Before I reveal some chilling truths about environmental campaigners, you’d best grab your nearest cuddly toy and take refuge behind the sofa.
As government ministers, conservative commentators and coal lobbyists have warned us in recent days, the greenies are coming.
Comfort toys may not be enough. Run for your fracking lives, people.
The origins of this fearful outbreak of self-interested pleading came from a federal court challenge to the giant Carmichael coalmine being proposed in Queensland by the Indian mining and energy company Adani.
Mining lobbyists and ministers said green groups were using the courts to “sabotage” projects because they hated people having jobs. Environment groups claimed victory.
The government now wants to change the laws so that the only groups will have the legal standing to object in cases will be those directly affected by mining projects.
In fact, as the court was later forced to point out, there was no judgment in the case – and therefore no sabotage had actually taken place.
The environment minister Greg Hunt’s approval of the mine was set aside over a technicality at the request of the government’s own solicitor.
Hunt had not properly reviewed material relating to two vulnerable species – the yakka skink and the ornamental snake. So Hunt will have to go back and review those papers.
The upshot is that the approval of the proposed mine will be delayed a few weeks or months. But coal lobbyists, government ministers and conservative commentators spoke as one, describing the weaponry of the modern environmental organisation.
When they go to courts to challenge projects, they don’t just rock up on bamboo bicycles with little more than hemp sandals and the hopes and dreams of dying planets. Oh no.
They go to court with actual lawyers. Real ones. The cheek of it.
We were told they had also discovered a form of communication called email and these things called websites, which they had used to get people to send 14,000 objections to the Queensland government about the Carmichael mine.
To add to the terror, we were also told campaigners were “sophisticated”, “well organised” and “very clever”. I’ll bet those monsters can tie their own shoelaces too.
Michael Roche, the boss of the Queensland Resources Council, has been vocal about the campaign strategies of environment groups. He didn’t like the “clicktivism” style of campaigning that helped coordinate those 14,000 pieces of correspondence.
Yet the national mining industry lobby group the Minerals Council used this same tactic last year when the coal industry was again coming under attack.
The much-ridiculed Australians for Coal campaign encouraged people to fill in an online form that generated a reported 35,000 emails to the inboxes of Australian MPs.
Roche has also been at pains to point out that the small number of legal cases brought by environmental groups were part of a “deliberate strategy” contained in a 2011 document called “Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom” that emerged in March 2012.
Roche even held up the strategy document in an interview on Lateline as though it was a smoking gun (apparently, we should be shocked that campaigners campaign, and that they have a campaign strategy, but not shocked by the various national strategies to promote coal by the industry which you would presume also exist).
As the document obtained by journalists at the Australian Financial Review outlines, the motivation for the campaign to disrupt the coal industry was to prevent a “global climate tipping point”.
When an industry threatens livelihoods, health, habitats and entire countries across the globe, you’d better hope the campaigners have a strategy.
One of the co-authors of that 2011 strategy is the Tasmanian journalist, campaigner and author Bob Burton.
I asked him why the strategy was put together and what he made of the statements from the industry and ministers. I’ll leave you with his response:
What’s good for the coal industry is bad for the world. Who could sit back and let the coal industry do even more damage to our world when cleaner, safer and better alternatives exist?
After Greg Hunt and Adani both admitted to the federal court that the decision approving the Carmichael mine was illegal, the approval was set aside. A reasonable industry and government would acknowledge they had made a mistake and calmly go back and follow the law.
But the coal industry, behaving like the spoilt brat of Australian society, is demanding that the law be changed so that advice on how to protect endangered species can be ignored.
Ever since they were pinged by a small community group they have been jumping up and down yelling at those who pointed out the illegal behaviour. If it was a schoolyard they’d be given a time out but the federal government prefers to back the bully.
As the industry becomes embroiled in ever more scandals and controversies they desperately need a diversion. It’s easy to see why.
Over the last decade the fossil fuel lobby groups in Australia have spent the best part of $500m peddling denial and delay. This has imposed a terrible toll on Australia and the world: polluted air and waterways, the destruction of towns, farmlands and forests and damage to the Great Barrier Reef by everything from ship accidents to ocean acidification.
The coal industry lobby groups celebrate projections of coal use that would cause global warming of between three and four degrees or more when most scientists and governments agree that the global temperature increase should be kept to 1.5 or two degrees at most.
