Labor and Greens would have us believe coal mining is dead

National politics and media are afflicted with a culture of forgetting when it comes to coal and action on climate change.

Coal stockpiled for export at Newcastle. Picture: Bloomberg

National politics and media are afflicted with a culture of forgetting when it comes to coal and action on climate change.

The proposed emissions trading system that former Coalition prime minister John Howard took to the 2007 election said it was important Australia moved only in concert with major northern hemisphere emitters. Journalists and sensible politicians outside the Greens party seemed to understand this precaution.

Any action taken here but not matched by major polluters in the northern hemisphere would do nothing to reduce emissions globally but would export our emissions-intensive industries over­seas. We have already lost the car assembly business and parts of our aluminium smelting industry. Labor policies to quarantine aluminium from its renewables target suggest it knows this industry is vulnerable too.

Unfortunately Australia got 12 years of policy chaos rather than Howard’s 2007 policy. Kevin Rudd won that election, called climate change the “great moral challenge of our time” and then dumped his ETS in 2010. He was then dumped in favour of Julia Gillard, who introduced a carbon tax at $23 a tonne, three times the then European price, despite promising “no carbon tax under a government I lead”. She fell to Rudd in 2013 and he lost to opposition leader Tony Abbott in September on a promise to “axe the tax”.

Emissions policy had already destroyed opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull in late 2009, and did so again as prime minister last year. It may yet cost Abbott his seat of Warringah as he is assailed by self-proclaimed Liberal independents campaigning on climate change with GetUp (read Labor) help. Yet Abbott has largely been correct on the issue. Whatever your views on climate change, there is only self-inflicted pain for Australians in getting ahead of the rest of the world on emissions reduction.

The largest emitter, China, has formally committed to continue increasing emissions until 2030. The second-largest emitter, the US, is refusing to be bound by Paris emissions reduction targets but is the only large emitter to cut emissions — because of shale gas fracking. India and most of Southeast Asia continue to burn coal, increase emissions and build new coal-fired power stations.

Two years ago I wrote in this column that perhaps as many as 1000 new coal-fired power units were under construction or in scope globally, and most media were stupidly proclaiming coal dead. The following year the Parliamentary Library, asked to do the same research, put the figure at 621 coal power units (rather than stations) under construction.

China is not moving away from coal as the Greens and our ABC have claimed but has scrapped 100 proposed projects in its highly polluted east to focus on new coal-fired plants in its less populated west. Much of that will be fired by Australian coal.

Yet like fairies at the bottom of the garden Labor, Greens and independent politicians continue to claim there in no role for coal in the future power generation mix domestically. Labor’s Richard Marles, speaking on Sky News on Wednesday about the Adani mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, said it would be good if the thermal coal industry closed in Australia.

Thermal coal exports are worth $39 billion a year to Australia and with coking coal the total coal export sector is worth almost $70 billion a year. Coal prices have fallen slightly this year but are still near record levels, confirming demand globally. Coal remains king of our export tree, helping pay for all the imported luxury goods inner-city environmentalists love.

The coal industry employs tens of thousands of mining union members affiliated with the ALP through the AWU and the CFMEU, two of the largest contributors to the ALP’s coffers. Former AWU national president Bill Ludwig, a long-time mentor to Labor leader Bill Shorten when he ran the Victorian division of the AWU, belled the cat on Labor’s duplicitous attitude to Adani on the front page of this newspaper on Wednesday.

Ludwig blamed “a few lefties” in the Queensland ALP for politicising Adani. He backed the CFMEU’s threat to campaign against Labor candidates who refuse to support the project. The Daily Telegraph’s front page on Friday reported the CFMEU was taking a similar attitude on Labor candidates in NSW: it is “considering withholding electoral support for 11 ALP candidates across state and federal electorates in NSW” for not backing coal projects and mining jobs.

Labor’s attitude to coal and its commitment to a 50 per cent renewables target and a 45 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030 have put the political focus on Shorten and the costs his policies will inflict on Labor’s own union members and its traditional voters.

It is about time the media looked at this. Turnbull, who said publicly that emissions reduction would not be cost-free, should have campaigned on the issue in 2016. Voters need to understand what Labor’s policies will mean for their weekly budgets.

Labor is seeking to win Coalition marginal seats in prominent coal mining districts in Queensland (Capricornia, Michelle Landry; Dawson, George Christensen; and Flynn, Ken O’Dowd) and hold Joel Fitzgibbon’s seat of Hunter. Its chances will not be good if voters believe Marles was expressing a more widely held view on coal within the party.

Just how much Labor’s plans will cost was made clear on Thursday’s front page of The Australian by Simon Benson, who published research by former Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics head Brian Fisher, a respected economist who has worked on climate change for the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments. The research shows Labor’s plans would boost power prices by 50 per cent, cost workers $9000 a year in lower wages and wipe $472 billion from GDP over a decade. Even the Coalition’s emissions reduction target of 26-28 per cent by 2030 would produce cumulative economic losses of $70 billion and 2 per cent lower wages over the decade.

To my mind the issue of acting ahead of the rest of the world is a bigger question than domestic politics, jobs and power prices. I live in Abbott’s seat of Warringah. Do voters in the area driving expensive European cars plastered with “Stop Adani” and “Vote Tony Out” stickers really think scrapping a mine in Queensland will make any difference to climate change?

Indian power users will simply source their coal elsewhere and the coal they can buy from South Africa or Indonesia will be dirtier than our coal.

The ABC and parts of the Channel Nine media finished the week celebrating that the world’s biggest coal miner, Glencore, had promised to stop expanding its coal interests and cap its exports at the present level of 145 million tonnes a year. It was painted as a socially responsible decision bowing to the Climate Action 100+ anti-coal investment lobby group.

Wily CEO Ivan Glasenberg must have smiled at the easy applause he got for agreeing to remain the world’s largest coal miner and to continue exporting every year its record shipments levels from last year.