Will the Anvil Hill open-cut coal mine go ahead?
Yesterday I received an email via Greenpeace Australia about the Anvil Hill open-cut coal mining project:
The Land and Environment Court will hand down their decision on the Anvil Hill mine court case at 4pm today:
Newcastle student Peter Gray lodged a court challenge against the controversial Anvil Hill open-cut coal mine on the grounds that there is no consideration of its climate change impacts. The action was taken after repeated refusals by the state government to consider the climate implications of new coal mine proposals, despite Premier Morris Iemma labelling climate change the greatest threat facing our environment and way of life.
Mr Gray’s legal team will argue that the Director-General (D-G) of the Department of Planning must instruct Centennial Coal - developer of Anvil Hill - to assess the full greenhouse gas emissions from the project, including the huge volumes of carbon dioxide that will be released when the coal is burnt. This will mean rejecting Centennial’s current Environmental Assessment, which does not include a full greenhouse assessment. If approved, Anvil Hill will produce up to 10.5 million tonnes of coal a year which, when burnt, will produce more greenhouse pollution that NSW’s entire transport sector of more than four million vehicles. Yet the greenhouse implications of this are ignored in the Government’s approval process.
Anvil Hill is situated at Wybong, west of Muswellbrook in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW, Australia. (Google Earth link to Anvil Hill).
A broad group of concerned citizens, residents and activists have banded together to form The Anvil Hill Alliance and are determined to stop the mine going ahead.
[Anvil Hill] is the largest intact stand of remnant vegetation on the Central Hunter Valley floor, home to threatened species and indigenous heritage. Centennial Coal wants to lay waste to this with an open-cut coal mine that will produce at least 9 million tonnes of coal a year and help drive the massive expansion of the Hunter Valley coal industry. If this goes ahead it will accelerate the onset of dangerous climate change, the greatest threat to human and non-human life.
According to an announcement on the AHA’s website:
The NSW Government has passed amendments to the Planning Act that are designed to squash the court challenge against the proposed Anvil Hill coal mine. Planning Minister Frank Sartor introduced the amendments claiming that they were “housekeeping measures” but in fact they will circumvent this court challenge that may result in the greenhouse impacts of all Major Projects being properly assessed.
This is a terrible shame and underlies the hypocrisy inherent in Government thinking. On one hand the NSW Government have shown themselves to be extremely progressive with respect to global warming, with their NGAC scheme, but all that good work could be undone with the stroke of a pen if they allow this abomination to go ahead. Australia is already the most aggressive polluter on Earth, with each Australian being responsible for an average of twenty eight (28) metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent every year.
As the climate change section of the AHA’s website makes clear,
The Hunter Valley is one of the world’s top coal producing regions. Newcastle is the world’s largest coal export port. Every year it exports 80 million tonnes of coal, about 10% of all world trade. Yet despite growing awareness of the threat of climate change, the NSW Government is approving new coal mines with absolutely no consideration of their climate impact. 15 new mines and 10 expansions of existing mines are in the pipeline which would add another 60 million tonnes a year to the 110 million tonnes of coal produced by Hunter mines. This increase alone is almost double NSW’s annual consumption of coal.
Actions against Centennial Coal, the company behind this outrage, are taking many forms. Greenpeace shut down CC’s AGM the other day in protest against the proposed mine. Centennial Coal have comissioned their own environmental impact study showing that the coal mine will be a boon to the area, but if that impact study fails to take greenhouse gas emissions into account then its a miserable failure at best.
The world does not need more coal mines. We need to divert the resources and funding that are currently propping up this malignant industry into cost effective solar, wind, wave, geo-thermal and other clean technologies. Carbon Planet is meeting with Greenpeace this afternoon to discuss how we can help in this crucial fight. The time for words has passed. We are entering a time of action, a time of consequences. — DS
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