Time for Bob Brown’s environmentalists to tell the truth about Adani coal

Environmentalists don’t have to tell the truth or support logical policies to get media backing.

Former Greens leader Bob Brown joins hundreds of protestors at an anti-Adani rally in Sydney as part of a convoy protesting against the Queensland coal mine. Picture: AAP.

Environmentalists don’t have to tell the truth or support logical policies to get media backing from the ABC and the Nine newspapers, which have been campaigning against the Adani coal mine in central Queensland for years.

Bob Brown, patron saint of the environment movement and the Greens leader who killed Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading system in 2010, defied rational argument in a piece here by Matt Denholm on April 17 about Brown’s anti-Adani road convoy from Hobart to Canberra via Queensland.

Brown rejected arguments that stopping Adani’s Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin was pointless because coal mined elsewhere would simply be burned instead. “That’s the heroin dealer’s lament — if I didn’t do it someone else would. It’s not an ethical argument,” Brown said.

It’s the sort of flimsy argument that wins fans on social media. But think about it carefully.

Brown is spinning, like any politician. He knows coal-fired electricity generation will continue to be rolled out in India and China. He knows the Great Barrier Reef is not threatened by Adani, because even if Australia decarbonised, the temperature of the ocean around the reef will keep rising because China and India don’t plan to start reducing their carbon intensity until 2030. And he knows China’s annual emissions rise is greater than the full emissions total of Australia each year.

Once the Left of politics used to care about workers’ jobs here and for the poor in India. Now not so much. More than 90 per cent of India’s villages have no access to electricity. Their main sources of fuel for heating, cooking and light at night are firewood and cow dung pats.

Both are bad for respiratory health and both are far worse for the environment than clean coal-fired baseload power. Adani’s coal will be cleaner than most alternative coal supplies India might be able to import.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in re-election mode this month, pledged to build a national electricity grid in the world’s biggest democracy at the 2014 poll. Progress is slower than forecast. The Hindu reported in March 2016 that two-thirds of households were still relying on firewood for cooking in largely unventilated homes.

Physics.org reported in November 2015 that hundreds of millions of housewives were still endangering their health by using baked cow pats to cook family meals. These produce heavy concentrations of black carbon that threaten health. Their environmental downside is of less concern to people scratching to make a living. Forbes in May last year reported about Modi’s promise of 100 per cent village electrification: “Only 1417 of India’s 18,452 villages, or 7.3 per cent of the total, have 100 per cent household connectivity and about 31 million homes are still in the dark.”

Forbes noted that with “India depending on coal to meet 60 per cent of its electrical requirement and coal production stagnating it will be no easy task for the government to fulfil its (electrification) promise”.

These are facts the Stop Adani crowd simply deny. The Sydney Morning Herald published a piece on Good Friday criticising such arguments because the author claimed Adani has a bad record in India. In fact Adani has been rated one of India’s most trusted brands.

Environmentalists often privilege their personal feelings about climate over global facts. What is the truth about this mine so many are fighting to stop?

First, it is nowhere near the reef. The Galilee Basin is inland in sparsely settled, dry pastoral country. Adani’s coal will have to be railed 300km to the Abbott Point coal loader, which already services coal exporters from Bowen Basin fields 200km closer to the coast.

The Carmichael mine itself includes open cut and underground mines. The area covered by its wider infrastructure is about 30,000ha (300sq km) from a total basin area of 247,000sq km.

Green groups have used claimed threats to the reef to ramp up opposition to the mine. Apart from the unarguable points made above about rising carbon dioxide for another decade in China and India, the Federal Court found in favour of the mine in February last year in an action by the Australian Conservation Foundation claiming Adani would hurt the reef.  Having lost that fight, environmentalists now claim Adani threatens the ground water table and a black-throated finch. The mine will not use water from the Great Artesian Basin, it has met environmental standards and was signed off on April 9 by Coalition Minister for the Environment Melissa Price.

The SMH seems to think arguments that India’s poor should have access to healthy power enjoyed in the West for 100 years are a ruse. On April 17 it published a story headlined “Coalition MPs back Adani mine to stop women having to ‘cook with cow dung’.” The headline seemed to imply local federal member for Capricornia, the Liberal National Party’s Michelle Landry, had made some sort of gaffe in an ABC interview about the need for cleaner power in India.

It is not only the environment movement in denial on Adani. Federal Labor is wedged by the mine, which is anathema to progressive voters in Victoria and Tasmania but critical to Labor’s own CFMEU affiliated mining union members in central Queensland and the NSW Hunter Valley. The union has warned it will not support Labor challenger Russell Robertson against Landry unless he signs a statement saying he supports mining. Labor’s candidates in Flynn and Dawson face the same ultimatum.

Queensland CFMEU Mining and Energy president Steve Smyth on April 11 sent a “candidates pledge” to all state Labor MPs and candidates. Federal Labor is trying to walk both sides of the street on the issue. In regional Australia it supports mining while in the southeast it preaches a climate change mantra pledging 50 per cent renewables and a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. It just won’t tell reporters how much all this will cost, how many miners will lose their jobs and what benefit it will be to the planet, given rising emissions in the northern hemisphere.

Adani is favoured in private by the Queensland Labor government, but it pretends otherwise in the interests of Federal Labor. And here is the rub. Labor and the Coalition federally and in NSW and Queensland depend heavily on revenue from coal. Mining companies do pay federal taxes and they pay state royalties.

The Greens have been proclaiming the death of coal for a decade but last year it became this country’s No 1 export: coking and thermal coal now earn the nation $70 billion a year. This finances our hunger for imports, such as electric cars, TVs and iPhones.

Greens have argued coal is a stranded asset, yet prices are near historic highs. Why? Because China and India are building hundreds of coal-fired power stations.

Greens have claimed Adani’s mine is a con and won’t be built. Yet Adani has spent $1 billion on the project and is proceeding.

Finally, track down the latest peer-reviewed science about the surprising adaptability of corals to changing sea temperatures. Then reflect on how they survived previous periods of higher carbon dioxide concentrations.