So we're driving from Jaipur to Agra – slowly, because northern India's December fogs are earlier than usual, and chewier. They're also smellier because – let's be frank – this is more smog than fog; weeks-long pea-soupers that seem like a hangover from industrial revolution London. Perhaps, indeed, they are – and perhaps if I'd seen it this way, more Hogarthian satire than sci-fi future, it wouldn't have scared the tripe outta me quite as it did.
Along the road, for hundreds of kilometres, people burn rubbish and crouch for warmth around small roadside fires. In stacks and house-sized mounds, on hayricks, rooftops and median strips, millions of cow-dung patties are drying for burning. In the fields, tall-chimneyed brick kilns belch black smoke into air already viscous with particulates. And then there are the vehicles, in their teeming, honking millions.
Adani mine project moves forward
Jobs, regional investement, and the battle against climate change... all will benefit, say Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Adani CEO Jeyakumar Janakaraj at an announcement in Townsville. Vision courtesy ABC News 24
As we cross from majestic Rajasthan to Uttar Pradesh, our driver, the stoic, blue-turbaned Mr Singh, welcomes us to the crime capital of India. If there's irony here it doesn't translate, but the shift is palpable. Suddenly, after Rajasthan's straight-backed, saried elegance, there are beggars, everywhere. Rag-clad people scrabble in the dust with pigs, monkeys, mangy dogs. Nature, what there is, looks beleaguered. The fog writhes with sirens, and massive black SUVs emblazoned with UP Police insignia swarm the streets like predatory megafauna. I have the impression we've driven onto some post-apocalypse movie set.
The previous day, India time, news hit that this week's Australia India Leadership Dialogue in Brisbane would see Malcolm Turnbull meet Gautam Adani to discuss a $1 billion subsidy for Adani's immense Carmichael coal mine. Subsidy, mind you, on top of the already controversial approvals, despite the already parlous state of the Great Barrier Reef and notwithstanding Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg's election promise that the project would need to "stand on its own two feet".
In my mind, as we drive, the subsidy, the scrabble for existence and
the hellish fog coagulate into the thought that scares me witless: is
this the future? Is this the world's Lorax moment come to life,
or at least to living death? Is this the extreme end of income
disparity, where the unconscionably rich take all, leaving the
inconceivably poor to squat in the dirt at their gates, unable to drink
the water or breathe the air: unable even to cook food without making
their own plight worse?
I'm reflecting that India is way ahead of us in this. We Australians get to behave like the world's irresponsible schoolboys because we have the gift (or theft) of a big clean continent that takes a lot of screwing up. But India has been at it for aeons. Throughout most of that time – arguably still – the rich have created vast and indescribable beauty by creating clearings in the forest of the ubiquitous poor. Using the poor to build the massive walls – the forts and palaces, villas and compounds – designed to keep their own filth and sound and stink at bay, the rich then shut the gates.
Now, although the clearing mentality persists still, it can no longer work. "This winter," declares an aircon ad in the Hindustan Times, "no matter how high the pollution is, the healthiest air is in your room". Do they not see that the "me-now" solution only makes everything worse for us-later? That even the grandest sultan can no longer wall his oasis. Eventually even Adani, even Turnbull, and their children and grandchildren, must breathe the air and drink the water.
This is the future that whacks me. I feel poisoned by it, infiltrated, sickened, as though a grime of death had covered the world, blocking all sunlight. Later that evening I discover that I have, in fact, been poisoned, not by smog or dystopia (although probably neither helped) but by a much more treatable gastritis, that earns me a stern talking-to from a handsome Brahmin doctor.
But the fog, and the dystopia, signal a real malaise, one for which
there's no miracle antibiotic. Indeed, climate change is the world's
superbug, bred from a billion unthinking me-now cures; just make it OK
for me, for now, for here.
Australia, even in selling coal to countries like India, is acting like the worst kind of irresponsible patient, pretending – as Frydenberg has for years – that "most importantly" our purpose is to "help lift millions out of energy poverty" when it can only worsen their plight, and ours, while making the mega-rich richer. That's bad enough. Then to subsidise that racket, using public money to PAY the rich to destroy our reef, and our climate, is plain bonkers. What are they thinking?
It's especially bizarre given Adani Group's track record at a project in Gujarat which, according to a 2013 Indian Ministry of Environment report, has involved persistent and flagrant breaches of permit conditions, large-scale destruction of mangrove forests and creek systems, groundwater salination and unapproved reclamations.
Queensland law now requires mining licensees to be a "suitable person". Adani's licence was bought from another company before the suitable person test was in place, so it has never had to face scrutiny in this regard.
But regardless of fouling Australia's environment, there's the fouling of India, and the world, as all that coal is burned. And, yes, there are alternatives. Consider, for example, Pollinate Energy in Bangalore, co-founded by young Sydney law graduate Emma Colenbrander. In four years, Pollinate has quietly shifted more than 80,000 of India's 300 million without access to electricity onto solar LEDs.
Think what $1 billion could do in such a forum. Surely, if we really wanted to lift India's poor from the dust without worsening the grey scrabble of their lives, that would be the way to go?
Links
Jobs, regional investement, and the battle against climate change... all will benefit, say Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Adani CEO Jeyakumar Janakaraj at an announcement in Townsville. Vision courtesy ABC News 24
As we cross from majestic Rajasthan to Uttar Pradesh, our driver, the stoic, blue-turbaned Mr Singh, welcomes us to the crime capital of India. If there's irony here it doesn't translate, but the shift is palpable. Suddenly, after Rajasthan's straight-backed, saried elegance, there are beggars, everywhere. Rag-clad people scrabble in the dust with pigs, monkeys, mangy dogs. Nature, what there is, looks beleaguered. The fog writhes with sirens, and massive black SUVs emblazoned with UP Police insignia swarm the streets like predatory megafauna. I have the impression we've driven onto some post-apocalypse movie set.
The previous day, India time, news hit that this week's Australia India Leadership Dialogue in Brisbane would see Malcolm Turnbull meet Gautam Adani to discuss a $1 billion subsidy for Adani's immense Carmichael coal mine. Subsidy, mind you, on top of the already controversial approvals, despite the already parlous state of the Great Barrier Reef and notwithstanding Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg's election promise that the project would need to "stand on its own two feet".
 |
| Illustration: Simon Bosch |
I'm reflecting that India is way ahead of us in this. We Australians get to behave like the world's irresponsible schoolboys because we have the gift (or theft) of a big clean continent that takes a lot of screwing up. But India has been at it for aeons. Throughout most of that time – arguably still – the rich have created vast and indescribable beauty by creating clearings in the forest of the ubiquitous poor. Using the poor to build the massive walls – the forts and palaces, villas and compounds – designed to keep their own filth and sound and stink at bay, the rich then shut the gates.
Now, although the clearing mentality persists still, it can no longer work. "This winter," declares an aircon ad in the Hindustan Times, "no matter how high the pollution is, the healthiest air is in your room". Do they not see that the "me-now" solution only makes everything worse for us-later? That even the grandest sultan can no longer wall his oasis. Eventually even Adani, even Turnbull, and their children and grandchildren, must breathe the air and drink the water.
This is the future that whacks me. I feel poisoned by it, infiltrated, sickened, as though a grime of death had covered the world, blocking all sunlight. Later that evening I discover that I have, in fact, been poisoned, not by smog or dystopia (although probably neither helped) but by a much more treatable gastritis, that earns me a stern talking-to from a handsome Brahmin doctor.
 |
| Australian coal is exported to India. Photo: Glenn Hunt |
Australia, even in selling coal to countries like India, is acting like the worst kind of irresponsible patient, pretending – as Frydenberg has for years – that "most importantly" our purpose is to "help lift millions out of energy poverty" when it can only worsen their plight, and ours, while making the mega-rich richer. That's bad enough. Then to subsidise that racket, using public money to PAY the rich to destroy our reef, and our climate, is plain bonkers. What are they thinking?
It's especially bizarre given Adani Group's track record at a project in Gujarat which, according to a 2013 Indian Ministry of Environment report, has involved persistent and flagrant breaches of permit conditions, large-scale destruction of mangrove forests and creek systems, groundwater salination and unapproved reclamations.
Queensland law now requires mining licensees to be a "suitable person". Adani's licence was bought from another company before the suitable person test was in place, so it has never had to face scrutiny in this regard.
But regardless of fouling Australia's environment, there's the fouling of India, and the world, as all that coal is burned. And, yes, there are alternatives. Consider, for example, Pollinate Energy in Bangalore, co-founded by young Sydney law graduate Emma Colenbrander. In four years, Pollinate has quietly shifted more than 80,000 of India's 300 million without access to electricity onto solar LEDs.
Think what $1 billion could do in such a forum. Surely, if we really wanted to lift India's poor from the dust without worsening the grey scrabble of their lives, that would be the way to go?
Links
- Adani Coal Mine Project: Queensland Government Approves Rail Line, Camp
- IEA Says Australia’s Coal Plans Don’t Match Climate Realities
- Quentin Bryce In High-Powered Group Calling For Coal Power To Be Phased Out
- Hazelwood Will Close In March, French Bosses Tell Power Plant Workers
- Four Environmental Reasons Why Fast-Tracking The Carmichael Coal Mine Is A Bad Idea
- Coal Will Be Important 'For Many, Many Decades To Come', Says Turnbull
- Climate Change Challenge To Gina Rinehart’s Alpha Mine Dismissed By Court
- Dutch Parliament Votes To Close Down Country's Coal Industry
- Galilee Basin Coal Must Be Left In Ground As A ‘Priority’ – New Report
- Australian Coal Industry Records Large Losses, Experts Advise Against Investing Super Funds In The Industry
- Adani Should Bow Out Gracefully From Its Carmichael Coal Mine
