I just  saw "Guarding the Galilee" documentary film presentation tonight, with audience, at a local community hall. The film is being shown at many ad-hoc community meetings all around Australia. There is plenty enough in the film, more than I could write here. There was plenty of impressive visual imagery and people to tell their stories. As was noted some members of audience, all the speakers appeared to be altogether too very respectful in the film. It was the total message that communicated felt anger among some of the audience.

The Galilee Basin is a beautiful rich bio-diverse region.

From wikipedia, we have

The Galilee Basin has a diversity of ecological communities and species as a consequence of the interactions between its large area, several biologically significant climatic gradients, the biogeographic effects of eight river basins, and the importance of landscape form driving water and soil redistribution in semi-arid environments of inland Australia. This diversity is expressed through the presence of 31 subregions of the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia and 46 major vegetation subgroups of the National Vegetation Information System.

To the Australian governments, its just several potential coal mines.

It was difficult to think of a good reason why this Adani Mega Mine project is still allowed to live. Obviously it serves a political purpose for the Queensland Labor Party, because of economic depression in Queensland. The LNP is still ideologically wedded to the coal industry, from since decades ago. The present ALP state government appears no different.   As an independent MP has said in the film, it is too bad there is a time delay between the party donations, when the policy fixes are put in, and when the registered donations finally come to light.  The mining industry is said to run the Queensland governments, both Labor and Liberal. The Australian state of Queensland is undergoing big changes, and present demands to bring back jobs and growth won't be met by paying for and building a destructive mega-coal mine, for benefits of tax-dodging corrupt Indian billionaire named Mr Adani.

A political jobs and growth swindle

The Adani project is just too obviously a "Fake Jobs and Growth", a Political Election Stunt and Swindle, a distraction that won't make a half-cent of difference to Queensland revenue and net employment, except to throw money down a black hole. As the Greens have noted, renewable energy investment brings more for jobs, as if real jobs and real energy supply were actually the current governments intentions. Or may be it is more of an invocation from a conservative political "Cargo Cult", involving magical thinking to bring back boom times of the past.

The promises made between the Adani Coal corporation, and the Queensland / Federal Governments are so ridiculous on both sides, it is really difficult to tell who is the biggest swindler, and which parties are also deceiving themselves every mad step of the way.

Its another coal mine black hole, to help fix up a broken state, now broken from years of making black holes to cater for mining export corporations. Queensland is already too much a failed raw materials export economy, that has to buy too much of its value added stuff, and development infrastructure from elsewhere. The strategy worked during the mining boom, when population levels were lower. The big money royalties were plowed into the transport and lifestyle infrastructure of expansion, to attract more people into the state. And they did, and Queensland Grew. It was the "Sunshine State". Jobs and Growth appeared to work, and politics rode the good times, until the current times of the settling in of the limits to growth.

This skilled cartoon by Tandberg was possibly something to with current weather, not long term change. But for me it is about the growing storm over proposed mining of Galilee Basin. Queensland is experience economic change and climate change, from linked causes.

Limits to growth is here, now

Too many commodity prices have fallen, the rest of the world aims to move off coal and gas, global economic growth has ran into limits, the resources profits are declining, and the barrier reef dying. As climate change is ignored, at risk is the famed beach frontage,  flooded by storm surge and sea level rise. Extreme tropical storms wash away the inappropriate real estate development, creating billion dollar reconstruction costs.  Queensland will have to soon enough have to start again from scratch.  The problems of Queensland and its economic decline and unemployment are as structural as the declining global coal industry. They are systemic, and are proving far to common to many industrial nations around the global. We are globalized and are catching the global economic diseases.  The systemic decline of human industrial civilization is underway.

The changes we have to make, are to move of what won't work any more in the near future. What renewable infrastructure can be sustained after global industrial collapse is an open question, but nothing will be achieved by not investing in our best transition efforts now. Sure, the system requires minerals and fossil resources, but not so mined so much that the production economics collapse. Cost and Scarcity, and time limits, properly applied, would encourage less waste, and better economic efficiency. Falsely cheap power and resources, a false and misleading surplus, will bring ruin.

This Adani Swindle won't cure the Queensland economy or bring back jobs. It will be a destructive waste of money. More land, water get destroyed inland, which is real future income and sustainability thrown away.  More coal to India makes for more global carbon emissions.  If new coal mines are the supposed answer to Queenslands problems, then Queensland is doomed.

Dirty reputation

Adani Coal Corp is technically bankrupt, and the global coal industry is in structural decline. It wants banks to loan them money on the basis of the promise of the wreaking the Galilee Basin. Adani Coal is an environmental swindler. Adani's environment promises are paper thin. Outside of corrupt Indian government wealth circles, Adani is corrupt environmental pariah. It gets awarded land for free from the Indian Government. It kicks those Indians living off their traditional lands, which the Indian government fails to recognize. Adani's operations degrade  and poison their environment.

Clean coal means dirty water

As Indians interviewed said 'Adani never does what it promises for the environment'. They lie  always. Like the politicians that support this mine. Adani must be really good liars, to swindle rights to large amounts of free water to 'clean coal' after only one small down payment. Although it sounded a lot, a few million don't matter when you are asking for billions in hand-outs.  Meanwhile, Queensland agriculture and towns continue to pay big bucks per day for using ground or river water. And after cleaning coal, Adani will turn downstream water into toxic coal crap, just like Tony Abbott.

Mining also takes energy

As well as requiring lots of water, mining takes lots of energy. The 'cleaned' coal is destined to be shipped to India and burned to produce its CO2, its dirty particulate emissions, sulphur dioxide, and a fair quantity of toxic ashes. The energy released in the chemical oxidation exchange gets used to boil water into hot steam, to push electricity turbine generators around. Around 60-65% of the energy is lost in the conversion to electricity, and further losses occur down the grid wiring and in the electric devices of final use. But to get the coal out of the ground in the first place, and transported, a lot of energy has to be used up. That would be in the form of diesel fuel for the many digging and cutting machines and transport for coal and rubble. There is chemical energy for explosives, and there is all that energy used for water pumping. To power the site facilities, diesel fuel electricity generators will be running full time during work periods. arge parts of the diesel fuel cost are subsidized by tax breaks. For open cut mines, there's the cost of removing the entire ecosystem, soil and rocks above. For underground mining, the energy cost of bringing the coal up to the surface.

"Mining takes energy" , and the unit costs of that energy are rising. For a marginal quality thermal coal, a long way from the coast, that's going to kill net energy gains, and profitability, even without a global decline in thermal coal markets. Even if the coal railway, if it gets built is downhill to the coast, all the trains have to make the return trip. As cheap oil is declining, in order to keep mining stuff, a lot of non-fossil fuel energy is going to be needed, to replace the on-coming shortage of cheap diesel. Thermodynamic laws are not escapable. There are limits as to how far national economies can give up everything else just to keep up mining. Ugo Bardi gives a brief summary of the big system picture here in "Mineral resources and the limits to growth".

Running out of profit

IEEFA reports that Adani coal is trying to flog off its money losing power station in India that is supposed to be using our future exported coal. It isn't great quality thermal coal. Adani are short of money, and a few billion dollars of Australian money would barely pay off their debts. Adani family have a lot of money squirrelled away to impress Australian politicians with their absolute wealth, and obviously intend to keep up appearances, with a tax haven set up for the deal.

Governments that treat their own country like dirt

Adani Mega Coal is a blasphemy in terms of ecological economics and Australian Climate Policy, if only we had a really convincing one. The political relationship of Indian Prime Minister Modi with Adani, and favour reciprocation's, and between Australian and Indian government, also should come into scrutiny and suspicion. Australian governments of today cannot depend on new coal projects being mindlessly swallowed as evidence of good government.

The only good news is that if the LNP and ALP persist with this project, we can use the natural results of this crazy coal mine corruption swindle finally boot of them out of Australian Government forever. Make sure to ompletely divest from any Australian bank and its associates, CEO,  and supporting infrastructure corporations that dare to try to help bring this project about., such as EDI-Downer. This project is worth setting up a revolt in Australia to stop it. It is a insult to good government.

Recognize and prepare for change

Australian politics needs a severe wake up call. As this article from my favorite futurist blog shows, the global economic circumstances, conditions of our industrial and economic world are changing fast. We need to change in adaptive ways, to the requirements that will be imposed us anyway by nature, or we will fail to be ready. Turmoil and failure are implicit in any transition.

If we want our peoples to thrive in this country longer term, we have to look after it. Well its off to my local MP's office again to drop off a hand written note, and a flier or two.