By Steve Saunders
The Court’s decision on the Mt Pleasant NSW coal-mine extension will only amplify Labor-Green determination to plug ahead with net-zero, punishing Australians for climate guilt.
The judges were hemmed in by NSW climate laws, replicated in other states, and amplified at the federal level. They were between a coal-rock and a renewables hard-place.
But net-zero makes little sense
It’s often remarked that Australian climate policy should not trade on land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) trickery as a get-out-of-jail card.
If you lard Australia’s emissions trajectory with dodgy deductions for LULUCF, it looks like our 21st-century emissions are down, down. If you don’t, they haven’t shifted much.
But that omits the larger point. Perhaps one should be questioning the legitimacy of the entire global (UN) project for “carbon accounting”, “carbon neutrality”, and ever since 2016-18 “net zero”.
Our finite-sized planet, elle ne parle pas net-zero.
After 30 years of global “climate action”, fine, great, the “carbon intensity” of the global (or Australian) economy is down, “renewables” are well up. But hydrocarbons (aka “fossil-fuels for climate-denialists”) are still 80% or more of world’s final energy consumption. Nominal GDP and overall consumption keep on rising, as do population, environmental degradation, emissions, CO2 levels, and land/sea temps.
Mountains have been written on the need to curb endless growth via steadier-state economies. Some of the best economists still assume the UN climate project is part of the solution. Even though it encourages over-population and over-migration.
Likewise, over-migration and over-population are core precepts of Australia’s dubious “growth” economy and have been for decades.
Australia’s sheeple scientists seem to think the net-zero model is fine; they just want to lift the carbon “captures”, and then it’s up to our underperforming planet to lift its game.
But science says the planet’s huge carbon-cycle is overwhelmed, struggling to absorb more than half of human emissions. Emissions (A) minus captures (B) “netting out” to zero seems as far away as ever.
Thus, in “carbon accounting”, the government is usually the biggest liar.
Albanese and Bowen sure are punching above our global weight. Admire the chutzpah of their new Climate Change Authority paper, which assumes climate misinformation comes from bad external actors, not the government.
Yet Labor has twice welcomed misinformer Simon Stiell. Head of the UNFCCC acronym, he lectures us that the UN project is a no-brainer, or else our fruit and veg crops will fail, we’ll take the rap for rising sea levels and Pacific “climate refugees”.
It’s this zany “logic” that had Bowen heading up an arcane pre-COP (global Conference of the Parties, UNFCCC’s decision-maker) in Tuvalu, one that the world largely ignored.
And wouldn’t Labor love to pass their Duty of Care bill, where “sock puppets” and AI could be weaponised, to strafe non UN-compliant climate or immigration commentary.
What’s the Court’s emissions decision?
To the extent mortals can wade the impenetrable mangroves of the Court’s 3-2 split decision, I’m not inclined to be too critical of it.
All five judges had to accept the same legal (state of NSW) climate premises. Skewed though they are, in scientific or commonsense terms.
Not in dispute was that “Scope 3” or exported emissions via combusting the coal, meaning 98% of the total emissions were the point of contention. These emissions had to be addressed.
Overruling the NSW Court of Appeal, all five judges agreed that such an address was not only in view of potential climate punishments that might come back to haunt Muswellbrook/Mt Pleasant (a dot in world terms), but also the climate impacts worldwide or “without geographic limit” as per Clayton Utz. It was peculiar, either way.
The High Court’s only question was: had the NSW Planning Commission given Scope 3 sufficient attention? In my paraphrase, was there enough performative lip-service?
Two said yep, three said nope. That raises the real-world question: how can one ever account for hydrocarbon emissions when shipping the stuff?
Few countries have tried to address that problem directly through laws or legal interpretations, which isn’t surprising. And UN net zero itself is also behind the play, rather relying on corporate targets and corporate disclosures.
Scope 3 emissions, by definitionally, are corporate or organisational. Shucks, there are only 15 different categories, going “upstream” or “downstream” in the “value chain”. Confusingly, Scope 3 accounts for the majority of emissions in some industry sectors, but only a minority in others. I wouldn’t want to be an Australian corporation or miner facing mandatory Scope 3 reporting.
Like net zero itself, regulating the Scope 3 labyrinth looks like an unending bonanza for global “carbon accountancy”. While that’s happening, de facto, it appears to license more of the same of the same. That is, endless growth and persistent environmental decline.
Practically, what could NSW have done differently? Nobody’s saying much, but once again we have words from learned friends at Clayton Utz.
“The majority noted, authorities could consider conditions such as requiring coal to be washed before export, limiting exports to coal of a certain calorific content, restricting sales to countries with emissions reduction commitments, requiring the use of carbon capture technology, or imposing offset obligations.”
Oh goodie, all the NSW consent determination really needed was five more climate fairy-stories. Which are largely unrealistic and unenforceable and would make little material difference to the 98% yardstick.
What are the ramifications?
UN net-zero has always exploited wealthy nations’ (or white) climate guilt, with a pass for China/India economic and emissions growth, and for the African population explosion.
This is made explicit, in that UN policy holds industrialised nations responsible for “climate loss” and damage in developing nations. But these nations don’t really have to curb their over-population and over-migration, as that would be “racist”.
Australia’s upper-class left commonly imagines our adorable friend China as the only nation truly serious about net-zero, unlike bad-old US.
In view of ANZUS and AUKUS, the Labor-Greens wouldn’t much say this openly, but their policies are scarcely less extreme.
Green’s policies on climate and immigration are UN style policies, and never mind Australian voters. Thus, new leader David Shoebridge somehow rebranded Labor’s extraordinary 1.6m net-migration 2022-26 as a “migrant bashing” race-to-the-bottom.
According to The Australian, we safely “can assume” that Labor doesn’t want to destroy the country.
Can we? In their Intergenerational Report (IGR) Labor demands 235,000 annual net migration for the next 40 years, assumes renewables for net-zero will reduce utility bills by 40%, and somehow infers that AI is a big opportunity for our immigration-resources economy.
Then note here, Labor NSW has banned new coal mines or exploration bids and won’t repeal the Scope 3 trigger in its own laws.
Plus, so-called Greens will be scouring other states and other coal or gas plays to see if they can be derailed using this precedent.
While states have their own net-zero targets, Australia’s fight for UN net-zero “social justice” rests largely with the federal government. In just four years, Albanese Labor has unveiled a remarkable amount of hard-to-undo legislation for renewables net-zero, with an amazing number of quango-acronyms to police it.
The Court didn’t even look at all this federal law, where Albanese has legislated a fanciful “net zero economy”, with its own NZEA “authority” to make it happen.
Our ISP (Integrated System Plan) is meant to be a pragmatic engineering roadmap for the NEM (National Electricity Market). Worryingly, ISP increasingly incorporates renewables projects that may never get built, on the pixie-dust pathway to net-zero.
Never forget the German precedent
Voters do want a reliable grid, with tolerable consumer prices, that aren’t crowded out by the barely regulated energy-thirst of our AI cargo cult. They don’t want mass migration, nor net-zero puritanism at high cost.
Labor-Greens seem to say, too bad, that’s what you’re getting. Hence, the voter shift to One Nation, and the shift in Coalition stances on mass-migration and net-zero, since the defenestration of their Labor-Lite leader Sussan Ley.
More so under the AI revolution, world economic evidence doesn’t support Australia’s idiosyncratic immigration-economy. Nor does the weight of physical and scientific evidence support net-zero as achievable, or as a mystical IGR basis for Australian prosperity.
Labor-Greens are putting a higher value on the UN project than on Australian voters and welfare. That may assuage “climate guilt” but Australians will be worse off and developing nations won’t be better off.
Germany is the one major nation that’s taken renewables-for-net-zero literally enough to bet on the core reliability of its entire energy fleet. That didn’t go well.
While the Australian-left does boutique victory laps over the Court’s 3-2 decision, the US and China are off on yet another growth-jag. Like, the rather gas-fired US AI revolution goes against China’s rather coal-fired AI. This takes net zero further away than ever.
US and China aren’t too fussed about Scope 3, nor would they ever emulate Australia, whose endless population growth drives 3/4 of GDP “growth”. If Australia heeded voters or other threatened-species, it would pull back from UN net-zero and mass-migration.