"The market has spoken. Coal power plants have been closing for almost a decade now, and they will progressively be retired and not replaced over the next couple of decades.

"The main debate about them is how soon they close. Will they live out their 50-year lifespan, or be forced out earlier by the amount of renewables coming online – or artificial deadlines?"

Mr Maher said little had changed in Australia in the 10 years since both extremes of the debate – the Greens and the Coalition – combined to defeat Kevin Rudd's carbon pollution reduction scheme. The Greens voted it down because it was too weak; the Coalition because climate denialists had led a revolt to knock off Malcolm Turnbull as leader the day before.

Anti-Adani backfire

Mr Maher cited the Greens' behaviour at the last election with the anti-Adani convoy through Queensland, which drove voters "into the arms of One Nation and Clive Palmer, from where their votes went to the LNP".

"For the Federal LNP government, the campaign against export coal has been the gift that keeps on giving,'' he said.

"They have countered the fantasy that Australia must shut down its export coal industry with their own fiction that there are no challenges ahead for our coal industry; and that fighting greenies is more important than the hard yards of developing sensible industry policy.

"The outcome of the anti-export campaign was not only a failure to stop Adani, which was always a strange objective – it really is just another coal mine – but to contribute to an election outcome that sets back climate policy in Australia."


Mr Maher said each country was responsible for meeting its emissions targets and that included nations which bought Australia's coal. If Australia stopped exporting coal, the countries would buy it from somewhere else.

"There is not a single example of any other country choosing to restrain their energy or other exports in order to reduce emissions in other countries. It is a cross that has been invented for Australia to bear,'' he said.

"Attacking our export coal industry has always been a project that, even if it succeeded on its own terms, would fail in reducing global emissions."