When we burn coal we change the biosphere. As James Hansen says, ‘if
we burned all of the coal in the ground, the planet is cooked. It would
result in temperature rise of several degrees and sea level rise of tens
of metres.’ So do we continue down that road, or change? There are
encouraging signs, with the price of renewable energy falling. But there
is vast investment in coal. Mining companies are looking to increase
production. Tom Morton visits Germany, India and northern NSW where
plans are underway for new and bigger coal mines. Local people are
fighting back, to save their traditional lands, their ancient villages,
animal corridors and rich agricultural lands, all of which are
threatened by the ongoing march of coal.
Reporter: Tom Morton
Production: David Fisher, Tom Morton
Technical production: Judy Rapley
Original music: Stuart Brown
Researcher: Emma Lancaster
Additional recordings: Manuel Waltz
Additional Research: Areeb Hashmi, Kanchi Kohli, Manju Menon, Katja Müller, Rebecca Pearse
Readings: Stephen Adams, Eurydice Aroney, Mark Don, Joe Gelonesi, Christoph Kaufmann, Colin Moody, Timothy Nicastri, Shiv Palekar, Edmond Roy, Steven Tilley,
ABC Archivist: Sabrina Lipovic
ARC research project investigators: University of Technology Sydney: James
Goodman, Devleena Ghosh, Tom Morton, Jon Marshall; University of Sydney: Linda Connor,Stuart Rosewarne. External Partner Investigators: Ortwin Renn, Dipesh Chakrabarty
Research and travel funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant “The Coal Rush and Beyond”.
Additional funding: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
Reporter: Tom Morton
Production: David Fisher, Tom Morton
Technical production: Judy Rapley
Original music: Stuart Brown
Researcher: Emma Lancaster
Additional recordings: Manuel Waltz
Additional Research: Areeb Hashmi, Kanchi Kohli, Manju Menon, Katja Müller, Rebecca Pearse
Readings: Stephen Adams, Eurydice Aroney, Mark Don, Joe Gelonesi, Christoph Kaufmann, Colin Moody, Timothy Nicastri, Shiv Palekar, Edmond Roy, Steven Tilley,
ABC Archivist: Sabrina Lipovic
ARC research project investigators: University of Technology Sydney: James
Goodman, Devleena Ghosh, Tom Morton, Jon Marshall; University of Sydney: Linda Connor,Stuart Rosewarne. External Partner Investigators: Ortwin Renn, Dipesh Chakrabarty
Research and travel funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant “The Coal Rush and Beyond”.
Additional funding: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
Transcript
Robyn Williams: Coal. It is the bedrock of civilisation. My father was a coalminer in South Wales who went down the pit to labour in the dark all day when he was just 14. That was back in 1919, nearly 100 years ago. He was immensely proud of the mining tradition. George Orwell put it this way in The Road to Wigan Pier:
“In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the Nancy poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal’...”
In this three-part Science Show series, “Beyond the Coal Rush”, Tom Morton, of the University of Technology Sydney, reports on the massive changes taking place in the energy industry all over the world.
Tom Morton: I'm standing on the edge of a field in a village in Eastern Germany, listening to the church bells chime noon. The field belongs to Ulli Schulz, who's a local farmer. His family have farmed land here in the village of Atterwasch for more than 500 years. It's August 2014, and the maize harvest is just in, so we're looking out over a field of bare stubble.
Ulli tells me a bit about the history of the bells. The youngest was cast in 1990, to replace a bell which was melted down to make gun barrels in the First World War. But the oldest bell on the church tower dates back to 1464. Ulli says it rang at the time of the Thirty Years War to warn the people of Atterwasch that the invading Swedish armies were marching towards their village.
If you're wondering what all this has got to do with coal, well, quite a lot actually.
Ulli Schulz and his fellow villagers are facing another kind of Swedish invasion. The Swedish company Vattenfall wants to demolish the village of Atterwasch and two others nearby to make way for a coal mine. If the mine goes ahead, his farm, the church, the homes of the people who live here, and a large area of surrounding woodland will be swallowed up.
We'll ring the bells again if the Swedes come, says Ulli, but he's only half-joking.
Over the last three years, together with a group of researchers from Australia, Germany and India, I’ve been documenting these local struggles against coal mining, and how they’re connected to global debates about coal’s contribution to climate change. Out project is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. We’ve followed a conflict between tribal people in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, and the mining giant Adani, the same company which wants to mine here in Australia's Galilee Basin. It’s a conflict which has gone all the way to India’s Supreme Court.
We’ve explored the clash in eastern Germany between the coal industry, and villagers with solar panels on their roofs, and wind turbines turning over their fields.
And closer to home in northern NSW, we’ve watched the battle between Chinese company Shenhua, the world’s largest coal producer and farmers on the black soil of the Liverpool Plains.
John Hamparsum: This is about dining versus mining.
Tom Morton: What we’ve discovered is an unfolding process, where tentatively, sometimes reluctantly, these local communities are joining forces with environmental organisation, campaigning for climate action.
Andrew Pursehouse: Well, it’s something we haven’t done too much before, as farmers we’re pretty uncomfortable with that arrangement, but we’ve got to defend our right here. We’ve got to defend the future of farming, in country like this. And I’ve said many times before, we’ll do whatever it takes.
Tom Morton: There’s a global contest underway over the future of coal. And the stakes in that contest, could not be higher.
Barack Obama: The growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.
James Hansen: Coal is the biggest contributor to changes in the atmospheric greenhouse gases and therefore to changes in climate.
Barack Obama: This summer I saw the effects of climate change first hand in our northernmost state, Alaska, where the sea is already swallowing villages and eroding shorelines, where permafrost thaws and the tundra burns, where glaciers are melting at a pace unprecedented in modern times.
Tom Morton: President Barack Obama, speaking at the Paris climate summit last year.
What we do - or don't do - with coal over the next 20 years will determine not just how we humans live on the planet for generations to come, it will shape the future of the biosphere itself.
James Hansen: We have to phase out coal, that is crystal clear. We just look at how much CO2 there is in the coal that is in the ground, and if we burned all of the coal in the ground, the planet is cooked. It would result in global warming of several degrees, sea level rise of tens of metres. We just can't do that.
Tom Morton: James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and now Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's Earth Institute.
At the Paris summit, nearly 200 world leaders agreed on a common goal: limiting average global warming to less than 2 degrees. But to keep within that 2-degree limit, more than 80% of the world's coal cannot be burnt. In other words, we have to leave it in the ground.
Paul Ekins: Well, it's pretty stark. Some 82% of the world's coal reserves, some 50% of gas, and about a third of oil.
Tom Morton: Professor Paul Ekins of University College London. Those stark figures are the culmination of ten years of research funded by the UK Energy Research Centre, and published last year in Nature.
Paul Ekins and his colleague Christophe McGlade constructed a model of the world's energy system, how much energy the entire world's population will need from now to 2050.
Paul Ekins: How many billion vehicle-kilometres will they want to travel, how many terawatt hours will they want to use in terms of electricity.
Tom Morton: They factored in population growth, GDP, and even projected improvements in energy efficiency. And they matched those energy needs against a carbon budget, the total amount of carbon dioxide humanity can emit if we want to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees. The size of that carbon budget might make your head spin. It certainly did mine: 1,000 gigatonnes of CO2.
Paul Ekins: Well, 1,000 gigatonnes is 1,000 billion tonnes, it's a big number. It comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, their most recent assessment report. And they looked at all the global climate models and the emissions of CO2 which those global climate models suggest will allow the world's average global temperature increase to be limited to 2 degrees.
Tom Morton: Now you might be thinking, whoopee, we've got a budget of 1,000 billion tonnes of CO2, let's burn, burn, burn! But the reality is much more sobering.
Paul Ekins: 82% of the world's coal reserves have to stay in the ground, and I have to say that that was our scenario even when we were using carbon capture and storage up to 2050. If you don't use carbon capture and storage, 88% of the world's coal was going to stay unburnt. Those figures are very stark and they do represent we believe pretty realistically the challenge that faces governments and world leaders when they sign up to the Paris agreement, which of course they all did with great fanfare in December. These are the kinds of implications which they must be prepared to face.
Tom Morton: Professor Paul Ekins, of University College London.
Narendra Modi: Democratic India must grow rapidly to meet the aspirations of 1.25 billion people, 300 million of whom are without access to energy.
Tom Morton: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking at the Paris climate summit last year. Mr Modi told the representatives of 196 nations assembled at the summit that 'in the 21st century, the world must turn to the Sun'. He launched a Global Solar Alliance to drive the uptake of solar energy in the developing world.
But Mr Modi also delivered a pointed message to the rich developed nations.
Narendra Modi: The prosperous still have a strong carbon footprint. And, the world's billions at the bottom of the development ladder are seeking space to grow.
Tom Morton: The developing world, said Mr Modi, is 'seeking carbon space to grow'. That's code for 'we need to burn more coal'. More than 60% of India's electricity comes from coal. And the black stuff is so important, it even has its own government ministry, which I visited in Delhi earlier this year.
Anil Swarup: My name is Anil Swarup. I am Secretary, Ministry of Coal, government of India. The reason why a separate ministry was constituted in the early '70s was because of the role that coal plays in the Indian economy. Given the amount of coal that is used for generation of power increasingly, it was felt that there should be separate ministry to see that coal grows in India.
Tom Morton: Anil Swarup is coal's Mr Fixit in India, He's a dapper career public servant who's active on Twitter, talking up his plans to boost production at Coal India, the country's state-owned coal colossus.
Anil Swarup: Indeed we are planning to double the capacity of Coal India from almost 500 million tonnes last year to a billion tonnes in the next five years.
Tom Morton: That's extraordinary. A billion tonnes of coal a year.
Anil Swarup: Indeed. We don't have any other option. Presently per capita consumption of energy in India is at the level of late 19th and early 20th century US. So, if you're going to be called a developed nation, that will be requiring a lot of power. Until a viable alternative becomes available, we'll continue to bank on coal. It's not by choice, it's by compulsion. There is no other option but to bank on coal.
Tom Morton: Anil Swarup, Secretary of India's Ministry of Coal.
Excerpt from The Road to Wigan Pier: Our civilisation is founded on coal. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported. — George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.
Tom Morton: Coal made the modern world. The whole vast edifice of industrial civilisation, the power and prosperity of the West, were built on coal. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that developing countries like India want a piece of the carbon action.
Jairam Ramesh: Right now we are 1.25 billion and we'll be 1.7 billion by the year 2050. Given our demographic pressures, given the fact that we have to grow at about 7.5% to 8% per year, India will need to at least double its coal consumption in the next 15 years. There's no escaping that. That's what I call the cruel coal conundrum as far as India is concerned.
Tom Morton: India's former Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh. Not just India but the whole world faces a cruel coal conundrum. How to meet the aspirations of billions of the global poor without cooking the planet. So is there a way out of this dilemma? Can we imagine a future beyond coal?
After two years of research in three different countries, I think the answer's to be found not just at the dizzy heights of global climate policy, but close to the ground, where people confront coal and coal mining in their everyday lives.
Let's go to Germany. You might be surprised to learn that this world leader in renewable energy has a dirty secret.
Falk Hermenau: Hello, I'm Falk Hermenau, I'm from a small town near Berlin called Cottbus, and around our area, it's called Lusatia, Lausitz, this is how we call it, and around my home town are currently five open lignite mines, open pit mines or open cast mines, whatever you call it, and the plans are to open up five new plants.
Tom Morton: It's a sunny Saturday morning in late August 2014 in the village of Kerkwitz, in the East German region of Lusatia—die Lausitz—close to the Polish border.
The string quartet is made up of local people from Kerkwitz and the neighbouring villages of Atterwasch and Grabko. But if you think they're the entertainment for the village fete, think again. They're actually the warm-up act for a pan-European protest action.
The Swedish company Vattenfall, which owns a number of coal mines and power plants here in Lusatia, wants to dramatically expand its mining operations.
Falk Hermenau: The area where we are now, near Kerkwitz, there are three villages affected - Kerkwitz, Grabko and Atterwasch - and the mine is supposed to be called Jaenschwalde Nord
Tom Morton: Vattenfall plans to mine 200 million tonnes of brown coal at its Jaenschwalde North mine over the next 20 years. If the mine goes ahead, Kerkwitz, Grabko and Atterwasch and a large tract of surrounding forest will vanish from the face of the Earth.
Falk Hermenau: So we decided to make a real big call for help and called all the different organisations, like Greenpeace, like Friends of the Earth.
Tom Morton: Falk Hermenau has travelled around the world taking part in anti-coal protests, including one in Australia. But now he's come home to Lusatia to lend a hand. Later this morning, local people from the villages facing demolition will join hands with supporters from all over Europe to form a human chain seven kilometres long, from here in Kerkwitz across the border to the village of Grabice in Poland.
Falk Hermenau: We didn't want to make it only a local issue, we wanted to make it like a global issue because mining is the worst thing that we can do to this area here and the worst thing we can do in terms of climate change.
Tom Morton: So we are walking to the human chain now, and I'm walking with a group of activists who have come from all over Europe and beyond to come here. There are people here from Serbia, from Russia, from Poland…
Kuba Gogolewski: I'm Kuba Gogolewski, I'm of Polish origin, I work for an organisation, CEE Bankwatch Network, a network of 16 organisations from Central and Eastern Europe.
Tom Morton: So how did you get involved in this whole issue in the first place, what got you involved with coal?
Kuba Gogolewski: It's a funny story, I was in India as a volunteer in a fundraiser for Greenpeace, and when I was there talking about climate, the first thing…'But isn't Belchatov in Poland, and isn't it the source of the biggest emissions in Europe? And so why are you here?'
Tom Morton: Belchartov is a town in Central Poland. It has the largest brown coal fired power plant in Europe, which is also the biggest emitter of CO2 of any power plant in Europe. So what Kuba's colleagues at Greenpeace in India were saying was instead of lecturing us about climate change, shouldn't you be paying more attention to what's going on in your own backyard?
Kuba decided to return to Poland.
Kuba Gogolewski: I started doing research for one organisation on the Polish energy sector, and the deeper I got the more scary it got. Poland is a very coal dependent country, currently it's around 86%, 88% of our electricity comes from coal, meaning lignite and hard coal together.
Tom Morton: So here we are at the river's edge, people are actually standing here in the water. Okay, they're ringing the bell for the start of the human chain.
Kuba Gogolewski: It's a unique thing in Europe between Poland and Germany, they had been warring not so far ago, and the unique way of showing that people on the ground can find their language much more or much sooner and come together and show solidarity than a lot of time states can do.
Tom Morton: The symbolic climax of the human chain is just about to happen, when Kuba, a Pole, and Julia, his German wife, join hands in the middle of the river.
Okay, so Kuba is going over to the Polish side, I'm here in the water with Julia. Julia, maybe this is a good time to ask you, we don't usually think of coal as being very romantic, but was it coal that brought the two of you together?
Julia Huscher: Yes Tom, we have both been working on a report together, and this work has turned out to be so intense that we fell in love over this report.
Tom Morton: And where were you living before Brussels?
Julia Huscher: I'm originally from a region in the east that is close to the Czech border, so I actually grew up with a lot of air pollution, both from coal power plants and also from burning coal in homes, which is still a problem in many European countries.
Tom Morton: And what is your work?
Julia Huscher: So my work is to highlight the health dimension of coal. So we try to raise awareness of how much energy policy is linked to our health and how much we are actually at the moment paying for the electricity from coal with people's health.
Tom Morton: I'll let you in on something here; Julia and Kuba are, as the Germans say, of good hope.
Julia Huscher: I'm sure this is something that I'm going to tell my child over and over again, that when I was five months pregnant I was standing in this river in the cold water to close a chain of hands.
Tom Morton: Now the lovers can be reunited in the middle of the river. How does it feel?
Kuba Gogolewski: It was always splendid, so the river doesn't change it at all.
Tom Morton: Julia?
Julia Huscher: I feel so overwhelmed by this successful action of human chain, that I am a part of this when most of my life I am feeling now already very connected to Poland, through all the links that I've made through friends and family, and now I am really physically linked into the country. So it's an incredible feeling, I have to say.
Tom Morton: Yes, it's going to be a German-Polish baby. Are they just cheering because that man has taken his trousers off, or…?
Julia Huscher: I think it's the end of the chain.
Tom Morton: You might be thinking at this point, hang on a moment, what's all this talk about coal mines? Isn't Germany supposed to be a paragon of renewable energy?
Well, yes...
Markus Steigenberger: The energy transition, the famous Energiewende in Germany, is basically the transition of an energy system almost entirely based on fossil and nuclear sources to 80% and more renewable sources. In the year 1990 we had 95% of the German electricity coming from fossil and nuclear sources. In the year 2050 nuclear will be phased out, that's going to be phased out much earlier, in the year 2022, and the energy system will be 80% renewables. This transition from fossil and nuclear to renewables is what we call the Energiewende.
Tom Morton: Markus Steigenberger from Agora Energiewende.
The German energy transition, or Energiewende, has been building ever since the 1990s, but in 2011 it took a decisive new turn, driven by events on the far side of the world.
News report: The Fukushima nuclear disaster has moved up the ladder from the third worst civilian nuclear accident in history to the second, now behind only Chernobyl. With explosions at three of the plant's reactors and now a fire in spent fuel at reactor number four, it's now a good deal worse than the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster.
Tom Morton: Just a few days after the explosions in the Fukushima reactor, German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the catastrophe as apocalyptic. Merkel's Christian Democrat party had previously supported nuclear energy. But Merkel, who has a degree in physics, declared, 'The risks of nuclear energy are insurmountable.' Those words spelt the death knell for Germany's civilian nuclear industry. In June 2011 the German parliament passed laws decreeing that all nuclear power plants would be closed down by 2022.
Markus Steigenberger: The significance of what happened in 2011 is that from that moment people understood that, okay, this is not stopping anymore. So there is a basic consensus in the German society that we are doing this energy transition, regardless of what government is in power. And that was for many people, but also companies, that was the decisive moment when they understood, okay, so that's not going to stop. It was a shift of mindset that took place, that people now started to really think about solutions and many people stopped to try to block the developments.
Tom Morton: The German energy transition is a massive social experiment. It seems to be working. 30% of Germany's electricity already comes from renewables, mostly wind and solar. But there's a perverse paradox at the heart of the German energy transition.
Claudia Kemfert: On the one hand we have an increased share of renewable energy, the emissions are going down from this side, but on the other we still have a very high share of coal, which is approximately 45% still.
Tom Morton: Claudia Kemfert, head of the department of energy, transportation and environment at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin.
Germany's energy transition has a dirty secret: the only energy source that's still cheaper than renewables is brown coal. Coal's share of electricity generation actually grew after the energy transition laws were passed. That means it's still profitable for companies like Vattenfall to burn brown coal in their power plants, like their Jaenschwalde power plant in Lusatia, one of the five biggest emitters in Europe.
Claudia Kemfert: So we need…after the nuclear phase-out also a coal phase-out, but that's not as easy as it sounds. We are not constructing new coal-fired power plants because this is a stranded investment, nobody will do it, but we still have a large number of coal-fired power plants, and we have very old ones which are older than 50 years and they are still in place, and they are still running, and this doesn't make sense.
Tom Morton: Matthias Berndt, we are sitting here in your garden just outside the church and the rectory here, and I just said to you that we could see the German energy transformation from your back garden and I was actually referring to the windmills that we can see turning over the tops of the trees there. But then you said, well yes, we could see the energy transformation, but actually we could also see something else that's the opposite of the energy transformation. What did you mean by that?
Matthias Berndt: [Translation] All around us there are green meadows and woods with lots of old trees in them, and little valleys with streams running through them. You could easily jump to the conclusion that everyone would be trying to preserve this beautiful landscape and promoting renewable energy, but unfortunately you'd be wrong.
Tom Morton: Matthias Berndt, Protestant pastor in the village of Atterwasch. I ran into Matthias at the human chain protest, and now I'm drinking coffee in his front garden.
Matthias Berndt: [Translation] The plan is to open up an open cut brown coal mine right here, 50 metres from where we are sitting. The mine would swallow up this village and go all the way to the River Neisse, that's about seven kilometres from here. The lake would vanish, the woods would vanish, and nothing more would grow here for 100 years or more. It would mean that the church here, which is 800 years old, would be blown up and destroyed. The lives people have been living here would be overturned, they'd be torn out by the roots. And we know that when you cut off people's roots you also cut off their future.
Tom Morton: One man with very deep roots here in Atterwasch is Ulli Schulz. His family has been farming here for 500 years, since the time of the Thirty Years War. Ulli's father, who is now 88, ran the farm before him, and his son is following in his footsteps.
Ulli Schulz: [Translation] They grow crops, mostly for feed, and they breed cattle, pigs and chickens. Alongside the barn is a biogas plant which generates 160 kilowatts of electricity and heats the poultry pens in winter.
Tom Morton: What does the prospect of the new coal mines mean for you and for this farm?
Ulli Schulz: [Translation] Well, it's a sword of Damocles that has been hanging over us for a while. The whole farm is sitting on top of a coal seam. If the mine goes ahead, where we are standing will be a gaping hole, just like the hole that already exists a couple of kilometres from here. The whole of the farm wouldn't be destroyed, only half of it, but half is enough. What it would mean for us financially, I don't even want to think about. What it would mean for our morale? Well, it would just be a disaster.
Tony Abbott (archival): This is a sign of hope and confidence in the future of the coal industry. Coal is good for humanity. Coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia and right around the world.
Tom Morton: Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
The first decade of this century saw a new coal rush.
News report (arhival): Over the past five years, coal exports have surged 17% nationally to 240 million tonnes a year, worth $23 billion to the national economy.
Tom Morton: World coal consumption grew by more than 70% between 2000 and 2013. Coal prices soared, and so did investment in new coal mines, here in Australia and around the world.
Benjamin Sporton: A lot of what we saw in the early part of this century was very much driven by China. Coal is a fuel that is affordable, it's reliable, and it's easily accessible for many countries, and so all of those things were also true in China.
Tom Morton: Benjamin Sporton, CEO of the World Coal Association, speaking to me from London. The World Coal Association represents major coal producers, including BHP Billiton, Anglo American, Peabody Energy and the Chinese company, Shenhua.
Benjamin Sporton: China's economy was growing quite substantially and they were achieving huge things in terms of reducing poverty, growing their economy. 600 million people were lifted out of poverty in China in the last couple of decades. So a lot of that has been driven by coal. They need coal to help them build up the infrastructure that helps their economies grow.
Tom Morton: In 2008, at the height of the coal boom, the state-owned Chinese company Shenhua paid $300 million for a licence to explore for coal on the Liverpool Plains, in north-western NSW.
Almost immediately, there were protests:
News report (archival): Two forces were at work today; those on the land who want to safeguard the alluvial soil and the watercourses above and below the ground, and those attending the Gunnedah coal basin conference who want to tear the soil up or undermine it and its water for coal. And with open cut on a huge scale right down the Hunter Valley, the meeting also called for a stop to the granting of exploration permits.
Protester: Exploration is the first stage in mining, and this is where you mustn't be conned by the mining companies or indeed the government.
Tom Morton: Getting the final approval to actually start digging can be a long, slow process. Both State and Federal governments have to have their say. I first visited the Liverpool Plains in February 2015, seven years after Shenhua got the exploration licence. The NSW Planning Assessment Commission, or PAC, had just given Shenhua the green light, and farmers on the Liverpool Plains were spoiling for a fight.
Andrew Pursehouse: I won't keep you too long, it's pretty hot out there, but it's a great roll-up today, it's a great honour for any of the farmers that are here to join the traditional people in this fight. We fought the Second World War together, and we're going to fight this one together too.
Tom Morton: I'm at a protest rally outside the offices of Shenhua in Gunnedah NSW. There are 150, maybe 200 people here. The rally has been organised by local Gomeroi Aboriginal traditional owners. They are angry that grinding grooves of cultural significance on rocks on the projected mine site will be moved if the mine goes ahead.
For the Gomeroi and local farmers like Andrew Pursehouse, who's speaking at the moment, it's crunch time. The final signoff has to come from the Federal Environment Minister, and that could be any day.
Andrew Pursehouse: Mr Hunt, the Environment Minister, who will get the tick-off, will come to the region at the end of this month…
These farms will produce agricultural products, food and fibre, for hundreds and hundreds of years ahead. When a mine comes in here and destroys the aquifer network and pollutes the land, we've got nothing after that.
Tom Morton: Andrew Pursehouse likes to joke that he shares three boundary fences with the Chinese government; his property abuts land that's been bought up by Shenhua.
Andrew's family have been farming here at Breeza Station on the Liverpool Plains for more than 30 years. His father was treasurer of the local branch of the National Party.
Before this all happened and before you became involved in the coal action group and trying to raise awareness about the impacts of the mine, were you the sort of person that was involved in activism of this kind?
Andrew Pursehouse: Never and I think I expect for any farmer on the Liverpool Plains, we are not against mining, we are a primary industry as well. We produce export dollars, it's no different to mining. But this is just the wrong place for a mine, you just don't put a mine in a food bowl.
John Hamparsum: I'm John Hamparsum. I've a second-generation farmer on the Breeza Plains of New South Wales and we've owned this farm since 1961.
Tom Morton: John, we're looking out across a small lake here, out towards a ridge. Could you just describe the scene and tell us what we're looking at?
John Hamparsum: Okay, we're actually standing on a floodplain here. This is the black soil floodplains, the Liverpool Plains. The black soils were brought down through the floods and we're looking out across a dam here and then the floodplain, out across to the ridge, which is going to be mined by Shenhua. The ridge is around about 50 metres above the floodplain and where we're standing on this floodplain, if we go down below us, around about 20 metres, we have water. These aquifers are highly productive for irrigation. Our concern of course is if the mine, which is going to be 300 metres deep on that 50-metre high ridge, it will be around about 220 metres below our aquifers.
Tom Morton: The Liverpool Plains are some of the richest farmland in Australia. In 2014, agricultural production here was worth $2.4 billion.
John Hamparsum: With our wheat, a lot of that goes domestically into pasta production. A lot of it gets exported because of the high quality of our durum, it goes to Italy and goes into premium pasta manufacturing. Our bread wheats go mostly into local bread or flour making. Our sunflowers, these ones that are just over here that you can see, they'll be harvested and they'll be taken up to Narrabri where they'll be crushed into oil. And the sorghum, there's a new market opened up in China where they're making whiskey out of sorghum. I think it's called Baijiu. It's going all over the place. It's feeding the world.
Tom Morton: Would it be fair to say then that basically this is about mining versus agribusiness?
John Hamparsum: No, I think this is about dining versus mining. It's about being able to produce food forever. Now, that mine over there is going to operate for 30 years. When it goes, after it's basically ripped out what they want and gone, what will it produce?
Tom Morton: Just looking down at the ground here, just kicking the dirt a bit, this ground here, this black soil is famous. What is it about this soil?
John Hamparsum: The reason these soils are so fertile is the black soil alone is great but then you've got water with it. These soils are self-ameliorating in that they swell when they get wet and they shrink when they dry, so you get the cracking. That goes down to more than a metre and a half. Actually, they heal themselves in wet and dry times. The fertility of the soil is incredible. We can't do it on radio but I could pick up that soil and let you smell it and you'd smell humus. It would smell like somebody's really good compost, and that's these soils.
Alan Jones: Now, the picture you saw there was of the Liverpool Plains. This is soil that you could eat. An approval has been given for a Chinese outfit Shenhua, who've bought up farms all over the place, to mine, and these farmers are defenceless…
Tom Morton: Broadcaster Alan Jones on the ABC-TV's Q&A. Well, if it's good enough for Alan, it's good enough for me...
John Hamparsum: Have a pinch, not too much. You're not used to it! You'll grow two foot!
Tom Morton: Look, I must say it's been a long time since I've eaten dirt, John, but…
John Hamparsum: It's enjoyable, it's good for your stomach too, by the way. But as Alan Jones said, you can eat this dirt, and he's right. This soil is so fertile, and there's only a few pockets of it in the world. And what right have we got to put this at risk?
Tom Morton: Shenhua have consistently maintained that they're not going to be touching the black soil here. They're going to be mining up on that ridge over there, and that consequently the mine and farming on the black soil plains here can co-exist. That was an argument that was accepted by the PAC. What's your response to that?
John Hamparsum: I guess there's a number of points to that. First of all, the Namoi Water Study that was done and completed by Schlumberger Water Services as an independent expert scientist has indicated in their report there are massive gaps in knowledge about the interconnectivity of the fractured rock or ridge water and the alluvial ground water which is where we are now. We know that that science hasn't been done.
News report: The Federal Environment Minister says he stopped the clock on the controversial Shenhua Watermark coal project in the state's north-west to seek further advice. Greg Hunt says he has referred the project to the best water experts in the country, to ensure the proposed open cut coal mine won't damage water resources on the Liverpool Plains.
Tom Morton: In late February 2015 with the state election looming and fierce attacks coming from Alan Jones, Greg Hunt gave the Liverpool Plains a reprieve.
Greg Hunt: It was the right thing to do to get the best science because you never take risks with water, with the future, not just for children and grandchildren but for centuries hence.
Tom Morton: It seemed as though the farmers and their Gomeroi allies had won a small victory. But Andrew Pursehouse was keeping his powder dry. If the minister's final decision is to approve the mine, he told me, then bring it on.
Andrew Pursehouse: The community is not afraid to fight. And if you see the blockades that are occurring and the issues that are occurring with the Whitehaven mine at Maules Creek and you've seen and heard of the blockades in the Pilliga, you have seen nothing as to what will happen on the Liverpool Plains.
Tom Morton: Let's cast our minds back for a moment to those stark figures we heard earlier about how much of the world's coal has to stay in the ground unburnt if we are to keep global temperature rise below two degrees.
Paul Ekins: 82% of the world's coal reserves have to stay in the ground, and I have to say that that was our scenario even when we were using carbon capture and storage. If you don’t use carbon capture and storage, 88% of the world’s coal.
Tom Morton: How much of Australia's coal is unburnable?
Paul Ekins: It's 93%, so that's a very high proportion indeed. So only 7% of Australia's coal was being burnt in our model between now and 2050.
Tom Morton: That's not very good news for our coal industry.
Paul Ekins: I'm afraid climate change is not good news for the coal industries of anywhere in the world. So in the former Soviet Union it was 94% remained unburnt, in the United States 92% remained unburnt, so the model was definitely not discriminating against Australia, it was just showing that the coal reserves in the world are very, very large, and far greater than the carbon budget available if we want to stay within two degrees.
Tom Morton: Paul Ekins. He’s co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre. I asked Benjamin Sporton of the World Coal Association, what these findings mean for the global coal industry.
Benjamin Sporton: What we ought to be doing if we’re trying to achieve the world’s climate targets is to focus on the role for low emission coal technology. And that’s a two-step approach. It’s focusing on the high efficiency, low emissions plants that can be built today, and then it’s working very hard on looking for the role of carbon capture and storage and demonstrate and deploy that technology. We’ve done some research at the World Coal Association recently that looks at what you can actually achieve by focussing on deploying high efficiency, low emissions coal-fired power plants, the super critical and ultra super critical technology that decreases the emissions of CO2 by up to 35% and that is actually one of the most affordable ways for countries to mitigate CO2 emissions is by focussing on shifting away from older less efficient coal to more efficient coal technology. I think it’s those kinds of things that are actually going to make sure that we can achieve the world’s climate targets.
Tom Morton: Paul Ekins agress that there is a role for carbon capture and storage in the future. But even if the technology is rolled out across the world, in the next ten years, it’ll only increase the mount of the world’s coal reserves we can burn by 6% if we want to stay with the 2-degree target.
Paul Ekins: Just focussing on more efficient coal and carbon capture and storage is not going to achieve the world’s climate targets. And that is very very clear from the modelling we’ve done and from basic arithmetic. Obviously it makes sense if we’re going to burn coal to do that as efficiently as possible. And indeed, the coal industry has made huge advances in terms of the efficiency of its power stations. And it’s really important that the new power stations that are being built that they are the more efficient coal-fired power stations. So I’m absolutely in agreement with that. And I’m also very much in agreement that we need to get on with carbon capture and storage. But one needs to recognise that carbon capture and storage is an enormously expensive and capital intensive technology. It entails building a lot of extra kit at the coal-fired power plants, and then big pipelines that need to take the carbon dioxide all the way to where it’s going to be stored. It needs to pump it down there. It needs to make sure that it’s staying there. My own government here in the UK has recently cancelled a couple of big demonstration projects which for the last ten years it has said that it is going to proceed with. And then obviously there is a limit to the speed at which you can build these very large carbon capture and storage plants. There simply isn’t the capital available to do that. I feel if the coal industry really wanted to get on with it, it ought to be financing these plants itself.
Tom Morton: In 2015 the International Energy Agency published its latest World Energy Outlook. The IEA predicted turbulent times ahead for coal. It is said that the momentum behind coal’s surge was ebbing away, and that coal faces a reversal of fortune.
I asked Benjamin Sporton from the World Coal Association what he thought of this assessment.
Benjamin Sporton: Even in the context of coal perhaps losing share, if you want to call it that, it is still growing in absolute terms. Some more interesting and specific numbers, I think, from the IEA look at Southeast Asia for example, where coal demand there is forecast to grow every year through to 2040 by about 4.6%. Coal will play an incredibly important role in India. I was in India back in February and talking to the government there and they are very much focused on an important role for coal in improving their electrification and improving their electricity systems. So when we look at all the fundamentals of what's happening, I still see a strong future for coal.
Jairem Ramesh: India will need to at least double its coal consumption in the next 15 years. And by 2030 we probably would be ending up consuming per year certainly not less than 2 billion tonnes of coal.
Tom Morton: Jairem Ramesh, India's former Environment Minister, speaking to me at his home in Delhi. Mr Ramesh has seen India's cruel coal conundrum from both sides of the fence. Before he became Minister for the Environment, he was Minister for Power.
Jairem Ramesh: Even with the most optimistic of assumptions on solar and wind and nuclear and hydropower, 55% of our electricity would still come from coal. I don't see for India getting out of this trap of increasing coal consumption. I don't like it but it's a reality.
Tom Morton: Some of India's richest coal reserves are in the state of Chhattisgarh, and that's where the coal trail took me next.
I'm sitting by the village well in the centre of the village of Sahli in the Hasdeo Arand region in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India. This village of Sahli is very close to the Hasdeo Arand forests, which are some of the oldest forests in India, they are very rich in biodiversity, and an important source of livelihood to many of the people who live here in the village. For about half of the year they gather forest produce which they depend on. But underneath those forests is a vast seam of coal, nearly a billion tonnes of coal. And since 2012, Adani, who are the same Indian company who want to mine coal in the Galilee Basin in northern Queensland, Adani have also been mining coal just a few kilometres from this village of Sahli. Already one village has been demolished to make way for the coal mine, another four villages, including Sahli, are slated for demolition. Forest has been chopped down, and the villagers are not happy.
Chetu Ram: [Translation] We are the natives of India, we tribal people. We have been here for many generations. We will not let them end our settlements like this.
Tom Morton: Chetu Ram, village elder from the village of Sahli. He was born in 1942, before the British left India, and he says neither he nor his village are going anywhere.
Chetu Ram: [Translation] We are like kings here on our land. If our land is taken away from us today then there will be no one to look out for us and we will not get any other place. That is why I say we are sitting here at our own place; here we are king. If our land is gone then everything is gone.
Alok Shukla: [Translation] My name is Alok Shukla. I work in Chhattisgarh on issues to do with coal mining and its impact on water, forest and land. Coal mining also affects the rights of tribal people in Chhattisgarh, it causes displacement of people and has all sorts of impacts on the environment. The area I work in is called Hasdeo Arand, within the districts of Korba and Surguja.
Tom Morton: Under the Constitution, the land rights of India's Adivasis or tribal people are protected by law. But those constitutional rights are increasingly coming into conflict with coal mining.
Alok Shukla works with Jan Abhivakti, a local grassroots organisation which defends the rights of tribal people and the forests they depend on for their livelihood.
Alok Shukla: [Translation] Hasdeo Arand is an area of rich, dense forests. The forests are rich in biodiversity and wildlife habitat. But within this area, 30 coal blocks have been created, covering a total of 1,800 square kilometres where there are coal blocks on a large scale. Because of these coal blocks, the Hasdeo Arand region is going to get vanished. But we are trying to find out how to save it. Previously the Central Environment Ministry had declared this whole area a no-go area for mining. They stated that mining would not be allowed here. But after that the Ministry is regularly trying to open up coal mining here.
Jairem Ramesh: Therefore you know it was my assessment that given the demand that was being generated for power which required this coal, and given the fact that the linkages had already been established for these coal fields, that we impose strict conditions for approving these coal mines, which is what we did.
Tom Morton: Jairem Ramesh was India's Environment Minister at the time the Adani coal mine was approved. In fact he gave it the green light. I asked him why he'd overturned his own ministry's decision to declare the Hasdeo Arand forests a no-go area for mining.
But you set aside the advice from the Forest Advisory Commission which said that this should remain a no-go area.
Jairem Ramesh: Yes, but you know, when I actually saw…when I looked at all the maps and I got all the satellite imagery from the local forest department and I talked to people, it certainly appeared to me that this was an iffy area. The Forest Advisory Committee is not always a repository of objective analysis and sometimes they went ahead and said no and I had to say yes, and this is a good case, the fringe area, the Hasdeo Arand fringe area case.
Tom Morton: So overall though you were satisfied that there was an overriding public interest in particular…
Jairem Ramesh: Absolutely, an economic interest, I wouldn't even say a public interest, public interest is a much abused word, I would say economic interest. There was an overriding economic interest, yes.
Robyn Wiliams: And next week, you’ll hear how the Minister’s decision was overturned, by elephants. Tom Morton, with the first program in our special series, ‘Beyond the Coal Rush’. Tom Morton invited coal companies Adani and Shenhua to be interviewed for the series, but they declined. Technical production by Judy Rapley, original music by Stuart brown, The Science Show’s producer is David Fisher. I’m Robyn Williams
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