A moral case for coal? Three reasons why Frydenberg’s claims are wrong

Tony Abbott might be consigned to the back-benches of the Australian government, but one of his favourite political slogans, that coal is good for humanity, lives on.

Over the weekend, federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg showed that a Malcolm Turnbull-led Coalition still supported the development of what could be Australia’s largest new coal mine – the Adani-owned $16.5 billion frydenbergCarmichael coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

Indeed, as we pointed out on Friday, this is one area where the Coalition and Labor are in furious agreement. In fact, Labor – both state and federal – may be even more keen for the Carmichael mine to go ahead than the government.

Speaking on the ABC Insiders program over the weekend, Frydenberg gave Abbott’s old coal line new a new spin, arguing there was a “strong moral case” for the mine, the development of which federal environment minister Greg Hunt approved for a second time on Friday.

“I think there’s a strong moral case here,” said Frydenberg. “I’ve just been at the G20 and at the APEC energy ministers’ meeting and they pointed out that over a billion people around the world don’t have access to electricity.

“This means more than two billion people today are using wood and dung for their cooking.

“The World Health Organisation says this leads to 4.3 million premature deaths – that’s more people dying through those sort of inefficient forms of energy than malaria, HIV aids and tuberculosis combined.”

Leaving aside, for the moment, the strong moral argument against digging up an estimated 60 million tonnes of thermal coal a year in a severely carbon constrained world, let’s look at the validity of Frydenberg’s claims.

First, the claim Australian coal can help prevent premature deaths from pollution. Without doubt, the practice of burning wood, dung and other types of locally sourced biomass fuels in developing countries is a big killer.

power-plant-coal-tatamund-india

But is coal any better? As James Conca wrote in Forbes in 2012, when it comes to the energy “deathprint” – that is, the number of people killed by one kind of energy or another per kWh produced – “like the carbon footprint, coal is the worst.”

“For coal, oil and biomass, it is carbon particulates resulting from burning that cause upper respiratory distress, kind of a second-hand black lung,” Conca wrote.

“Our lungs just don’t like burnt carbonaceous particulates, whether from coal or wood or manure or pellets or cigarettes.

“The actual numbers of deaths in China from coal use exceeded 300,000 last year since they have ramped up coal so fast in the last decade and they usually do not install exhaust scrubbers. The impact on their health care system has been significant in not just deaths, but in non-lethal health effects and lost days of work.”

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As for the argument that coal is the answer to the energy poverty problems of countries like India – where tens of millions of people exist without an electricity supply – this is an argument disputed by many, from the IEA to former Indian energy ministers.

The World Bank, for example, has said precisely the opposite; that continued use of coal is exacting a heavy cost on some of the world’s poorest countries, both in health impacts as well as climate change.

“In general, globally we need to wean ourselves off coal,” World Bank climate change envoy Rachel Kyte said in July. “There is a huge social cost to coal and a huge social cost to fossil fuels … if you want to be able to breathe clean air.”

Kyte went on: “Do I think coal is the solution to poverty? There are more than 1 billion people today who have no access to energy. …If they all had access to coal-fired power tomorrow their respiratory illness rates would go up, etc, etc …

“We need to extend access to energy to the poor and we need to do it the cleanest way possible because the social costs of coal are uncounted and damaging, just as the global emissions count is damaging as well.”

In India, the current Modi government has placed energy security on the highest priority with a pledge to provide all Indians with reliable electricity before the next elections in 2019 – but mainly via distributed solar energy, and not coal.

As Srinivas Krisnhaswamy wrote in this article in July, past data clearly shows that a doubling of India’s thermal generation capacity over the last decade has electrified only 8 – 10 per cent more rural households, for reasons that are not hard to fathom.

“The centralised power supply model, where the cost of supplying power to rural areas is high and increases with distance from the grid, is increasingly making rural electrification difficult and uneconomical.

“At least 50,000 villages out of a total of 550,000 villages in the country will always be too remote to connect to the grid at reasonable cost. What is required then is demand-driven electrification that can be tailored to the local needs and scaled as per local requirements.”

EAS Sarma – India’s former secretary of the Ministry of Power – argues much the same in an article published in August; a direct response to Tony Abbott’s coal claims.

“Studies have shown that when a village is more than 5 km from the grid, the cost of supplying electricity from solar and other off-grid solutions is far below the costs of supplying from conventional sources such as coal,” Sarma wrote.

“This is due to the high cost of building out the poles and wires to provide access to coal electricity and the technical losses involved in transmitting and distributing electricity to the consumers.”

It is, he continues, “simplistic and simply inaccurate to assume that new electricity generation capacity added to the grid will automatically reduce electricity deprivation among the poor.”

Sarma also cites the recent Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis study which showed that the cost of producing electricity in India using Australian coal from the Galilee Basin is roughly two times the current average wholesale cost of electricity.

“This makes Galilee Basin coal too expensive for India,” he writes. And when you factor in the huge social costs of coal power pollution, any perceived benefits of added coal power infrastructure are well and truly outweighed.

Finally, there is very strong, scientifically supported argument that digging up new coal reserves is not the right thing to do for anyone on the planet: morally or economically.

This is because, in order to stay within the world’s carbon budget – the well accepted, scientifically-based method to determine how much carbon humanity can “spend” if it hopes to avoid dangerous climate change – the majority of the world’s fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground: 62 per cent of it, for just a 50 per cent chance of meeting the 2°C limit; and 77 per cent of it for a 75 per cent chance.

For coal alone, 88 per cent of global reserves are currently considered unburnable.

As an April report from the Climate Council noted, this translates to over 90 per cent of Australia’s coal reserves being redundant, even under the most generous carbon budget.

“We are already at a global temperature rise of almost 1°C and climate change is making many extreme weather events in Australia significantly worse,” said report author and Climate Council Councillor Professor Will Steffen.

“A 2°C rise in global temperature will have very serious impacts on people worldwide, and could trigger major changes …like the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

“If we want to meet our international obligations to keep below the 2 degree target, not only can we not develop any new coal mines but we also have to have a planned phase-out of our existing fossil fuel extraction and usage.”

This makes coal a huge economical gamble, too.

A report by HSBC, also published in April, said the fossil industry was facing risks from several fronts at once, including ever-cheaper renewables, dramatic advances in battery storage, and much more efficient use of energy.

The bank said high-cost fossil projects will be driven out of business by fast-moving low-carbon technology.

“The two key drivers of a low-carbon future are energy efficiency and a scale-up of renewable energy,” the HSBC analysts wrote.

“In December, we expect a universal climate agreement to be signed in Paris as part of the drive to reduce CO2,” the report said.

Comments

16 responses to “A moral case for coal? Three reasons why Frydenberg’s claims are wrong”

  1. Keith Avatar
    Keith

    I have a different take on what Josh Frydenberg said on Insiders. While he highlight the neo-con story about coal being good for humanity, when it came to the Turnbull Government attitude to funding the project he said two signifiant things:
    i) Adani needs to prove that this project is commercially viable and can stand on its own feet
    ii) The Government has other plans for the $5 billion northern fund and is unlikely to provide any support for the Adani mine.

    So it looks like sanity is coming, although why they would continue to make fools of themselves internationally with such nonsense is hard to fathom. They will have to change this if Turnbull goes to Paris.

    With not a single bank supporting the Adani financing, a large number of both Australian and International banks publicly saying no to funding, and Adani actively investing large sums in solar PV, I think the chances of Adani getting the Galilee Basin mine developed are close to zero.

    1. Jacob Avatar
      Jacob

      Also, Glencore hates the Adani mine because other mines will have to shut due to oversupply.

      There is obviously an oversupply of thermal coal.

    2. JeffJL Avatar
      JeffJL

      Perhaps you did not listen to Mr Frydenberg. He was very forceful that we had a moral duty to have that coal available to send to India. I would have loved a fact check on everything he said and claimed throughout that interview though.

      1. Keith Avatar
        Keith

        Hi JeffJL,

        Reality is that he closed the door firmly on the Adani mine. The rest is just platitudes to the neo-con audience. Some time soon he will have to change the rhetoric or he will, like Tony Abbott, be seen to be a fool by the rest of the world.

        It is really clear that in India’s case there is no moral argument for coal. You don’t need to look further than statements from the Indian PM.

        1. Miles Harding Avatar
          Miles Harding

          Maybe, but they have no issues with looking like fools in the interim.

    3. john Avatar
      john

      On a financial return examination I agree.
      However if “The Australian Government” puts in say 5 Billion Dollars it just may fly.
      Stupid?
      Perhaps.
      Debatable yes.

  2. David McKay Avatar
    David McKay

    I agree Keith. It was heartening to hear Freydenberg state the economic basis for Adani’s mine. He did, I seem to recall, mention energy when he brushed by the “other plans” for the Northern Fund. Hope he is not referring to funding Katter’s wish for a new Coal burner in his electorate. This would really demonstrate how expense new coal is!

  3. Chris Fraser Avatar
    Chris Fraser

    Exporting coal is now a moral case ? … how desperate. I hope India avoids the State-wide grid investment issues that we had.

  4. Jacob Avatar
    Jacob

    Not to mention the huge job creation in installing and cleaning solar panels.

    SolarCity employs 9000 people in USA and solar PV makes up a tiny percent of grid generation there.

    1. Coley Avatar
      Coley

      The lead industry got away with killing and maiming a great many people, the tobacco industry nearly managed it,
      Both by peddling disinformation and buying influence, it’s time the fossil fuel industry has a clear shot across it bows, that given the known risks to public health that the industry and those responsible for policy within it will be held responsible if they continue in the current direction.

    2. James Hilden-Minton Avatar
      James Hilden-Minton

      Just a friendly update, SolarCity is now at 14,000 employees and hiring 500 every month. In another year, they’ll also be staffing their Riverbend panel plant upto 6000 more employees. The solar industry is one of the largest job creators in the US economy. Politicians would do well to try to take credit for that instead of siding with incumbents headed into economic obsolescence.

      1. Jacob Avatar
        Jacob

        Well it would be good if we could know how many man hours it takes to produce 1kWh of electricity from solar PV compared to coal/LNG.

  5. James Hilden-Minton Avatar
    James Hilden-Minton

    The mortality chart is quite interesting. I wonder how much of this mortality is specifically due to workplace risks for energy workers.

    I would expect that most of the very low mortality of rooftop solar is simply the risk of working on roofs and would be similar to other construction risks.

    But clearly coal workers are faced with enormous health and safety risk. One wonders if Labor even cares about occupational health and safety anymore. If so, they should encourage workers to find much better jobs in wind and solar.

    What’s the moral calculus around sacrificing coal miner’s lives in Australia to pollute poor communities in India? Is it really worth dying for when solar and batteries can get the job done at much lower human cost?

  6. DogzOwn Avatar
    DogzOwn

    On ABC Breakfast, Frydenberg’s lament was about people in sub-Saharan Africa and India, his usual thing about premature death from smoke of wood and dung fires. How can these guys make Australia look so ridiculous when they promote coal power for the Sahara? EU countries are seriously planning for large scale solar and HVDC transmission lines to get renewable power from Sahara. Will Frydenberg make them an offer they can’t refuse for coal power out of Sahara?

  7. Glen S Avatar
    Glen S

    And yet again, India is proving it is doing all it can to kill imports of coal. September imports down 27%:

    http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/10/19/india-coal-imports-idINKCN0SD0C920151019

  8. Miles Harding Avatar
    Miles Harding

    Frydenberg’s words may have been put there by the coal lobby he so faithfully represents, but they are held in place by his own foot.

    There seems to be a parallel here to many state governments’ love affair with poker machines:
    The poker machines prop up the state state coffers at a tremendous cost to the many trapped by the (deliberately designed) seductive nature of the gambling machines. The state is apparently oblivious to the immoral nature of profiting from the misery of its most vulnerable citizens.

    Apparently no amount of evidence can convince the COALition that the coal ship has already sunk and there is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Their actions are, in effect, an attempt to sell all of humanity into a very unpleasant future.

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