The coal export industry often claims that it is essential to NSW’s prosperity. A damning report from NSW Net Zero Commission, released this month, showed just the opposite: fuelling global warming with more greenhouse gas pollution will drive the NSW economy into the ground.
Modelling by the UNSW’s Institute for Climate Risk and Response and Deloitte, commissioned by the Commission, found that climate change is already causing a major drag on NSW’s economy, and that this will worsen if global warming is not controlled.
The figures were shocking. NSW residents’ incomes were estimated to be 18% lower in 2024 than they would have otherwise been in a world without climate change. That means each person in the state was made $20,000 poorer by global warming that year.
Money made on coal mining now is coming at a very high cost. Deloitte’s modelling projected that by 2070, climate change could result in a loss of 46,000 jobs per year for Sydney’s economy, with mounting year-on-year impacts making it increasingly harder for industries to recover and sustain long-term growth.
Construction was named as one of the more vulnerable industries in Sydney. The report noted there would be “direct reductions in labour productivity across the urban construction workforce due to extreme heat” and that slowing demand for construction services would make it “harder for the sector to grow and create new jobs.”
The government already knows a lot about the boggling scale of damage and loss that will come with higher global warming. More frequent bushfires will harm human health and impact air quality. Rising sea levels will take coastal homes, roads and suburbs. Hotter days will hurt the tourism industry. These impacts can be estimated, but the impact on people’s lives, families and wellbeing is harder to understand.
Within days of the Commission’s report landing, NSW’s Environment Minister Penny Sharpe delivered a response to earlier advice from the NSW Net Zero Commission warning that continued coal mine expansions and extensions would be incompatible with preventing global warming exceeding the dangerous thresholds established in the Paris climate agreement and written into law in NSW.
Minister Sharpe accepted four out of five findings from the NSW Net Zero Commission’s landmark Coal Mining Emissions Spotlight report, agreeing that NSW planning authorities must “meaningfully consider greenhouse gas emissions and their impacts in all planning decisions, including those for additional coal mining.”
This is where the balance starts to tip between making quick dollars on coal mining now and paying the unmanageable cost of those decisions mounting year after year from now on. Meaningful consideration of climate change would change everything.
Just hours after her announcement the biggest coal mining project ever considered in NSW was referred to the state’s independent planning authority, the Independent Planning Commission NSW (IPC), for a public hearing and decision.
If approved, Glencore and Yancoal would be allowed to continue open-cut mining at Hunter Valley Operations (HVO) near Singleton for another 19 years. The project would pump an enormous 800 million tonnes of carbon pollution into the atmosphere and hasten the economic costs highlighted in the Net Zero Commission’s report.
Next month, the IPC will hear the Hunter community’s concerns about how the project will escalate climate disasters, harm water and worsen air pollution. It’s imperative that the IPC seek input from the NSW Net Zero Commission about the impacts of the proposal.
While NSW’s energy is increasingly sourced from renewables, the NSW government has shied away from acting to prevent more coal mining projects from fueling global warming and climate change. As a result, coal companies make enormous profits, while communities and governments bear the cost of more frequent and severe disasters. The evidence is becoming impossible to ignore: stopping coal expansions and extensions is key to achieving a stable climate, protecting jobs and communities, and safeguarding NSW’s economic security in the long run.