Linking Adani coalmine to social uplift in India ridiculous, says conservationist

Continued attempts by Australian politicians to link Adani’s Carmichael coalmine to the social uplift of the poor in India are “completely ridiculous”, a veteran Indian conservationist says. Debi Goenka, the Mumbai activist who challenged Adani’s environmental licence for its mine in the Queensland land court in 2014, said Australian government figures continued to rely on arguments about imported coal lifting Indians out of poverty, which were “all bunkum”. The Conservation Action Trust founder said he had his “fingers crossed” for Australian conservationists, who on Friday took their challenge to Adani’s licence to a Queensland supreme court judicial review. But the Indian coal market, which had swung dramatically against the viability of imported coal for electricity, would seal the Carmichael mine’s fate, Goenka said. The conservation group Coast and Country will argue that the environment department, by approving Adani’s licence in February, failed in its obligations under the Environmental Protection Act to uphold the “principle of ecologically sustainable development” in place in Queensland since 1994. The Coast and Country spokesman Derec Davies said the prospect of the Queensland government granting Adani “rights to unlimited groundwater extraction” put at risk the 1m-year-old Doongmabulla Springs and the endangered species it supported. It is the eighth legal challenge to Adani’s long-delayed project, and has left the Indian conglomerate’s Australian arm with 27 employees and financial backing – that will need to top $10bn – yet to materialise. Coalition government figures and conservationist opponents have mustered moral cases for and against the mine. The federal mining minister, Matthew Canavan, spoke on Monday on the ABC talk show Q&A of the importance of Adani’s mine in the context of the “fossil fuel industry [being] very important to our country and … very important to the development of the world”. That followed the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, invoking coal’s role in supporting global development last October. Turnbull said coal was likely to long remain the “largest single part of the global energy mix”, which was “a critical ingredient in achieving development goals, alleviating hunger and promoting prosperity, particularly in developing and emerging economies”. “If Australia stopped exporting coal, the countries to which we export it would simply buy it from somewhere else,” he said. This would arguably increase global emissions “because our coal, by and large, is cleaner than the coal in many other countries.” At the time, the energy minister Josh Frydenberg had said there was a “strong moral case that the green activists sometimes don’t comprehend” with coal, when more than 1 billion people lacked access to electricity and more than 2 billion “are using wood and dung for their cooking”, a practice the World Health Organisation linked to 4.3 million premature deaths. Speaking to Guardian Australia from Mumbai, Goenka said the circumstances around coal-driven electricity in India meant it would remain out of touch for the “300 million so-called poor Indians who the Australian politicians seem to be really worried about”. “They are surviving on a per capita income of less than a dollar a day. Most of them don’t even have formal housing,” he said. “So the question of them spending 6¢ per unit of electricity in a place where they don’t even have an electrical connection, where they don’t even have appliances, I mean it’s completely ridiculous. “I think if Australian politicians are really worried about the poor in India, maybe they should come and have a first-hand look and see what actually needs to be done to improve the living conditions of the poor, rather than [advocating] for a company that is doing its best to get the politicians to invest Australian money into an Indian company’s project.” There was in any case “no question of Carmichael coal being imported into India”, given the collapse in the financial viability of imported coal, Goenka said. A surge in domestic Indian coal supply meant the Indian government was “actually contemplating banning all coal imports”, he said. “[But] even without government intervention, the private parties who are out to make money are going to go for the cheapest option,” he said. The Tata Power project at Mundra in the Indian state of Gujarat, next to an Adani Power project, “started blending imported coal with Indian coal on their own because they found it cheaper”, Goenka said. The current demand on the Indian electricity network also suggested little need for a dramatic expansion of supply capacity, he said. During times of peak demand on the network over the last two Indian summers, the “average plant load factor for all power plants has been at 65-70% capacity”, he said. “That means that even during peak load, we have enough power capacity in the country without requiring any more energy or imports from anywhere, or any new power plants.” Mainstream power companies had “seen the writing on the wall” and were making billion-dollar investments in renewable energy projects, Goenka said. Adani in India “don’t talk about [Carmichael] at all”, with the topic only coming up in occasional reports on Australian court cases, and India-Australia diplomatic exchanges, he said. “I guess nobody in their right mind wants to talk about making a decision that’s going to cost them $15b. “That’s something that you would want to bury in the deepest coalmine that you can find.” Goenka said there was public awareness in India about concern for the Great Barrier Reef around the impact of the Carmichael project, which would be Australia’s largest coalmine and a globally significant source of emissions when the coal was burned. “People are aware of it and I think a lot of people in India care about climate change and sea-level rises,” he said. “The Great Barrier Reef is of worldwide heritage importance and I think a lot of people would be very sorry to see anything happen to it.”