The story of a mining project in Australia helps to explain why the world keeps burning coal despite the profound risk it poses to the future.
If you live in Australia, or more specifically in the State of Queensland, you are familiar with the Carmichael coal mine and the Adani Group, a corporate conglomerate from India which will be mining the coal, shipping it to India on its own fleet of ships which will dock in ports owned by Adani to power a coal energy plant Adani owns in India, where the power will be transmitted to Bangladesh. And if you know these things, you know how Adani basically bulldozed its way through the recent elections in Australia and in Queensland in order to secure its mine and its mining operations, turning what was expected to be a “climate change election” into one which kept the existing Conservative government in place and essentially guaranteed the secure future of coal mining in Australia, at least in the near term.
Whether or not you know these things, this New York Times article is worth a read. It provides more details about Adani, the Carmichael mine, Australian politics, the political and economic strength of the Adani founder and CEO in India (and now apparently in Australia), and, perhaps most importantly from a climate perspective, why this messy mess and the burning of coal in India can offset positive actions taken elsewhere on Earth to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It also tells the story of how Adani literally bulldozed its way over villages and homes in India to construct its coal energy facilities, informing us that the concept of environmental and climate justice is so important.
Sound familiar to us in the US? Yup, but here the coal industry is in decline, but more than made up by the oil and gas industry and by fracking, offshore drilling, drilling in the Arctic and so on. Same evil, just a different cast of characters.
