New South Wales Mining has come under fire for running an ad on its website which claims that the state’s “high quality” coal is “needed for energy security” – and “needed for many years to come.”
Climate group Climate Integrity filed a complaint with the ACCC on Wednesday claiming these statements were misleading and deceptive conduct under the Australian Consumer Law.
The group says the ad comes “straight from the tobacco industry’s playbook” and has joined the Australian Greens in calling for fossil fuel advertising to be regulated like tobacco.
The advertisement was published on the website for NSW Mining, an industry association that represents coal producers in New South Wales, and in The Coal Face, an industry newspaper that describes itself as “the voice of the coal mining industry and its people.”
It features three young women in high vis and hard hats standing next to each other, with a headline on the advert reads: “Coal is needed for energy security”. It makes several other claims, including that “NSW coal is high quality” and “our coal is needed for many years to come while the world develops other energy resources.”
Climate Integrity director, Claire Snyder, says the ad presents an “alternate reality” that downplays the serious harms caused by mining and burning coal and misleads on coal’s rapidly declining role in global power systems, including Australia’s.
Climate Integrity’s detailed legal complaint, drafted by lawyers from the Environmental Defenders Office, points to AEMO’s integrated system plan which currently forecasts Australia’s remaining coal fleet to close three times faster than expected with nine in 10 coal-fired power plants to retire by 2035. It also makes several arguments about why each claim made in the ad is false.
“They’re claiming we need coal for energy security, our coal is higher quality. All coal harms health and the environment. Saying our coal is cleaner or somehow less harmful is like saying have a light cigarette,” Snyder says
“It’s misleading, it’s misleading the public, misleading the customers, potentially misleading shareholders, which is really problematic.
“One of the things it ignores I think is that the serious harms of mining coal are well established. It makes these claims around energy security and powering business without any sort of qualification or disclaimer that there is huge momentum to phase out coal in the next ten years.”
Renew Economy contacted NSW Mining for comment but did not receive a response.
Snyder called on the government to introduce regulations to treat oil, gas and coal advertising like tobacco advertising, pointing to recent calls by a United Nations expert to criminalise climate change disinformation.
The call follows a similar push by the Australian Greens, which in April unveiled a suite of proposals to tackle greenwashing and limit the influence of oil, gas and coal companies.
One of the Greens’ proposals would extend tobacco advertising and sponsorship bans to cover fossil fuel companies and create a $275 million fund to help clean energy companies replace oil, gas and coal producers as sponsors.
“Once the harm [from tobacco] was recognised, it was regulated,” Climate Integrity’s Snyder said this week. “We’re in the phase where the harm of coal has been well-established, but we’re still seeing this advertising that is misleading and deceptive.”
In June Elisa Morgera, UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, called for a total ban on fossil fuel industry lobbying and advertising, and criminal penalties for climate disinformation saying the “fossil fuel playbook” has “undermined the protection of all human rights that are negatively impacted by climate change for over six decades.”
“Overall, the fossil fuel playbook has negatively impacted the rights to information, education and science, 118 undermining the exercise of civil and political rights and preventing effective human rights protection, for at least six decades,” Morgera wrote.
Australia was one of the first countries to crack down on tobacco advertising after a landmark legal judgment in 1992 accepted the science of second hand smoking following a complaint regarding an advertisement run by the Tobacco Institute of Australia.
Several fossil fuel companies and their industry associations have found themselves on the wrong side of regulators in recent months.
The ACCC announced in June that it was launching a greenwashing lawsuit against Australian Gas Networks over a series of commercials as part of its “love gas” campaign following complaints from the Australian Conservation Foundation.
Climate Integrity filed a separate complaint against Liberal-linked astroturf group Australians for Natural Gas for misleading or deceptive conduct in April 2025. Renew Economy previously reported on the group’s ties to Tamboran Resources managing director and CEO Joel Riddle and a Coalition candidate at the last election, Nathaniel Smith.
In March 2025, Australia’s advertising regulator found Australian Gas Infrastructure Group breached the Greenwashing Code with a social media post claiming electric cooktops are vastly more expensive and more emission intensive than cooking with gas.
