Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum Australian coal mine blocked over climate impact

One of Australia's environment courts has ruled against the country's largest independent coal producer, saying that its assessment of the impacts of a new mine should have included an assessment of its impact on climate change.

The campaign group Greenpeace has called the ruling "historic". Greenpeace has been demonstrating against the proposal of the Centennial Coal Company to build a new mine in New South Wales.

Justice Nicola Pain ruled on Monday that the environmental assessment, previously approved by the government, was void. She cited "a sufficiently proximate link" between coal mining and greenhouse gas emissions for the latter to be considered in the mine's assessment.

The case was brought by 26-year old student Peter Gray, who sued Centennial Coal and the New South Wales Department of Planning.

Gray argued that approval of the Anvil Hill mine should take into account the impact the mine would have on climate change, including emissions caused when the coal is burned later in foreign countries.

Source:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10709-australian-coal-mine-blocked-over-climate-impact.html

The implications are immense. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how long this decision stands?

A token gesture, at best, but better than doing squat. Coal is ubiquitous, somebody else, in a Third World Country, will pull it out of the ground. What's really crazy is that we have the technology to clean the emmissions. In the early '70's China was building water traps that captured the particulate. The resulting sludge was used as fertilizer ofr flower gardens. Too toxic to be used in food crops. The drawback? They needed enormous settling ponds.

When I opened this, I thought it was dealing with the immediate impact on the Environment of NSW, a lovely place, BTW. When I was travelling through Java I accompanied some jounalists from germany who were visiting an open pit Diamond Mine. You needed a special Government Permit to get inside. It was like something from Dante's Inferno. a HUGE hole in the ground with THOUSANDS of little Indonesian men each carrying a sack of mud from the bottom to the top. We weren't allowed to take our cameras inside and to this day, I don't have words to describe it. They had trails carved along the sides of the excavation and everybody followed these zig-zagging up, dumping the mud, then going back down. There was NO talk of "Environment" back then.

My unpopular view is that sometimes judges or "Justices" are a weak link politician effort.

In many ways it is easier to become a Judge than a member of the congress. First of all a past history as a Judege is not fully available to the public. Sceondly there is no public confronatation as there is in a political race. Most Judges positions do not require them to answer to any body and they get to keep the job when they are wrong- no matter how much damage they may have done.

Justice Pain may be right on but knowing how evidence can be presented and aimed at a particular result, I think that issue, for the fairness to the investors, should have made its way through a panel of serious informed academics in the required fields. Just me.

I tried to edit my post to include a comment based on my further review of what she did.

She has decided that the study for the mines approval should require an enviormental impact report. The issue seems to be confused between the effect of the MINING on the enviorment and the effect of the use of fossil fuels that will result from the mining. A costly delay that to me appears to be mis-directed.
jjw

I'm going to somewhat disingenuously take a position here I don't entirely agree with:

Three cheers for the judge. Every action that raises the cost of fossil fuels. Every action that slows down the delivery of new fossil fuel energy sources. Every decision that makes it more painful to mine the earth for energy as has been done for the last century ... Only makes so-called green energy sources such as wind and solar energy that much more likely to be cost competitive. And why shouldn't the coal company, or its customers, be financially responsible for the entire impact of the commodity the produce and use?

Capitalism only works when one takes away tax-payer subsidies. Go capitalism!

Hi DA:

It all sounds good to me.

Why do we give people news coverage because they are cold?
Why do we keep bitching about foriegn dependency on energy?
Why don't the Green Peace people come up with more than complaints and never have any solutions?

Utopia is not around the corner and people that tie themselves to trees would do better planting trees. If we will not be real in our search for balances then we accomplish zilch.
So.. do not burn coal, burn trees instead. Real progress.

jjw