You’ve got to love the way the national conversation transpires around resources some days. Take Adani at The Australian today:
A highly orchestrated, secretly foreign-funded group of Australian environmental activists opposing the $16 billion Adani coalmine in Queensland has “dampened” Indian investment interest in Australia and received heated criticism from the federal Coalition and Queensland Labor governments.
Indian Power Minister Piyush Goyal told The Australian yesterday the years of legal challenges to the vast Carmichael coal project, now revealed to have been funded by multi-million-dollar foundations in the US, “will certainly dampen future investments” from India.
Federal ministers and the Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, have warned of the danger posed by activists to jobs and investment, and questioned the links between the Australian groups, through their US funders, to the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic election campaign, John Podesta.
After meeting Mr Goyal, federal Resources Minister Matt Canavan, who has previously criticised the campaign to block the Indian project, said: “We need to be able to take advantage of the demand for coal in Asia.”
Ms Palaszczuk, who was in Prosperine yesterday to talk about the benefit of Adani’s project, for which the company began seeking approval seven years ago, said the US groups should look after their “own backyard”.
They are looking after their own backward. They share the same planet, after all. And last time I looked, Adani was “foreign-funded” as well.
But, let that go. One does not need to be an environmentalist to see the folly in the Adani project. It is widely known that it’s break even price is around the $100 thermal coal price. That puts it at the very outer edge of the cost curve, above the 95th percentile, from UBS:
Yet as coal demand sinks worldwide, the price will keep falling and displace everything outside of $50-60. So to build the Adani project at all will only lower the coal price further and trigger the shutting-in of other more efficient coal mines, some of which are in Australia, mostly in NSW.
The Adani project is Indian resource nationalism combined with Bjelke-Petersen-style crackpot economics that privileges development over economic gain.
Ms Palaszczuk might as well be throwing bananas at the US lobbyists for all of the economic sense that she’s making.
