He/she says that ‘only ignorant people will justify extra CO2 emissions’. I don’t know if it’s ignorance, a lack of responsibility, short sight, selfishness or something else, but it’s definitely a problem, IMHO!
Individuals are the only people causing climate change in great quantities, Don. The fossil fuel companies, such as Exxon and Shell, don’t actually create C02 emissions on a great scale. They simply extract the fossil fuels out of the ground, and deliver them to retailers in the suburbs, with the carbon still sequestered in the liquid formats. It’s the soccer moms and people like you and me who hand over $90 for a tank of gas who actually perform the combustion that creates C02, each time we turn the key to start our vehicles.
We do this, not because we want to ruin the planet, but because its so much faster and easier than walking.
If there was a way to get from A to B that was more environmentally friendly, and cheaper, everybody would convert overnight, and then no politician would stand in the way.
But there isn’t yet a way for so many things, and reasonable people can’t wait or postpone their soccer games, their dates, their supermarket visits or their joy rides, so they burn a little C02 and get on with living their lives.
Is this a problem, or a choice we’re making? I’ll leave that for the philosophers.
One thing is certain. If C02 emissions are ever reduced down to net zero, there will be other things left that threaten the survival of our species on this fragile planet, such as the disappearance of forests and the finiteness of clean water.
We’ll fight wars to get our share, because we have the same competitive instincts as other animals.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the species is doomed. Even if 99.9% of humans disappeared in an apocalypse, there would still be 80 million people left to start again.
For all we know, that might have already happened 100 million years ago, and this might be the second or third or more generation of “advanced civilisation” on this planet alone.
Start what again ? The modern society we have today could not be rebuilt from “scratch” (let’s be generous and say, starting around the medieval era), even assuming the knowledge wasn’t lost. All the easily accessible raw materials to do it are gone.
Well, we may not “know”, but we can have a pretty good guess it hasn’t happened from the lack of any evidence.
What happened a hundred million years ago is not recoded n any book, for no book is older than 5000 years.
Nor is it limited by the absence of anything we’ve scraped from the surface of the earth in the last 200 years.
To truly get a sense of the Earth 100 million years ago, and that far into the future, and beyond, we must rely upon our imaginations.
It is the same for tomorrow.
Bollocks.
The “book” is the geological record.
If there was any “advanced civilization” 100 million years ago, the evidence would be in the geological record.
It ain’t, so there are two possibilities…………….
……..they either didn’t exist, or they managed to destroy themselves so completely as to leave no trace.
Occam’s razor………..
See what you did, Thucydides? Complete immediate rejection. Your reaction to an unusual point of view was swift and polarised.
You have no need of an imagination because you know everything you need to know.
But read my last comment again, and see if you can pick out a single sentence that contains a false statement.
I believe it’s called begging the question, Frank. Books aren’t the only source of information as to what happened a hundred million years ago. Nor are those events likely to not have left some quantifiable impression on anything we’ve scraped from the surface of the earth in the last 200 years. One doesn’t need to truly get a sense of the earth (sic) 100 million years ago to have a fair idea of what it was like. Nor for tomorrow.
That’s several.
Or maybe it’s something that we’ve thought about before today. Maybe heard of, read about, or even read through, The Silurian Hypothesis.
So you’re arguing against something that isn’t even what I said!
Why don’t ou try responding to what I did say?
What you said was:
For all we know, that might have already happened 100 million years ago, and this might be the second or third or more generation of “advanced civilisation” on this planet alone.
I looked that up, drsmithy. Wikipedia says Frank and Schmidt say the fossil record would likely be no help. 100 million years ago is too long for any human artefacts to last.
So imagine if our modern civilisation was destroyed soon. What evidence could you expect to detect of its existence 100 million years from now?
There are things covered in the Wikipedia page:
After a great time span, the researchers concluded, contemporary humans would be more likely to find indirect evidence such as rapid changes in temperature or climate (as occurred during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum ~55 million years ago); evidence of tapping geothermal power sources; or anomalies in sediment such as their chemical composition (e.g., evidence of artificial fertilizers) or isotope ratios (e.g., there is no naturally occurring plutonium-244 outside a supernova, so evidence of this isotope could indicate a technologically advanced civilization).[2][3] Objects that could indicate possible evidence of past civilizations include plastics and nuclear wastes residues buried deep underground or on the ocean floor.[2]
I read that article, drsmithy.
I’m surprised you chose to regurgitate it instead of answering my question, which was about what traces of our modern society today might be detectable in the future if our society was ruined tomorrow.
Plastic waste will have degraded to molecular constituents within 1000 years, and nuclear byproducts will be inert within 1 million.
Geological action of tectonic plates will bury most built environments within 1 million years.
USB sticks and all other digital storage media will degrade after 100 years unless kept in temperature stable dehumidified environments.
What evidence do you think will last for 100 million years?
anywho what about the contra deals in todays political machinery and theolans to optimise our finite and undervalued resources and life on earth and compliant hoodwinked population due to propaganda via a cartel run world order
As you say books didn’t exist millions of years ago; but geological samples down to molecular level, ice cores, and many other artefacts tell the story of what has happened in the past. You apparently haven’t read anything in relation to paleo-climatology.
I seriously doubt that Frank has ever read a book…..by which I mean ANY book.
Was it a written record that informed us of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs (and others) 65 million years ago? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.
The fossil fuel apex groups and corporations themselves have know about the impact their products cause for many decades. The corporations have paid third parties to undermine climate science which has been very productive for the fossil fuel corporations. The result has been that developing renewable sources of energy had been stymied for a considerable amount of time. In other words, individuals generally can only use fossil fuels for many of their activities even though they would like to do otherwise. Through knowing about the impact of their products the fossil fuel corporations have been committing homicide.
Keith, no fossil fuel corporation requires you to drive when you could easily walk. And yet, you still take the car, sometimes even turning on the air conditioner! Why do you do this?
Not because you are trying to wreck the planet. Not because any evil corporation makes you do it. You just do it because it’s convenient.
As for the geological record, take a good look at your house that you paid $1m for. How much of it do you think is going to be left standing if you cease all maintenance for the next 50 years?
100 years?
500 years?
5,000 years?
Keep going Keith, and tell me what you expect to see in the fossil record 1 million years from now.
Then multiply that by 100.
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
Happily, my computer is being powered by the PV panels on my roof.
so just let it happen and not worry bout it ?
Yep – there are only two universal laws – the laws of physics and chemistry. Everything else is the product of human imagination. Read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
“… Sapiens provides us with no resources for answering questions about the moral implications of scientific and technological change. A commitment to a reductionist, mechanistic view of Homo sapiens may give us some insight into some of the aspects of our past most tied to our material nature. But Harari’s view of culture and of ethical norms as fundamentally fictional makes impossible any coherent moral framework for thinking about and shaping our future. And it asks us to pretend that we are not what we know ourselves to be — thinking and feeling subjects, moral agents with free will, and social beings whose culture builds upon the facts of the physical world but is not limited to them.”
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-reductionist-history-of-humankind
yes totally
We need to distinguish between metallurgical (met) coal & thermal coal
Met coal is used to produce steel. As yet ‘Green’ steel produced using hydrogen is not yet mainstream.
We need steel to be produced (ideally in Australia given we have all the ore products)
Thermal coal is mainly used in power generation.
It appears this mine is met coal.
Not all coal mining is bad, I would not want to see any more thermal coal mines approved.
counter point: ALL COAL MINING IS BAD
And where does steel, aluminium, lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, graphite, copper, oil, gas, boron, samarium, cobalt etc etc etc come from? Your so called “counter point” is Neanderthal in the extreme.
Go easy on Neanderthals please.
They lasted far longer than self-named “sapiens”
I’m fairly sure they don’t come from coal mines.
“Green steel” still needs metallurgical coal: it provides an essential ingredient to the steel-making process. Its prime purpose is not to provide energy.
Just to be clear: No metallurgical coal = no steel.
Not sure green steel needs metallurgical coal but hey I’ve been wrong before.
What doesn’t get scrutinized enough is the amount of steel and concrete (plus associated processes) needed to transition to net zero. The transition itself is carbon intensive and indeed the scale required is painted as well beyond current levels of emissions (at least in industry forums).
This begs the question – why are politicians selling the “everything the same but green” fantasy?
There is a bit more to this than meets the eye. To produce steel from iron carbon has to be absorbed by the metal. Look up the Bessemer Process in which the coal is burnt and absorbed in one process. The next step is to “dissolve the carbon into the iron without the burning of the coal producing CO2. So coal (Carbon) is required to produce steel from iron.
I am no expert and that is from my childhood memory. I am sure the experts out there will correct me.
You’re correct – I hadn’t considered the carbon needed for pure iron to become steel.
There is work on replacing coal as the carbon source. Old car tyres for example. UNSW research:
“Originally in partnership with OneSteel, the SMaRT Centre developed a process to make green alloys, using end‐of‐life rubber tyres and waste plastic as an alternative to coking coal. Now working with industry partner Molycop, many millions of passenger vehicle tyres have been diverted from landfill in Australia, and the technology has now been commercialised here and overseas.”
The owners of the Whyalla steelworks are working on non-coal steel, so the ‘green steel’ isn’t just the energy source. Here’s a bit:
‘Enter green steel – which sees renewable hydrogen used as an alternate reducing agent to create Direct Reduced Iron in an electric arc furnace powered by renewables.
The processed magnetite concentrate, which is ultimately a high-quality iron ore product, comes into this process because it enables the use of hydrogen as a reductant and is needed to feed the Direct Reduced Iron or DRI process.
“The successful production of the Direct Reduction grade [magnetite] pellets is another significant step forward in GFG Alliance’s green steel transformation at Whyalla,” the company said in its announcement of the news.’
That said, it’s small beans thus far.
New met coal delays green steel. A scarcity of met coal would expedite it. Steel will cost more, but keeping things cheap (the market) is what has created the climate emergency which we now must reverse – if we can and as soon as we can. We’ve been shitting in our nest and it’s now full to overflowing. The IEA predicts that more coal will be burned in 2023 than in any previous year. Widespread adoption of a new technology typically takes 40 years, which means hydrogen might replace coal in the 2060s, if we are lucky.
Hydrogen is being spruiked up by big industry, which needs a big industry to replace what they have. Similar to the way CCS was talked up for decades. Nobody ever believed in it but it served as an excuse for wrecking the climate and the ocean. Hydrogen needs about ten units of renewable energy to produce one unit of hydrogen energy. Thereby wasting 90%. My money is on better batteries, of all kinds, wasting 10-20%.
But all coal mining is bad. It’s a definition.
My first answer is awaiting approval, as I used a common metaphore referring to what we have been doing in our nest.
Awaiting ‘for’ approval, surely?
Or “Awaiting f.a.”
It makes no difference what we’re burning the coal for, one of the results will be greenhouse gas. Would we say ‘we had to fry the planet because we needed the steel?’. I hope not. No one is suggesting we should suddenly stop making steel, but saying no to new coal mines doesn’t mean that anyway. Constraining CO2 emissions should be mandatory, and general thoughts like yours should not be used to get in the way of actions that must be taken if we are to do that.
Steel is made by physically combining iron with carbon, not burning it. The carbon in the current steel-making process comes from high-grade coal, which is referred to as metallurgical coal. Your reply “It makes no difference what we’re burning the coal for” seems to indicate that you don’t know that.
When the EPBC Act was first beign discussed and was still in early draft, I (then a middle-rank public servant) tried to get a “climate trigger” inserted into the Act. But I was overruled by my then Division Head, and so the proposal was shelved – as still seems to be happening, even when it’s a government minister who raises the idea. “Long live Old King Coal” is the slogan, even if it entails the eventual death of most others, including mankind.
Why does it need to be an explicit trigger when it’s relevant to MNES?
It’s not relevant, at least at present, that’s the point. That’s because under the legislation something is only relevant when it is explicitly listed as such. It makes sense to ensure any such legislation spells out clearly what is included (and therefore what is not), otherwise there would be endless court cases arguing about how to apply the legislation. But of course it is desirable, if the legislation is going to achieve its objective, for the list of relevant considerations not to have glaring omissions.
Keen to talk to you Tony if you’d like to send me an email! eelsworthy@crikey.com.au
Perhaps we are now seeing the reason Plibersek was dumped in the Environment Portfolio.
She will have difficulty now in trying to reach for the leadership in the future. This will become a millstone around her neck.
Indeed. Albo not the nice guy he and his minders want us to believe. Just another career politician focussed more on politics than policy.
Yes, possibly a cunning plan by Albanese to eliminate her as a rival contender. I see her as being constrained by the Labor Party in the decisions she can make in this space, so I still see her as a leadership contender
And unfairly so, Charlie – the Trousers have pulled a fast one on her!
It’s OK to rape mother Earth, as long as you do it carefully and call yourself the ALP.