NSW approves largest coal project despite climate warning

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.

I accept the division of labour. My objection is to what this maxim does to it. A division of labour presupposes that the labour is actually divided, that each portion of the work is assigned to someone. Now universalise the commission’s principle. 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, and the importer, which did not dig the coal, blames the miner. Every authority follows the same rule, and the harm, though real, is assigned to no one. The maxim does not merely produce bad outcomes when universalised. It contradicts itself, because the jurisdictional order it appeals to for justification is precisely what it empties out. It resembles a building in which every tenant assumes the landlord has insured the roof while the landlord assumes the tenants have done so. The roof is never insured, yet each party holds a perfectly tidy document showing that it was someone else’s duty.

This is why the warning from Matt Kean and the Climate Change Authority matters, and the reason has nothing to do with its being an expert opinion. A warning is a request that a cost be counted. To receive the warning and approve the largest coal project in the state’s history anyway is not the same as making an error in arithmetic. It is a decision that a whole column of the ledger may stay blank.

The formula of humanity applies here. Consider a farmer in the Hunter whose crop fails in a future drought, or a family in a western Sydney suburb paying for air conditioning that is no longer optional. They were never consulted, and their losses were never priced. They serve as the unpaid guarantors of an approval that was declared balanced only because their side of the account was left off the page. To use persons in this way is to treat them merely as means.

The duty that follows does not require refusing every mine. It requires that whoever approves must also count. An authority that will not measure the harm may not certify that the scales balance. The commission stamped the approval, and the stamp is dry. The ledger beneath it still carries a blank line where the cost should be, and it has been signed below in the name of children who cannot yet write.