After so many years, the debate about an uneconomic coal mine, Adani’s Carmichael project in central Queensland, is now so tortured that I fear it has become incomprehensible to most people. It’s one of those rolling stories where more reporting creates more confusion. With new stories every day – including today’s [$] will-or-won’t-Labor-support-it coverage – one might gain the impression that something’s actually happening on the ground. It isn’t, yet. Last I heard, there’s nothing up there but a sign and a fence.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In the China-fuelled commodities boom of the noughties, when coal prices soared, plans were developed to open up a whole new thermal coal precinct in Queensland, the Galilee Basin, which lies north and west of what is arguably the world’s best coal precinct, the Bowen Basin, where all the mines are now. Nobody had seriously thought of mining Galilee coal before, because the quality is low-grade thermal (and remember, lower-grade thermal coal is burned to generate electricity, and makes up the vast majority of CO 2 emissions, while the more expensive coking coal is used in steel-making). It is also hundreds of kilometres inland, and long rail lines would need to be built to get the coal to port and ship it overseas. This would be prohibitively expensive, unless coal was selling for a fortune. Analysts estimated well north of $100 a tonne – five or 10 times the long-term historical average – which for a very short time it was.

India’s Adani, plus local magnates Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, all had huge tenements. It’s a long and complicated story (which helped launch PUP along the way). But Adani, which had beaten “boganaire” Nathan Tinkler to buy the privatised coal port at Abbott Point, managed to get the jump on its rivals in negotiations over a preferred rail corridor, and planning for what would be the world’s biggest thermal coal mine advanced.

After defying gravity for a while, in the wake of the financial crisis, the commodities boom ended sharply in 2012, with coal prices plunging in a genuine shock to the industry. This was driven partly by the shale gas revolution and corresponding decline of coal in the US, and coal miners shed workers left, right and centre to cut costs. Although prices have slowly recovered, they have not scaled their previous heights and are not expected to. Galilee coal has been economically marginal ever since.

Adani, a vertically integrated power company, has always claimed its economics are different, because it was proposing to sell the Australian coal to itself to burn for power in India. But the company, controlled by billionaire Gautam Adani, is a complex beast, and cannot be taken at its word. As ABC’s Four Corners exposed last year, it has a shocking environmental record. It avoids tax with the best of them. It has been knocked back by bank after bank. It is opposed by local traditional owners. It has missed every deadline. It has been described by some activists as the “perfect villain”.

These were all commendable qualities, needless to say, for people like former Queensland premier Campbell Newman, former PM Tony Abbott, and former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce. The federal government bent over backwards to ensure Adani got every approval it needed. When it still looked unviable and the company went back on its word that it did not need a cent of public funding, the government set up a thoroughly opaque slush fund, the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF), to offer a billion-dollar loan to fund the rail component of the Carmichael project. That’s where things lay until the Queensland election in November, when Annastacia Palasczuk suddenly decided she would block the NAIF loan, which required state government sign-off, ostensibly because her husband was working for a consultant engaged on the project. Limbo, except the federal government is now reportedly looking for a back door way of funding it.

Back home in India, the government is moving to develop the country’s own vast coal reserves, and renewables-plus-storage are getting cheaper than the old coal-fired-power-station plus hundreds-of-kilometres-of-poles-and-wires model for an electricity grid. Adani has what is known as a stranded asset. Though other coal miners in Australia may want to poke the greenies in the eye, they are decidedly lukewarm about Adani because it is so big that it risks flooding the thermal coal market and displacing coal from other mines, for example in the Hunter Valley.

Which is all very interesting (or not), but there’s only one reason why Adani matters to every Australian: the threat of accelerating climate change, spelled out again on Four Corners last night. Five years ago Greenpeace identified the Galilee Basin among 14 “carbon bombs” which, if they go ahead, would unlock such vast new greenhouse gas emissions that, by themselves, could tip the planet into unstoppable, dangerous climate change. They can’t go ahead if we are to give ourselves a fighting chance of limiting and then reversing global warming. It is that simple. It is not about cheap power for India – this is not cheap power in anyone’s language. It is not about jobs in regional Queensland – a just transition must be found for affected coal workers. It is not about saving the Great Barrier Reef – stopping Adani by itself won’t save the reef, it is too late for that, it’s a question of how much we can save. Adani must be stopped so that we don’t make climate change irretrievably worse. Given we are digging such a deep and depressing hole for ourselves and our kids, surely that’s the first and most important step: stop digging.

This article has been updated to reflect that the government rather than Adani set up the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility. This error occurred during the production process.

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