Dr Jiggens

by Drew Hutton
A quiet revolution, one to rival the digital revolution three decades ago, has been occurring for years in the world of energy economics, right under their noses but most pundits didn’t recognize it. Not only did they not recognise it but the business owners whose fortunes depended on reading the signs did not either. Perhaps this is the hallmark of any revolution: that those with vested interest in the old order, who frequent the same business and social bubbles that reinforce their prejudices and distort their capacity for reason, will not accurately read the signs and will become the victims of cataclysmic events. They will keep repeating mantras like, “Renewable energy will never provide baseload power”, or “Renewable energy is too expensive” as the liquidators move in.
Nevertheless, the fossil fuel industries are still powerful and capable of putting up a fight to the end and, even if significant transition is made over the next decade to renewables. To make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables as quickly and efficiently as possible there need to be mass movements that stop coal, oil and gas mining, pressure for divestment from fossil fuels and pressure governments for radical policy changes. More broadly, a judicious mixture of government intervention and markets – a recipe detested by the neo-liberals – will be needed to bring fairness and accountability to the system. Such a system should be jobs-rich; have in-built flexibility to promote innovation and diverse family and social arrangements; provide welfare and other measures to ensure some in society are not left behind in a changing environment or by such events as disastrous climate change; and enable workers to have a strong say in the direction of their enterprises and communities a strong involvement in determining their futures.
In the meantime there will also be many new-economy jobs, fixing up the mess that the old economy left behind, particularly in mining. If we take the coal-rich Bowen Basin for example, there are over 40 coal mines with 94,600 square kilometres of land disturbed by mining. Rehabilitating such sites involves re-shaping and re-contouring spoil heaps and waste rock dumps, covering tailings dams to prevent leakage of often highly toxic material, and dealing with large voids left over after open cut mining, which often contain high levels of acid, heavy metals or salt. Progressive rehabilitation of the sites is usually specified in environmental authorities for the mines but this is rarely done in any sort of systematic way. Less than 20 per cent of all the sites in the Bowen Basin have been rehabilitated. The cost of rehabilitating these Bowen basin mines varies from $8bn to $16bn. Queensland governments have been notoriously lax about collecting financial assurances from the companies. Over the years, many companies have been allowed to simply walk away from their mines without doing adequate rehabilitation. To the credit of the current Labor government the financial assurances for all mining in the state has been increased to $4.6m but this is still well short of a figure that would ensure taxpayers did not have to foot the bill. The Palaszczuk government has also passed through the Parliament amendments to the Environmental Protection Act that enable it to trace back the chain of responsibility for any mine where the owners have walked away from their rehabilitation responsibilities. That is important because we already have something like 15,000 abandoned mines in the state, about 400 of which are “high risk”.
It is important to know this background because we need to recognise that interventionist government and regulatory enforcement are essential to the creation of so many jobs in the new economy and certainly they are in the area of rehabilitating mine sites. Rehabilitation is not something that companies should be free to choose to do. It is part of the obligations they sign up to when they are given approval to extract minerals. Therefore private money, backed by financial assurances and regulatory enforcement can create thousands of jobs in regional Queensland. The key to creating this situation is motivating the companies to change their cultures so they no longer see environmental management issues as an optional extra but as an integral part of their operations.
We have been working on a case study of Blair Athol, a very old mine in central Queensland which has not been worked since 2012. The mine has 1166ha still to rehabilitate and only 14 workers are left on site after 170 were sacked in 2012. If they started now, they would create about 40 full-time jobs for the next 6-10 years. Multiply that across the Bowen Basin and there would be something like 2000-3000 jobs created at a time when no one is being employed in mining in regional Queensland. For the first time I can remember I can walk into a Government Minister’s office and say, “I can show you how to protect the environment and create jobs.”