Black coal, thin ice: the discursive legitimisation of Australian coal in the age of climate change

Abstract

Despite mounting urgency to mitigate climate change, new coal mines have recently been approved in various countries, including in Southeast Asia and Australia. Adani’s Carmichael coal mine project in the Galilee Basin, Queensland (Australia), was approved in June 2019 after 9 years of political contestation. Counteracting global efforts to decarbonise energy systems, this mine will substantially increase Australia’s per capita CO2 emissions, which are already among the highest in the world. Australia’s deepening carbon lock-in can be attributed to the essential economic role played by the coal industry, which gives it structural power to dominate political dynamics. Furthermore, tenacious networks among the traditional mass media, mining companies, and their shareholders have reinforced the politico-economic influence of the industry, allowing the mass media to provide a venue for the industry’s outside lobbying strategies as well as ample backing for its discursive legitimisation with pro-coal narratives. To investigate the enduring symbiosis between the coal industry, business interests, the Australian state, and mainstream media, we draw on natural language processing techniques and systematically study discourses about the coal mine in traditional and social media between 2017 and 2020. Our results indicate that while the mine’s approval was aided by the pro-coal narratives of Queensland’s main daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail, collective public sentiment on Twitter has diverged significantly from the newspaper’s stance. The rationale for the mine’s approval, notwithstanding increasing public contestation, lies in the enduring symbiosis between the traditional economic actors and the state; and yet, our results highlight a potential corner of the discursive battlefield favourable for hosting more diverse arguments.

Is climate change the ‘elephant in the room’ for outdoor environmental education?

“…Numerous authors have shared concerns that society has adopted a ‘business as a usual’ approach focusing on the “continued widespread political prioritisation of gross domestic product” (Raworth, 2017 , p. e49), neoliberal agenda and frameworks (Warner et al, 2020 ), and climate coloniality legacies (Sultana, 2022 ) placing profit over the planet and halting or stifling the opportunity for change. An example of this is the Australian Government’s decision to allow the Adani Coal Mine in the Queensland Galilee Basin to go ahead, even though some have argued it “represents a huge setback in terms of Australia’s efforts to mitigate climate change” (Stutzer et al, 2021 , p. 3). Furthermore, Australia’s inaction to transition to cleaner or renewable energy sources to achieve a net-zero emission plan was highlighted by being awarded the ‘colossal fossil’ award at the recent COP26 summit, exemplifying its continued dependence on coal and fossil fuel exports (Milman, 2021 ).…”

Stranded Assets in the Coal Export Industry? The Case of the Australian Galilee Basin

“…In other words, chances are high that even the downsized Carmichael project ends up as stranded asset. The decision to continue the development of the Carmichael mine was apparently rather a political decision (Stutzer et al 2021;Christoff 2022), not an economically driven one.…”

“…Despite the risk of asset stranding, the Australian government has continued to support coal and to forecast further increase in Australian coal production (Christoff 2022;Stutzer et al 2021;SEI et al 2021). This perpetuation of the coal lock-in increases the risk for asset stranding (Unruh 2019).…”

Lobbying Influence -- The Role of Money, Strategies and Measurements

“…Over the past decades, the topic has gained even more practical relevance as debates around urgent policy agendas have become increasingly contested and politicized (Lupia 2013;Bouleau 2019;Fowler and Gollust 2015;Druckman and Lupia 2017). As such, scholars have emphasized the importance of investigating the politics-especially the working of lobbying-behind policymaking, for instance, in migration (Spirig 2021), climate change (Stokes 2016;Goldberg et al 2020;Farrell 2016;Kim et al 2016;Cory et al 2021), energy system transitions (Stutzer et al 2021;Hughes et al 2020;Duygan et al 2021), and public health (Bowers and Cohen 2018;Wouters 2020;Harris and Moss 2021). Inspecting what it means for competing stakeholders to be politically influential and how the distribution of influence is linked to their endowments as well as lobbying practices thus leads to a better understanding of the nature of political contestations.…”