The laws politicians tell us are there to protect our environment can seem as pointless as the cheap Christmas giftwrap covering that bottle of wine you just bought for your least favourite uncle.

“Surprise surprise, Uncle Douchebag. It’s a bottle of $4.99 shiraz.”

Surprise. It’s still another coalmine.

Australia’s environment minister, Greg Hunt, has just approved a major expansion to the country’s Abbot Point coal terminal in Queensland.

The terminal’s expansion, proposed by Indian mining company Adani, is a crucial part of the coal industry’s plans for the Galilee Basin – one of the world’s biggest untapped sources of fossil fuel carbon.

Even though the approval comes with a string of important and welcome conditions, Australia’s suite of environmental laws continue to ignore probably the world’s greatest environmental threat – climate change caused chiefly from the burning of fossil fuels like coal.

When more than 190 countries agreed in Paris earlier this month to keep global warming “well below 2C”, Hunt himself said this was “arguably the most important environmental agreement ever”.

Adani wants to develop the Carmichael mine – Australia’s biggest coalmine – in the Galilee Basin.

The 60m tonnes of coal a year from Carmichael will take a route through Abbot Point, weaving and winking its way through the Great Barrier Reef and on to India.

Australian government scientists have made it clear that climate change is the greatest threat to the reef’s health and survival.

As I detailed in a recent report, the fossil fuel industry as a whole, and Adani in particular, has managed to engineer the kind of access to senior ministers, politicians and civil servants which other groups – such as the renewable energy industry, for example – could only dream of.

Rarely does an Australian politician set foot in India without meeting the company’s head, Gautam Adani, who in recent years has hosted private dinners, parties and rides in jets for his high-level Australian friends.

Last week, Adani had little trouble in securing a personal meeting with the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull.



Consider too that in Australia and many other jurisdictions, so-called “environmental impact assessments” that form the backbone of applications for major projects are still paid for by the companies seeking approval.

Adani and Australian politicians have continued to claim the Carmichael mine will create “10,000 jobs” despite the company itself admitting in court that just 1,464 net jobs would result from the project.

Australian government ministers have also gleefully picked up the coal industry’s public relations talking point that coal is an answer to lifting the world’s poorest out of poverty.

Some, such as the Australian newspaper’s cartoonist Bill Leak, have even gone as far as to say that “distributing solar panels to the world’s poor” is “racist”, “condescending” and “immoral”.

Leak was defending himself against accusations that a cartoon he’d drawn depicting Indian people eating solar panels was racist (this is the bit where we point out that the presumably racist Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, has a goal to have some 100 GW of solar power installed in his country by 2022 and by 2030, to have 40% of his country’s power coming from anything but fossil fuels).

Hunt’s approval of Abbot Point comes just days after Queensland’s land court rejected a challenge to the Carmichael mine that was lodged on the basis that the emissions from the burning of the coal would further fuel dangerous climate change.

But the court accepted the argument from Adani that the mine’s creation would not impact on levels of global emissions because if Australia didn’t develop the coal, then someone else would.

This is known as the “drug dealers defence” when a pusher pleads with a police officer that in supplying their illicit substance, they were merely fulfilling the demand created by the addict.

This argument is thin, particularly if you extend the drug dealing analogy. Police do not generally target drug addicts, but rather see the main game as busting the drug producers.

All decisions made about fossil fuel projects around the world are now made in a new political world shaped by the Paris agreement.

There, almost 150 leaders from countries around the world pledged to do what they could to cut greenhouse gas emissions and help the world’s poorest to fight the impacts of climate change.

As Hunt said, the deal was “arguably the most important environmental agreement ever.”

Arguably, then, Australia’s environmental laws and approvals processes need a rapid reboot to include the “most important” environmental issue there is.

Or in other words, the environment and the climate don’t want coalmines for Christmas and needs better protection than cheap wrapping paper.