NSW approves largest coal project despite climate warning

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.

That is the trouble with the question now being contested, whether the commission adequately accounted for climate-related economic damage. The phrase assumes damage is a sum you can add up and enter. Matt Kean, who chairs the Climate Change Authority, warned against approving the largest coal project in New South Wales history. He did not come to that warning from the environmental movement. He was the state’s treasurer, a man who has signed budgets and knows what a balance sheet can hold. A balance sheet cannot hold this, because the harm travels through relationships, and relationships do not show up in totals.

The strongest case for approval deserves a fair hearing, and it is a serious one. If New South Wales does not sell the coal, another exporter will, so the global emissions are unchanged and the state merely forgoes the revenue that pays for hospitals. But look at what kind of argument this is. It treats the world coal market as disorganized complexity, a matter of averages and substitution in which one supplier is as good as another. Then it treats the damage at home as simplicity, a single number to be discounted. It reasons statistically about the distant thing, which it cannot see, and arithmetically about the near thing, which it could see if anyone looked. The method is inverted exactly where the evidence is best.

There is a second cost the ledger hides. A place whose income rests on one great extractive use grows brittle. Its suppliers, its training colleges, and its politics all bend toward the single customer until nothing else is easy to start. Economies stay alive by adding new kinds of work to old ones, and a monoculture makes that addition harder each year it persists. The Albanese government will find it awkward to tell regions to diversify while their largest new commitment points the other way.

Picture the commissioners at the table, pens in hand, signing a document whose costs column is honest about everything it can measure. Somewhere a grazier is on hold with an insurer, listening to recorded music, waiting to learn that her policy is no longer offered.