Rising Tide Australia

Coal trains have begun to creep slowly back into the port of Newcastle, after the Hunter Region's world-beating export coal chain was crippled by freak weather. It is a good time for us all to be asking some questions: did coal exports contribute to the storm in the first place, and if so, haven't they done enough damage?

We are now about as sure that human greenhouse pollution is destabilising the world's climate, as we are that the theory of evolution is correct. However, a climate scientist who wants to keep her credibility is unlikely to tell you that any one weather event has been caused by anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. You will have trouble finding a scientist to tell you that Hurricane Katrina was caused be global warming, or that the chaotic weather that battered the east coast of NSW this June was due to the burning of coal and oil.

Here's what they will tell you though. Extreme weather events – such as floods, hurricanes, droughts, and storms – are increasing in frequency and severity around the world. The more greenhouse pollution that we pump into the atmosphere, the worse it will get. Not only that, but we are approaching a threshold point of global warming, beyond which climate change becomes self-reinforcing, and there may be nothing we can do to avoid catastrophe. If we want to avoid this threshold, we need to turn around global growth in greenhouse pollution as quickly as possible, and start making wholesale reductions.

Achieving wholesale reductions in greenhouse pollution can only be done by making equally wholesale reductions in fossil fuel consumption.

So as the Hunter Valley coal chain swings back into gear, let's all keep in mind that returning to business-as-usual will directly contribute to climate change, which will mean more freak weather events in the future.

But the problem is worse than that. Coal companies are not content simply to resume exporting coal at pre-storm levels. They, along with both major political parties and the coal miner's union, are campaigning to massively increase coal-mining in NSW and coal exports from Newcastle, further increasing our already grossly disproportionate contribution to global warming.

These plans are reckless at best, and at worst they show contempt for human and non-human life. We know that increasing coal exports will fuel further disruptions to the global climate. We know that it will mean more droughts, more floods, more heatwaves, more fires, and more lives lost to climate chaos.

On approving the 10.5 million tonne Anvil Hill coal mine near Denman a few weeks ago, the NSW Planning Minister Frank Sartor chose to ignore the “idealogical” climate change concerns of thousands of members of the public who made submission against the mine. Instead, he said that the mine would be worth $9 billion.

Leaving aside an obvious question – who gets the $9 billion – how logical is it to expand our coal industry because there is money to be made? To explore this question, I could quote figures from Nicholas Stern on the economic costs of climate change. I could find figures on how much damage the recent storm did, and countless other extreme weather events around the world, and we could try to tally up the costs and the benefits of coal mining to see who wins. But that is not the concern here. If the impacts of climate change were restricted to the economic, I would find another issue to campaign on. To compare the economic costs of climate change with the economic benefits of fossil fuel exploitation is callous and inhuman.

We can't put a monetary value on human life, or on the suffering endured by people who lose their homes, even their homelands, due to the effects of climate change. We can't put a price tag on the millions of species on earth that are under threat due to global warming. It is simply immoral.

We are faced with a choice: do we carry on with business-as-usual when we know it is costing lives? Or can we find the courage to kick the coal habit, and reinvent a future for ourselves that doesn't threaten us and every other living thing on the planet.