NSW approves largest coal project despite climate warning
The approval contradicts climate goals and may not account for climate-related economic damage, affecting the state's environment and economy.
The Ledger and the Web
The plan sees a ledger. On one side are royalties, construction jobs, and export contracts. On the other is an emissions figure, which the NSW planning commission can treat as somebody else’s problem once the coal is burned offshore. From the ground the economy works otherwise. Climate damage does not arrive as a line item. It arrives as a series of small withdrawals, each reasonable on its own. An insurer quietly declines to renew policies in a flood-prone postcode. The bank, seeing no insurance, will not lend against the house. The builder who would have renovated it takes work elsewhere, and the shop that sold him timber loses a customer it never knew it depended on. None of these people appears in an approval document, but together they are the economy.
The Commission’s Empty Column
The claim rests on a balance sheet. The NSW planning commission has weighed the largest coal project in the state’s history and found that its benefits exceed its costs. Let us first verify whether this measurement captures what it purports to capture.
A balance sheet is a machine with two columns. Into the first go royalties, wages, contracts and the revenue of a port, figures that arrive already denominated in dollars and therefore enter the ledger without friction. Into the second go the costs, and here the operator must do real work, because some costs come with a price attached and others must be estimated before they can be written down. Climate-related economic damage belongs to the second kind. It is an honest difficulty, and I do not mock it. Every estimate of such damage carries a wide margin, and the margin is set by the very uncertainty about future fires, floods and crop failures that makes the damage worth counting.
The principle operating here, stated plainly, is: when a harm falls outside my remit to measure, I may approve the action as though the harm did not exist. Let us ask whether this principle, universalised, produces coherence or contradiction.
The defenders of the NSW planning commission have a strong argument, and they deserve to hear it in its best form. A planning body is not a climate ministry. It assesses what the law asks it to assess, and global emissions are governed by national targets, international accounting, and the Albanese government’s own frameworks. If every local tribunal tried to settle the fate of the atmosphere, nothing would be decided anywhere. On this view, a division of labour among institutions is simply good order.
A Proposal for the Orderly Customs Treatment of Weather, Respectfully Submitted to the NSW Planning Commission
The Commission is to be congratulated on its approval of the largest coal project in the history of New South Wales. It has also established a principle of accounting that deserves to be applied more widely.
The principle is this. Coal dug in the Hunter is counted in New South Wales: the royalties, the wages, the rail freight, the ribbon at the opening. Coal burnt in a furnace abroad is counted abroad, and so is the smoke it makes. The state’s ledger ends at the wharf. Mr Matt Kean, who chairs the Climate Change Authority for the Albanese government, warned that this ledger leaves out the damage the climate will do to the state’s own economy. His objection is sincere, and it misreads the method. The Commission did not forget the damage. It found the damage to be foreign.
Charles Babbage
The claim rests on the premise that institutional boundaries function as clean partitions of responsibility, effectively isolating the labour of assessment. Let us first verify whether this measurement of “division of labour” captures what it purports to capture. The ethicist posits that the New South Wales Planning Commission is not a climate ministry, and therefore its scope is limited to local approvals. This is a claim of jurisdictional precision. I accept the necessity of division of labour; a single entity attempting to manage global emissions, local zoning, and national security would collapse under the weight of its own complexity. The order of specialized institutions is not merely good; it is essential for the machine of governance to run without seizing.
However, let us examine how this figure of “division” was assembled. The opponent argues that global emissions are governed by national targets and international accounting, implying a complete transfer of liability from the local to the federal level. This is a logical operation that assumes a closed system. In my engines, a gear that drives another must be accounted for in the torque calculation; energy is not lost, only transferred. The ethicist’s model suggests that when the Commonwealth handles emissions, the local commission’s output is zeroed out regarding climate impact. This is the error. It treats jurisdiction as a vacuum rather than a conduit.
The flaw enters at the point of aggregation. The opponent claims that if every tribunal tried to settle the fate of the atmosphere, nothing would be decided. This is a false dichotomy. It is not a choice between a single tribunal judging the entire globe and no tribunal judging anything at all. The choice is between a fragmented calculation that ignores the inputs from adjacent stages, and a unified calculation that acknowledges them. The opponent’s framework relies on the assumption that the “labour” is actually divided. I observe that the labour is not divided; it is deferred.
Consider the structure of the argument as a mechanical linkage. The state tribunal sets aside climate damage because the Commonwealth handles emissions. The Commonwealth points to approvals already granted by the states. The exporting nation leaves the matter to the importing nation. Each authority follows the same rule: “I do not process what has been or will be processed by another.” This is not a division of labour; it is a series of broken links in a chain. The harm, though real, is assigned to no one because the mechanism designed to calculate it is incomplete. The opponent’s building analogy - that every tenant assumes the landlord has insured the roof - is apt, but it is a description of a system failure, not a justification for it. A building where the roof is never insured is not a triumph of property law; it is a structural hazard.
The divergence here is fundamental. The ethicist operates on a principle of jurisdictional isolation, where the validity of a decision is determined by whether it falls within the statutory text of a specific body. I operate on a principle of systemic continuity, where the validity of a decision is determined by whether it accurately reflects the total causal chain, regardless of which specific gear in the machine turns it. To measure only the local approval without measuring its contribution to the global total is to measure the length of a single gear tooth and claim it defines the circumference of the wheel.
If the process cannot be described step by step - how a local approval contributes to a global emission total - then the current legal framework does not understand the problem it claims to solve. It understands the statute, yes. But it does not understand the physics of the outcome. The opponent’s “good order” is a static order. It is the order of a stopped clock. It is precise in its own way, but it tells no time.
We must ask: what is the input variable? The input is the physical reality of carbon released into the atmosphere. This reality does not respect the boundary lines of the New South Wales Planning Commission or the Australian Government. The atmosphere is a single, continuous medium. To legislate against it by fragmenting the assessment into jurisdictional silos is to build a bridge with gaps in the deck because the architect of the northern span disagreed with the architect of the southern span. The result is not order; it is collapse.
The strongest point made by the opponent is that universalising their principle leads to inaction. I agree that if every institution claimed total responsibility, chaos would ensue. But their principle is not one of total responsibility; it is one of total avoidance. They are not claiming that the state should manage global emissions. They are claiming that the state should ignore them. This is not a division of labour. It is a refusal to labour.
Can this be independently confirmed? We can look to the laws of thermodynamics. Energy and matter are conserved. They do not vanish when crossed a border. If the NSW Planning Commission approves a project that emits carbon, that carbon enters the atmosphere. The atmosphere does not ask for a permit from the Commonwealth before accepting it. The physical record exists. The legal record, however, shows a gap. The gap is not a feature of the system; it is a bug. Until the mechanism of assessment is redesigned to track the full causal chain, rather than just the local procedural step, the system remains untrustworthy. We do not need a new ministry; we need a better calculation.
Immanuel Kant
The principle operating here, stated plainly, is: When the consequences of an action are uncertain or external to the immediate jurisdiction, one may omit their valuation from the ledger of decision, provided that the immediate gains are certain and quantifiable. Let us ask whether this principle, universalised, produces coherence or contradiction.
You argue from the balance sheet, treating the assessment of the coal project as an exercise in arithmetic where only those costs with a fixed price tag may enter the column. You accept that climate damage is a real harm, yet you dismiss its inclusion in the statutory determination as mere speculation, because the specific monetary value of future fires and floods cannot be pinned down with the precision of a wage bill. This is the empiricist’s sanctuary: the belief that if something cannot be measured, it cannot be weighed. But let us examine the maxim you are acting upon. If every planner, whenever faced with uncertain but severe harm, chose to exclude that harm from their calculation precisely because it was uncertain, then the concept of “cost” in public planning would collapse into a fiction. A cost that is excluded because it is hard to measure is not a cost; it is an illusion. To universalise your principle is to create a world in which all significant harms are systematically invisible to reason, because only the trivial and the certain remain visible. This is a contradiction in conception. The maxim destroys the very framework of rational assessment it seeks to use.
You offer a defence that is arithmetical rather than moral, relying on the boundary of the state’s jurisdiction and the uncertainty of global emissions. You posit that because the coal is burned abroad, the harm is not the state’s to calculate, and because the damage is probabilistic, it cannot be entered into the ledger. I concede that you are correct in one specific, technical sense: a single provincial commission does not possess the authority to adjudicate global atmospheric justice. To claim that the New South Wales planning commission should determine the fate of the global climate is to confuse the scope of local duty with the scope of universal law. However, you leap from this limitation of authority to the conclusion that the harm need not be considered at all. This is a non sequitur. The fact that I cannot fully calculate the total damage does not mean the damage does not exist, nor does it mean I am free to ignore it. It means I must act with a higher degree of caution.
Consider the analogy of the blind architect. A builder who constructs a foundation without knowing the full depth of the soil beneath does not have the license to ignore the possibility of a void. He must proceed with reinforcement, not with blindness. Your position is that of the builder who says, “I cannot measure the void, therefore I shall build as if the ground is solid rock.” This is not prudence; it is negligence disguised as methodological rigour. The uncertainty you cite is not a reason to exclude the harm; it is a reason to apply the precautionary principle, which is derived from the duty to preserve the conditions of rational agency for future generations. If the action risks destroying the very environment in which future humans can exercise their autonomy, then the action is immoral, regardless of the precision of the ledger.
The maxim you employ treats humanity merely as a means to the end of certain economic gain, while treating the uncertain future as an end that can be discarded because it lacks a price tag. This violates the Formula of Humanity. We have a perfect duty not to act in ways that could be willed as universal laws of destruction. If we universalise the exclusion of uncertain harm, we universalise the destruction of the natural conditions required for moral existence. Therefore, the duty of the planner is not to ignore the uncertainty, but to acknowledge that the absence of precise data is not a licence for reckless action. The duty is to treat the potential for catastrophic harm as a veto on the project, until the certainty of the harm can be established. To do otherwise is to privilege the immediate, the certain, and the local over the universal, the contingent, and the distant, which is the very definition of selfishness in its most institutionalised form.
You ask for a balance sheet. I give you a moral calculus. The cost you omit is not zero; it is infinite in its potential to negate the possibility of future moral agency. The principle of excluding uncertain harm cannot be universalised without contradiction. Therefore, the project, as justified by your omission, is impermissible. The duty is to halt, not because we know the exact price of the fire, but because we cannot will a world in which such fires are ignored.
The Verdict
Where They Agree
First, both debaters fundamentally agree that the New South Wales Planning Commission’s decision to treat unquantified climate damage as a zero in its cost-benefit analysis is a profound methodological error. Babbage describes this as a fatal flaw in the “machine” of governance, where a blank cell is incorrectly calculated as nought. Kant frames it as a contradiction in the universalised maxim that allows harm to be ignored. Their agreement is significant because it bridges empiricism and deontology: both conclude that the act of omission is not a neutral or prudent exercise of jurisdictional restraint but an active, unjustifiable distortion of rational assessment.
Second, they share an unstated premise that the atmospheric system is a unified, borderless physical reality to which our political and legal jurisdictions are poorly adapted. Babbage’s principle of “systemic continuity” and Kant’s invocation of a universalised duty both presuppose that carbon emissions create a causal chain that does not respect the lines on a governmental organisational chart. This shared metaphysical commitment to a planetary system undermines the very foundation of the commission’s defence, revealing that the core disagreement is not whether the commission’s decision has global consequences, but how any local authority can ethically and accurately account for them.
Finally, both implicitly concur that the uncertainty of estimating future climate damage is not a valid excuse for assigning it a value of zero. For Babbage, uncertainty demands a range or an error margin, not a blank. For Kant, uncertainty demands the application of the precautionary principle, not a licence for reckless action. This shared rejection of using uncertainty as a justification for omission is crucial; it means the debate is not about the difficulty of measurement but about the ethical and empirical obligation to attempt it.
Where They Fundamentally Disagree
The valid role of jurisdictional boundaries in moral and empirical accounting. Empirically, they disagree on whether a “division of labour” among institutions, as currently constructed, functions as intended. Babbage argues it does not, presenting it as a “series of broken links in a chain” where harm is deferred, not divided. Normatively, Kant sees the appeal to jurisdiction as a maxim that, when universalised, leads to a contradiction where no one is responsible. Babbage’s steelmanned position is that the system must be redesigned for “systemic continuity” to reflect physical causality accurately. Kant’s steelmanned position is that the duty to count the harm is categorical and cannot be escaped by hiding behind a statutory remit.
The epistemological status of an unquantified cost. The empirical question is whether something that lacks a precise monetary value can be rationally incorporated into a decision-making ledger. Babbage, the empiricist, argues it can and must be, by using tools like ranges and error estimates; to record nothing is to make the most precise and certain error of all - zero. Kant, the ethicist, argues that the empirical difficulty is irrelevant to the moral calculus; the potential for catastrophic harm imposes a duty to restraint regardless of calculative precision. Their normative disagreement is starker: Babbage believes the primary failure is one of inaccurate measurement, while Kant believes it is a failure of moral reasoning that treats persons as mere means to economic ends.
The ultimate consequence of universalising the principle of omission. This is primarily a normative dispute about what constitutes a coherent maxim for action. For Kant, universalising the commission’s principle leads to a world where all significant, uncertain harms are invisible, destroying the possibility of rational planning and violating the formula of humanity. For Babbage, universalising the principle leads to a “static order” akin to a stopped clock - precise in its internal logic but functionally useless and ultimately untrustworthy because it is unmoored from physical reality. Babbage’s objection is to systemic failure; Kant’s is to moral contradiction.
Hidden Assumptions
- Charles Babbage: Assumes that a governance system can be mechanically redesigned to accurately track the “full causal chain” of local actions to global impacts. If this is false - if the complexity of global systems inherently defies such precise attribution - then his proposed solution of a “better calculation” may be technologically or politically infeasible, leaving his critique without a practical resolution.
- Charles Babbage: Assumes that the primary barrier to action is a correct understanding of the system’s mechanics, and that presenting this understanding will compel institutional reform. This assumes a strong link between technical clarity and political will, which is contestable. If political and economic interests are the true drivers, then his analytical approach may be ineffective.
- Immanuel Kant: Assumes that the “potential for catastrophic harm” is sufficient to impose a veto on the project via the precautionary principle. This assumes that the harm in question is of a scale and probability that meets the threshold for invoking such a principle. If the projected harm were far less certain or severe, his categorical argument would lose its force.
- Immanuel Kant: Assumes that the duty to “count the harm” is universally binding and will be recognised as such by all rational agents when the maxim is properly universalised. This assumes a shared foundation of rational morality that may not exist in pluralistic, real-world political institutions, potentially making his imperative a poor predictor of actual bureaucratic behaviour.
Confidence vs Evidence
- Charles Babbage: The claim that the commission’s method leads to a “static order… like a stopped clock” - the evidence is a logical analogy, not an empirical demonstration of systemic collapse. This is overconfidence in a metaphorical argument presented as a systemic diagnosis.
- Charles Babbage: The claim that treating jurisdiction as a vacuum rather than a conduit is an “error” - supported by an appeal to the laws of thermodynamics, which, while physically true, do not directly translate into a validated model of governance failure. This is an over-extension of a physical principle into a social domain.
What This Means For You
When evaluating coverage of this or similar approvals, you should immediately question any justification that relies on jurisdictional boundaries to dismiss a systemic cost. The most critical question to ask is not if a cost is uncertain or outside a direct remit, but how that cost is being accounted for somewhere in the system. Be suspicious of any analysis that does not explicitly state the value assigned to uncertain long-term harms, even if that value is presented as a range. Your view on the approval should change decisively if you discover that the decision-making body has a formal, transparent method for incorporating uncertain externalities, or if it can demonstrate that another institution is effectively shouldering that accounting responsibility. Demand to see the specific number, or range of numbers, that was placed in the column for climate damage.