Shutting down the conversation

If metal miners think anti-mining groups are giving them a rough ride these days, they should have a talk with their brothers in the coal business. The latest bright idea from the pressure groups is for the industry simply to shut down.

Greenpeace South East Asia floated the idea at the 2003 Coaltrans Asia conference in Nusa Dua, Indonesia. (Greenpeace wasn’t on the conference program; as far as we can tell, this was presented at a question-and-answer session on the first day of the show.)

Red Constantino, a spokesman for the group, said the industry that pulls the black stuff out of the ground so that others may burn it “bears a heavy responsibility in inflicting damage to the environment. This industry should stop promoting coal and start investing in renewable energy.”

But that’s not all: the industry is doing all this damage maliciously and knowingly. The coal industry doesn’t hold a contrary opinion about how best to satisfy mankind’s need for energy and maintain a clean environment — it’s sending us all to climate-change Hell because it makes so much money doing it. “Despite knowing the impacts of burning coal on the climate, the coal industry continues to talk of expanding sales and new markets,” says Constantino. “The coal industry is deliberately putting the world in peril, an attitude we consider criminal.”

Forget recent lousy coal prices; these are the “coal barons” (Greenpeace actually uses the phrase). They must be getting rich off this, because that’s what coal barons do.

Forget, also, the development of new power-generation technologies that radically reduce the emission of pollutants. Clean coal is no solution for Constantino. “The coal industry needs to clean up its act. Because of climate change, the only way it can do this is to phase itself out starting today, not tomorrow.”

The villain, as usual, is the developed world — Australia, in this case, which “is locking South-East Asia to a coal-based future.”

It seems Australia manages to compel 360 million Indonesians, Filipinos and Thais to consume Australian coal through loan guarantees by its state export financing agency, subsidies to the coal industry, and (smelling salts please) aggressive sales. “This is repugnant because the Australian government knows the impact of climate change will be hardest on countries of South-East Asia,” says Constantino, “and repulsive because it is promoting aggressively the export of coal even if it is undermining the Kyoto protocol.”

Constantino cited figures showing the Australian development agency AusAid had put about nine times as much money into coal projects (A$31 million) as it had into renewable energy sources, and compared Australia to “the Al Capone of climate crime — the Bush administration.”

Nice deke, Red: introduce a few figures and then cap them with an ad hominem attack on those nasty Beltway Bushites. But hyperbole is still hyperbole, and Greenpeace remains undisputed champion.

Interestingly, it was at the Coaltrans Asia conference in Sydney, two years ago, that Mark O’Neill of the Australian Coal Association identified the guiding philosophy behind the anti-coal rhetoric of groups such as Greenpeace. O’Neill called it “the fossil-free fantasy.”

With it come several assumptions: centrally, that fossil fuels are all bad, and that wind, geothermal power, and biomass are all good. And out of it come several axioms, chief among which is that any effort to make fossil fuels more environmentally benign is either futile or counterproductive.

So the direct consequence of the shut-down-coal stand is that it becomes more difficult to attack the problems with burning fossil fuels. Leave aside the issue of greenhouse gas emissions and their effect, or non-effect, on the climate: if coal is bad now, and attempts to make coal better are also bad, then coal will stay bad forever.

The longer anti-mining groups cleave to this kind of foolishness, the longer it will take to solve the central problem of energy demand, and the environmental impact of satisfying it. It may feel good to stand in the way of progress, but that means standing in the way of a better life for a great many people, in the Pacific Rim and everywhere else.

According to Greenpeace, the Philippines has as much as 70 gigawatts of “untapped wind energy potential.” Not this month, it didn’t: Red Constantino was over in Bali.