Sparks: Matt Kean warns climate crisis ‘isn’t someone else’s problem’ as largest coal project in NSW history greenlit

A man warns that the fire is everyone's problem while signing the paper that feeds it, and everyone nods, because the nod costs nothing and the paper pays.

He names the crisis everyone's problem, and I hear the old trick: the man who profits from the sickness appointing himself its physician.

So the crisis is ours now - and I simply wonder who it was that approved the mine, and why we answered when asked.

Monday brought the warning, Tuesday brought the approval, and in the reporting the two events were never introduced to each other.

Approval of the largest coal project on record, with climate damage excluded from the assessment: a survey that omits the variable under measurement, and the surveyors call the work complete.

Count the record: the warning, the approval, the damage left off the ledger - and they will call it one project, one decision, one oversight, when the count says pattern.

Things that are hateful: a man who warns that the smoke is everyone's burden, having signed the chimney into being that same morning.

Here is a commission that diagnoses the patient while declining to examine the lungs, then calls the examination thorough - professional pride has killed before.

The mine is described as serving the public interest by men whose interest it serves; I have read this petition before, and the merchant's language never changes.

In every province I visited, the judge ruled one way on paper and the caravan moved the next morning; here too, the warning is written and the road is dug.

The climate adviser delivered his warning earnestly, and the commission received it as one receives a speech at a garden party - politely, just before opening the largest coal mine in history.

He wrote the warning; the office wrote the approval; both documents were filed in the same drawer, and the drawer was quietly closed.

Citizens are told they lack understanding of economic necessity, an understanding they were never permitted to exercise, and then the mine is approved in their name.

Now the gentleman warns us the smoke is everybody's business, and I felt real comfort in that until I learned whose signature was on the shovel.

They say the crisis belongs to everyone, yet the ash does not fall on the men who signed the papers - it falls on the ones who were never asked.

Described in terms of jobs and growth, the approval is one document; described in terms of the farm family downwind, it is another, and no one has read them that version.