Last week, protesters rallied in
the major cities across Australia, opposing Adani's announcement for
self-financing the controversial Carmichael mine. Adani's Australian venture,
the Carmichael mine-and-rail project, was initially proposed as an A$16.5
billion mega-mine with 60 million tonnes a year capacity. The latest
announcement is the second time the project has been scaled down, and it now
stands as a 10-15 million tonnes a year self-financed project at A$2 billion.
But as the various messages on
display on the streets last Saturday demonstrated, public concern around
Adani's coalmine has snowballed into something much bigger. Apart from the red
and white on black STOP ADANI posters that have by now become ubiquitous across
protests and marches around the country, people also carried placards demanding "a renewable future" for Australia asking, "The climate is changing, why aren't
we?"
This is not a one-off event. The
scale of the protests that were organised in a flash to respond to Adani's
announcement demonstrate the breath of the venture's unpopularity, as well as
the network of resistance that has built up over the years. Australia is
witnessing a tsunami of climate protests, and a single name, Adani, has emerged
as the byword for the government's inaction on climate change.
Consider these two events from
last month:
A week before these protests,
students marched on the streets demanding that the government bring in a plan
to tackle climate change. Inspired by the 15-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg, thousands of Australian school children called a
national school strike to march on the streets, and fill city squares to demand
a safe future. Delegations of students met members of the state and federal
parliament, asking what their plan was to stop climate change. Some of the most
visible signs at the rallies included 'Don't be a Fossil Fool', and "It's
getting hot in here, so get out all your coals". Students also drummed up a
chorus of "Stop Adani" chants during the demonstrations.
Two weeks before the national
school strikes, bushfires swept through the drought-stricken state of
Queensland. One of the many images that surfaced in its aftermath was of a
scorched STOP sign on a dirty-track in a country town, against a flat,
blackened landscape. Someone had scrawled ADANI under it. Queensland's farmers,
reeling under the impacts of drought have been demanding decisive climate
action from a climate denialist Liberal Federal government. Prime Minister
Scott Morrison's "let us pray for rain" response to this extreme event became a
national joke.

Students met federal members of parliament asking toStop the Adani mine as the first step for Australia to stop building new coal
mines and transitioning to 100% renewables. December 2018. Photo sourced
from schoolstrike4climate.com
For the ten years that I have
worked along with environmental groups in Australia, I have seen the Adani
group's Carmichael mine emerge as the most popular and high-profile
environmental issue. Ten years ago, Queensland was in the middle of a
prosperous albeit highly environmentally destructive resource boom. At that
time, the focal point for civil society's opposition to rampant mining was the
Great Barrier Reef. The Reef, the largest living organism on earth, is under
severe risk of bleaching and dying from climate change. Activist groups,
scientists and even the United Nations warned against the state government's plans to
expand ports and gas processing plants along the coast of Queensland abutting
the Reef.
And then came the proposals for
mining coal in the Galilee Basin, Australia's largest coal reserve, a semi-arid
region in Central Queensland as large as the United Kingdom. Adani's Carmichael
mine, at its initial proposed capacity of 60 million tonnes of coal per annum
production capacity, was going to be its biggest mega-mine, and also its first.
It was going to be the key to a total of nine projects. Five of these mines in
the Galilee, including Carmichael, were going to be larger than any existing
coalmine in the country.
Approvals for Carmichael and
other mines in the region progressed through various stages, both state and
federal, around the same time that the world was moving towards a Paris
Agreement. Carmichael received federal approval with the single largest number
of environmental conditions ever received - a total of 36 - in September 2014
under the Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
Prime Minister Abbott's tenure
was known for an ideological championing of coal, opposition to renewables and
a denial of climate change. Under Abbott, who dismantled the previous Labor
government's carbon tax, the Carmichael mine was deemed not only in Australia's
national interest, but also in India's as an alleviator of poverty through the
provisioning of electricity.
In stark opposition to the
government's mindset, Australian civil society considered the Paris Agreement a
definite signal for moving away from coal. It has been estimated that to keep
the world below the 1.5 degrees of warming agreed in Paris, the world's
existing coal reserves need to be phased out, and new coalmines must not be
built. A scientific report "Unburnable Coal" by
eminent climate scientist Will Steffen estimates that "90 per cent of known,
extractable coal in Australia's existing coal reserves must stay in the
ground". The report conclusively states, "…There is no justification for
opening new coal mines".
Australia's coal exports have
also declined on account of China's reduced demand and Australia's oldest coal
port at Newcastle is now preparing for a future without coal. It is feared that
opening up the Galilee Basin during such times would risk existing jobs in
established coal regions. Even though both the Queensland and the federal
government strongly support prising open Australia's largest coal reservoir
through the Adani mine under these economically and climactically contradictory
circumstances, civil society groups joined hands against the Galilee venture
for myriad reasons.
Its most notable face is
the Stop Adani movement consisting of a network of 40 national,
state and regional-level environmental organisations united under the common
purpose of stopping the Adani mine as a first step towards making Australia
move away from exporting coal. The network registered 100 new local groups from
all around the country on their website within the first three months. At a
Stop Adani town hall event in Sydney in September 2017 that I attended, the
legendary environmentalist Bob Brown promised to make the movement the "biggest
Australia has ever seen". Such meetings occurred across cities, and towns not
just as a show of opposition, but also to develop strategies for local actions
in order to pressure elected members against the Adani mine.
Over the last two years, a pair
of paper mache heads belonging to former Prime Minister Turnbull and Adani
became as prominent as the Stop Adani signage at protests across Australian
cities. At a Stop Adani protest in Sydney last October, I spotted the Indian
businessman and Australian Prime Minister walking hand in hand with a stuffed
bag with 'Your Taxes $1 billion' written on it. The Sydney protest drew of
crowd of a couple thousands, and was part of Stop Adani's 'Big Day of Action', a coordinated national day of 60 anti-Adani
demonstrations around Australia.
The highly visible movement even
sports its own catchy merchandise. Volunteers at protest rallies make brisk
business from selling three or four different kinds of Stop Adani T-shirts, can
coolers, key chains and coffee mugs, apart from variously sized placards and
posters and tool-kits for local groups to start saying "no" to Adani "Street by
Street". Even Stop Adani dangler earrings, worn by both men and women youth
activists, can be spotted at such events.
**********
The year I landed in Australia,
Australian Labor dealt a severe defeat to the incumbent Liberal Government of John
Howard and Kevin Rudd formed government with a people's mandate for climate
action. Australia's mandate for 2007 was climate change action. From 2008 till
2018, Australia witnessed an unusual decade of leadership spills across both
parties and drastic backflips on climate policy. Rudd's Carbon Reduction
Pollution Scheme (CPRS) was struck down twice in Parliament, and his successor
Julia Gillard's Carbon Tax was scrapped by the Liberal Government of Tony
Abbott, the prime minister for coal.
There are two key differences to
the focus of civil society groups between 2007 and 2019. The first is that
emissions are now strongly linked in the popular imagination to "fossil fuels",
and in Australia's case, particularly to coal. The second is that the ambition of
both Queensland and federal governments to open up the Galilee Basin for
coalmining has backfired not just on climate and environmental, but also on
economic grounds.
Adani's mine itself, labelled a "climate bomb" with emissions potentials as massive as the Keystone
Pipeline in North America, along with concern over the company's environmental
track record and opaque corporate structure has lent itself to the Australian
imagination as a focal target for a unified civil society resistance. The
various arms of the Stop Adani resistance have captured people's frustration
over the Liberal government's denial of climate change as well as the Labor
Opposition's non-commitment to the demand of 'no new coal mines' to exert
pressure in electorates and influence voting patterns.
The debate over the Carmichael
mine and the Galilee Basin continues to rage as it has done in the last eight
years, with Resource Minister Matt Canavan's vociferous championing of Carmichael and the Galilee venture being
consistently countered by a variety of public concern representatives and
groups. A poll of 1,400 people conducted by the progressive think tank
Australia Institute found that 64 per cent opposed a $1 billion public loan to
build the Carmichael rail network. Coal consistently came last on respondents' lists of where they would like to see their taxpayer funds spent during the
poll.
Recent political changes hint at
a climate change election again in May 2019, 11 years after Kevin Rudd
attempted to make Australia take a responsible step to resolve the "biggest moral challenge of all
times". The Liberals
lost their longest held seat of Wentworth that boasts Australia's iconic
surfing beach Bondi to an independent, this October. This 'Blue Ribbon seat' was held by Malcolm Turnbull, the last prime minister and the only Liberal
party leader who supported action on climate change. When Australia's political
rigmarole replaced Turnbull with Scott Morrison, a climate denialist, notorious
for his coal stunt in Parliament, voters paid back in the Wentworth byelection.
At a pre-election candidates
forum organised by Stop Adani coordinators at the pavilion by the beach in
Bondi, the public sentiment reflected a zero tolerance towards the Liberal
government's lack of accountability on climate and the support for Carmichael.
Volunteers also recruited people for a door knocking activity to speak to 'as
many people as possible' before the elections to vote 'for climate' and against 'Carmichael'.
Australian activists and farmers
have been known not to see eye to eye on politics and environmental issues.
Farmers have also been known to vote conservatively and either deny or remain
silent on the matter of climate change. But the rampant scale of changes in the
last 10 years, both climactic and government proclivity towards coalmining at
the cost of other industries has united them. And their common focus, their
first measure of accountability from governments, is stopping Adani. As the
country heads towards a 2019 federal election, Adani will be the shorthand for
failing Australia's climate.