Lethal Heating: 07/17/19

17/07/2019

Adani Demands Names Of CSIRO Scientists Reviewing Groundwater Plans

ABC News - Josh Robertson

Stage 1 construction is underway, but Thursday's approval means the miner can now start significant work. (Twitter: Matthew Canavan)

Key points:

Emails show Adani gave the federal environment department five days to provide the names of people from the CSIRO and Geoscience Australia involved in the review
Adani says it wrote to the department to request "assurance that individuals involved in any review processes were independent"
CSIRO's Sam Popovski says "our scientists just want to get on and do their best job ... without their social media being tracked"

Adani demanded the names of all federal agency scientists reviewing its contentious groundwater plans so it could check if they were "anti-coal" activists, emails obtained under freedom of information show.
The revelation has alarmed CSIRO staff representatives, who said it indicated Adani had "a deliberate strategy" to pressure scientists by searching for personal information it could use to try to "discredit their work".
Emails obtained under freedom of information by environmental group Lock The Gate show Adani gave the federal environment department five days to provide "a list of each person from the CSIRO and Geoscience Australia involved in the review".
"Adani simply wants to know who is involved in the review to provide it with peace of mind that it is being treated fairly and that the review will not be hijacked by activists with a political, as opposed to scientific, agenda," the company told the department on January 25.
A department spokeswoman said it "consulted with CSIRO and Geoscience Australia about Adani's request" but did not provide the names "as the advice on the plans was received from CSIRO and Geoscience Australia, rather than individuals within those agencies".
Days before the demand, in a January 21 newspaper article Adani had questioned the independence of a scientist leading a Queensland review into the company's bird conservation plan because he tweeted from a climate rally nine months earlier.
The ABC revealed in February that Adani last year hired a law firm, AJ & Co, that had drafted a commercial proposal called "Taking the Gloves Off", in which it vowed to act as the company's "trained attack dog".
It proposed a "war" strategy including that Adani "not settle for government department's dragging out decisions — use the legal system to pressure decision makers".

Infographic: Law firm AJ & Co's draft strategy document for Adani. (Supplied)

In a section called "Play the Man", it said: "social media is a tool to use against ... decision makers. Look for evidence of bias..."
AJ & Co subsequently threatened legal action against activists, moved to bankrupt an Indigenous opponent and applied for ABC journalists' expenses, phone records and emails under FOI.
But the firm has said it rejected the "Taking The Gloves Off" strategy internally.
In February, Adani told the ABC it "won't apologise for pursuing our legal rights" but "will not comment in detail on the legal firms we use, their marketing material and any matters where they may represent us or advice we may receive".
But last week Adani said in a statement it had "never seen, received or endorsed the AJ & Co pages published by the ABC".
Adani said it had written to the federal environment department in January to request "assurance that individuals involved in any review processes were independent".
This followed "concerning reports at the time that the state environmental regulator had commissioned a review which constituted individuals who had expressed anti-coal, anti-mining sentiments", it said.

'Adani seemed to be suggesting bias'
Sam Popovski, a former livestock scientist and now secretary of the CSIRO staff association, said it was "the first time it's come to our attention that names of scientists involved in a scientific process have been requested".

A document titled "Adani Commercial Proposal — Taking the 'gloves' off" from legal firm AJ & Co.

"We're very concerned on behalf of our scientists at the CSIRO that a big company would go into looking at the personal lives of our members, including trawling their social media, in order to potentially discredit their work," he said.
"It was clear that Adani seemed to be suggesting bias, or potential bias, way before any of the scientific evidence was actually presented to the department.
"We are concerned that that type of behaviour might be encouraged or used in the future by other commercial entities or parties seeking to achieve a commercial outcome.

"Our scientists just want to get on and do their best job they can and provide the most rigorous, independent scientific advice, without their social media being tracked, and without their personal lives and potentially their families' personal lives being assessed and interfered with."

Emails show that 10 days before Adani asked for names, Geoscience Australia's acting director of groundwater advice and data raised concerns that the company had "actively searched/viewed" his and a colleague's Linked In profiles.
He reported to a manager that one of his former academic supervisors was an expert witness in a Queensland Land Court challenge against Adani, raising "potential for perceived conflict of interest".
"Thought I would share this reminder in case a query/challenge comes from left field. I'm perhaps being paranoid," he said.
The manager replied: "I have no concerns, however I will flag it with the executive here simply so that they are aware."
Emails also highlight concerns at CSIRO's senior ranks around relaying its findings of flaws in Adani's draft plans to federal Environment Minister Melissa Price, who later issued approvals in controversial circumstances.
"This could blow sky high," CSIRO's land and water director Jane Coram told colleagues ahead of a March 28 ministerial briefing.

Explainer: What we know about Adani's Carmichael coal mine

Here's what we know — and still don't know — about Adani's Carmichael coal mine project in central Queensland.

Under the terms of the review of Adani's groundwater plans, it was not to be provided with information directly from CSIRO and Geoscience Australia.
But on January 7, the federal environment department agreed to Adani's request that it provide the names of five CSIRO and Geoscience Australia staff involved in a video conference about groundwater with the department and the company late last year.
Mr Popovski said there did not appear to be "any reason for those names to have been released".
"The information that both the department and Adani actually need is the comprehensive scientific analysis," he said.
"If a scientific review is being conducted by CSIRO, there are usually multiple people involved and that science is rigorously reviewed before it is then provided to the department.

"So in our view, there are very limited circumstances, if any, for names to be released to a commercial entity.

"CSIRO's brand relies on its integrity and independence, and anything that commercial organisations or the government of the day do to threaten that brand and that trust that it's established with the Australian community can only be detrimental to the future."
However, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said he could understand why Adani demanded the names of the scientists.
"I mean they were made to jump through more environmental hoops than perhaps any previous project in the nation and no doubt they wanted to determine that, I suppose, those arguing against their proposals were not some sort of quasi anti-development groups and individuals," he said.

'More than a little disturbing'

Scientists say they are concerned that their social media profiles have been viewed by AJ & Co. (ABC News)

Lock the Gate campaigner Ellie Smith said: "We saw in the case of the independent review of the black-throated finch that scientists' names were brought through the mud through the media."

"So I can imagine that there was a lot of pressure on those individuals within Geoscience Australia and CSIRO."
Kirsten Lovejoy, a former Greens candidate and long-time policy adviser in the Queensland Environment Department, said she discovered her profile was viewed by an AJ & Co lawyer in March.
"It was more than a little disturbing ... they were looking for details about me personally," she said.
"People who work for various organisations, including the public service, have to adhere to processes and codes that make sure that they operate with integrity.
"To see undue pressure placed on those organisations is particularly outrageous."

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How Germany Closed Its Coal Industry Without Sacking A Single Miner

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

Hans Mohlek stood at the gates of the Prosper-Haniel coal mine in the Ruhr Valley in the west of Germany on a warm summer afternoon earlier this month, looked up and wept quietly.
The mine closed last December and Mohlek was among the last workers to leave. But what moved him so much on a recent visit with a handful of journalists was not just end of mining at Prosper-Haniel, but the end of a way of life that it represented.
Mohlek understood, he said, that the industry was no longer sustainable, but he missed the camaraderie of the mines.

Activists climb into the Garzweiler lignite mine in Germany on June 22 as part of a protest against coal mining. Credit: DPA

While Australia continues to open new coal mines, Germany is in the midst of closing down its entire coal sector. The last of the country’s black coal mines was decommissioned last year, the victim of the economic reality that nations like Australia could dig the stuff up cheaper than the Germans could.
Now Germany is beginning the process of ending its brown coal industry and shutting down the energy plants that it feeds so it can meet its agreements under the Paris climate accord.

Some see Germany’s audacious decommissioning of the industry as a model from which Australian has much to learn. Others believe that Australia is simply politically and culturally ill-equipped to do so.
The sheer scale of the German undertaking is hard to even contemplate from the Australian perspective, where coal is still king and where significant political decisions are met with particularly stern punishment.

Miners hold the last lump of coal during a closing ceremony of the last German coal mine Prosper-Haniel in Bottrop, Germany on December 21, 2018. Credit: AP

Germany’s industrial sector has been a force so great that it has shaped the modern world. Germany followed Great Britain into the industrial revolution, but with coal mining and steel manufacturing in its Ruhr Valley it soon caught up.

The Ruhr’s heavy industry fuelled German militarism, helping spur it to two terrible world wars and then from the mid-1940s it was the engine that helped a shattered nation recover. It then formed the heart of the European Coal and Steel Community, which evolved into the European Union.

By then Germany was so determined to become a force for good that a distinct form of capitalism - known as Rhenish capitalism - evolved in the mines and steelworks of the Ruhr Valley, says social historian Professor Stefan Berger. Rhenish capitalism was - is - marked by an aversion to conflict. Unions work closely with management and major business decisions are not made without significant community consultation.At the height of the industry, in 1957, Germany produced 150 million tonnes of black coal and employed 607,000 miners. The nation became an exporter of plant and equipment as well as chemicals and vehicles.
In the decades that followed though Germany had to sink its mines deeper and deeper to reach the black coal, and the government was forced to subsidise the industry to keep it viable. Under an agreement between business, unions and the federal government the mines were consolidated under a single owner, RAG, and long-term plans were put in place to close the industry.
Operating under a slogan that, loosely translated, declares that no one would be left behind in the pits, it was determined that not a single miner would be forced out of work. Instead pits were closed progressively across the region. Workers who wanted to stay on were transferred from mine to mine, while others were offered retraining, or if they were over 50, generous voluntary payouts.
To maintain the communities from which the miners came, new transport infrastructure and universities were built, waterways rehabilitated and mine sites and coking plants were converted into parks, exhibition areas and museums.
The last mine was closed last year and today RAG’s headquarters at what was once Europe’s largest coking plant is part of a complex that is a world heritage site. RAG still employs 5000 staff across the region.
Some work in offices dedicated to managing pensions and compensation, many more are engineers, working to rehabilitate the landscape and maintain the pumps that keep the region’s poisoned groundwater below ground, part of RAG’s €220 million ($355 million) annual “eternity fund”. According to one RAG executive, the company expects that more energy will be expended on the pumps than was extracted from the mines in the first place.
With the black coal industry closed, German policymakers turned to the nation’s brown coal, the softer, wetter, dirtier material still burnt to create 37 per cent of the nation’s energy - 41 gigawatts of power. In January this year, the government announced that it would close the brown coal industry by 2038 in order to meet its emissions targets under the Paris agreement.
Observing the lessons learnt from the closure of the black coal industry, the transition would be phased and orderly, supported by government and marked by cooperation between unions and industry. It would be a “just transition” that will in the coming 20 years cost 20,000 jobs.

An offshore wind farm operated by RWE. The rapid shift to renewables has shaken up the country's energy market. Credit: Bloomberg

One of the men who has led this transition is Michael Mersmann, director of global affairs with German mining union IG BCE. Mersmann is well travelled, charismatic and blunt.
Asked if he thinks that Australia could manage such a transition when and if the time comes he says “No”.
"One of the biggest problems Australia has is there is no existing relationship between employers, trade unions and states," he said.
"In your country you are rather heading towards a conflict, not a consensus. What we are trying to do here is have softer negotiations and find a solution at an earlier point."
But when you explore the notion in Australia, you discover there is another stumbling block. There is simply no acceptance in Australia that coal has a limited future.
Tony Maher, the CFMMEU's mining boss, has worked closely with Mersmann over the years and admires what Germany has achieved with transition. Indeed he notes that his German colleagues are often appalled by the state of industrial relations in other Western nations. “They see it as a problem in the English-speaking world, this culture of ‘sack them and forget them’.”
But he points out that much of Australia’s coal is destined for markets in Asia, which are not bound to the same emissions reductions agreements as Germany. Coal, he says, has a long future in Australia.
Nonetheless, Maher acknowledges that in a generation or so - sometime after 2040 - Australia’s thermal coal industry might begin to wind down. He does not believe there is anything to be gained by scaring the communities that depend on the industry now, but when the time comes, he says, Australia should take note of Germany’s transition process.
Maher does not believe that the current government - or one like it - would be able to do so, though, because it has no culture of working with industry and unions.
He believes Australian unions would have more luck building a just transition program directly with employers in the energy sector and proving that it works. Such a model might even be deployed across other industry sectors as needed.
When the Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age approached the Minerals Council of Australia - the mining industry’s peak body - the council referred us to Coal21. Coal21 is funded by a voluntary levy on coal production and dedicated to commercialising so-called “clean coal” technology with a view to ensuring that the industry can survive in a low-carbon economy.
Coal21’s chief executive is Mark McCallum, who also serves as an executive in charge of energy and climate at the Minerals Council of Australia and was formerly head of government relations with Shell.
He says that with clean coal technology carbon generated by burning coal can be harnessed for uses as varied as hardening concrete to help extract oil from oil fields more effectively, safely keeping it out of the atmosphere.
Dr Martin Rice, acting chief executive of the Climate Council, which provides independent climate and energy advice in Australia, scoffs at the very notion of “clean coal”, likening it to “dry water”. “It is a fossil, you can’t burn it cleanly,” he says.
Coal21’s upbeat assessment of the future of coal is at odds with the view of the industry in Germany too, where executives of both NAG and the giant brown coal miner RWE both told the Sun-Herald and Sunday Age that the industry has no future.
One sunny afternoon earlier this month Guido Steffen, a spokesman for the brown coal mining giant RWE, stood before a vast open pit at Hambach mine, not far from Cologne in western Germany. To this day RWE produces 35 million tonnes and over Steffen’s shoulder vast earth-moving equipment scraped up the ore.
Steffen said it had shocked the company when earlier this year the government’s expert coal commission recommended phasing out the industry by 2038 at the latest. The company, he said, had expected operations to continue into the 2050s.
“It will mean major cuts to our assets and our crew, they will be hard cuts,” he said. “But there is a consensus, there is a direction [about climate change] and now governments and politicians should transform those recommendations into law, into contracts.
“We have to do a lot for climate protection, and if society says we want to phase out coal, then we can’t work against it.”
It is hard to imagine Australian miners sharing that view.

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What Did You Do In The Climate Wars Daddy?

The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon

In the not too distant future, when climate alarmists
and identity politics have destroyed civilisation ...

Cartoon by First Dog on the Moon
LARGE IMAGE

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