Two per cent of the smoke: Australia's top court tells coal it can no longer look away
Australia's High Court has backed Hunter Valley residents who challenged a plan to double coal output at Mount Pleasant until 2048, ruling that planners ignored 98 per cent of the mine's emissions because the coal would burn overseas.
Australia's highest court has ruled for a small community group from the Hunter Valley and against the planned expansion of the Mount Pleasant coal mine in New South Wales, in the first climate case to reach the High Court. The mine, due to close this December, had sought to extend operations until 2048 and roughly double production, extracting an additional 406 million tonnes of coal. The court dismissed the mine owner's appeal, with costs, and upheld the finding that planning authorities had failed to properly consider conditions to limit the project's climate footprint.
The failure was one of arithmetic as much as law. So-called scope 3 emissions, released when the exported coal is burned overseas, make up about 98 per cent of the mine's greenhouse gas emissions. The New South Wales Independent Planning Commission, which approved the extension in 2022, did not consider conditions addressing that share because most of it would occur outside Australia. By focusing only upon 2 per cent of the project's emissions, the Commission failed to consider whether conditions should be imposed to ensure that greenhouse gas emissions are minimised to the greatest extent practicable, Justice James Edelman wrote.
The challenge was brought by the Denman Aberdeen Muswellbrook Scone Healthy Environment Group, local residents who first won in the New South Wales Court of Appeal before the owner, MACH Energy, took the case higher. Advocates say the ruling will shape future fossil fuel decisions in the state, where approvals have repeatedly treated exported emissions as someone else's accounting problem.
The judgment does not, by itself, close a mine. It sends the approval back through a door marked with a figure the industry preferred left off the page. A project that would have been among the largest open-cut coal mines in New South Wales can no longer be assessed as though coal dug in the Hunter Valley stops warming the planet at the port. For the residents who carried the case through two appeals, that recognition is the substance. The climate was always 100 per cent of the smoke. Australian planning law has now been told to count it that way.