Australia is recklessly blowing its own climate promises

Australia is roaring towards an emissions cliff – and its government just hit the accelerator. Last week, four new coal mine expansions were approved, adding to a shocking total of seven coal mine approvals in just 90 days.

These decisions come despite the government’s own Climate Change Authority warning that such projects could derail its climate goals. And it’s not just domestic emissions at stake: these mines will release massive amounts of methane and carbon dioxide, on top of the emissions created when the coal is burned overseas.

The Safeguard Mechanism – Australia’s primary policy for controlling emissions from its biggest polluters – simply won’t survive many more of these super-emitting coal projects. And yet, the approvals keep coming.

The Albanese government seems to be suffering from a split personality disorder on climate. On the one hand, Australia is racing to build out renewables faster than any other country per capita. On the other hand, it’s racing to approve more coal mines faster than any other country as well. These contradictions raise serious questions about whether Australia can call itself a climate leader.

Take the Lake Vermont Meadowbrook coal mine extension, one of the projects approved last week. It alone could emit an additional 3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually by 2030 – equivalent to nearly 6 per cent of Australia’s remaining emissions budget under its Safeguard Mechanism.

In approving these mines, the Albanese government has justified its decisions by pointing out that much of the coal will be used for steelmaking, rather than electricity. But this distinction doesn’t erase the impact.

Digging up carbon that has been securely stored underground for millions of years – whether for power plants or steel mills – is the exact opposite of what we need to do to address the climate crisis.

If you think about it, fossil fuels are the world’s greatest carbon capture and storage programme – millions of years in the making. Burning them is like running that program in reverse, releasing not only carbon dioxide but also methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas.

For coal, you start with an ancient swamp forest. It’s constantly churning through the cycle of life, soaking up carbon dioxide and dropping leaves and branches to the ground. Those branches are then covered in layers of hot mud, broken down and over millions of years of heat and pressure slowly transform into seams of coal that over hundreds of millions of years shape the Earth’s crust like the cross-section of a caramel fudge wedding cake.

But instead of marvelling at that endless, ancient carbon cycle, effortlessly doing exactly what we so desperately need to be doing more of, according to the International Energy Agency’s latest coal report, we’re still addicted to the steam-powered money train it fuels.

Even as we effectively celebrated the end of coal in the UK this year, the rest of the world has dug up and burned more coal than ever before. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the rate of growth is slowing, and electricity access has expanded dramatically. While coal demand may have grown by 1 per cent this year, electricity demand grew by more than four times that rate. In Europe, that’s been the case for years now, and the transition away from coal has clearly turned a corner. Coal-powered generation fell by 23 per cent last year, and this year it may have dropped another 12 per cent again.

In Asia, it’s a lot more complicated. The region is home to over half the world’s renewable energy generation, which has helped power incredible increases in electricity demand, making up 90 per cent of the world’s electricity demand growth over the last eight years. But it’s also home to 82 per cent of the world’s coal power. While Japan and Korea seem to be ever-so-slowly turning away from it; increases in China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam are continuing to drive global growth.

This growth is being used to justify coal mining expansions in my home country of Australia, where the four metallurgical coal mines were granted extensions only months ahead of a pivotal national election. Climate has now been pushed to the back burner.

While it is true the government justified these extensions based on the fact that their coal is used to make steel, and not burned for power; what is also true is that when you dig up carbon that has been securely stored underground through a process that can take millions of years to perfect, you not only release tonnes of methane and carbon dioxide, you also make reaching that geological net zero that much harder to achieve.

The world dug up close to 9 billion tonnes of coal this year. If we are to reach geological net zero, that’s an enormous amount of carbon we’ll have to learn how to put back underground.