I woke up this morning to the familiar, exhausting cacophony of climate activists rending their garments over the Independent Planning Commission. The source of their latest tantrum is the green light for the extension of the Hunter Valley Operations coal mine in New South Wales. The largest coal mine in the state’s history will continue to operate for another 19 years, yielding roughly 809 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution. The activists are calling it a profound betrayal of the Australian public. I call it the most refreshing piece of administrative honesty I have read in a decade.
For years, I have warned you that our obsession with net-zero pledges was a delusion that served only to give us a collective migraine. We have spent the better part of this century watching fossil fuel giants perform elaborate, degrading theatrical routines about algae biofuels and imaginary carbon capture technologies. It was undignified. It was exhausting. Now, finally, the Independent Planning Commission has had the courage to look the public in the eye and say they are going to dig up a truly apocalyptic amount of coal, they know exactly what it will do to the atmosphere, and they are going to do it anyway.
Let that sink in. There is no performance here. There is no corporate sustainability brochure padded with photos of executives planting saplings while wearing hardhats. There is just a pure, unadulterated promise to materially worsen global warming, documented in triplicate and stamped by the state.
The published reasons for the approval are a masterpiece of bureaucratic nihilism. I have read the entire docket. It is 150 pages of the most lucid, unbothered prose ever committed to the public record. Unlike the agonizingly apologetic language we usually see from environmental regulators, the commission’s ruling reads with the icy detachment of a coroner who has just been asked to schedule a future autopsy. They did not try to hide the CSIRO’s findings about extreme weather and ecological collapse in an appendix. They put the mounting disaster right up front, acknowledged the scale of the impending ruin, and then methodically checked the box marked approved.
I recently sat on a panel at COP alongside a senior planning official, and off the record, over some remarkably dry canapés, he confessed the sheer bureaucratic fatigue of pretending the system was designed to save us. He told me that drafting environmental impact statements that pretend 800 million tonnes of carbon won't boil the oceans takes a tremendous toll on a civil servant’s mental health. The IPC’s decision to simply accept the disaster and sign the permit is a massive victory for workplace mental wellness in our government planning departments.
It is infinitely easier to manage a catastrophic, irreversible climate tipping point when you simply schedule it into the quarterly zoning calendar and stop pretending you intend to avoid it.
Exactly. Why do we insist on torturing these poor commissioners by demanding they save a world they have already successfully monetized?
The activists, of course, refuse to grow up. They point to the 809 million tonnes of pollution as if it is some sort of gotcha, rather than the legally binding deliverable it so clearly is. What they fail to understand is that despair is only debilitating if you are still clinging to hope. Once you accept that the Hunter Valley Operations will run until 2043, you can finally relax.
Look at the 19-year timeline. It is, frankly, an incredibly considerate runway. Nineteen years gives the coastal property markets plenty of time to fully absorb the reality of their impending submersion. It gives the insurance industry a predictable actuarial table for the complete abandonment of the global tropics. This is what mature governance looks like: giving the financial sector adequate lead time to short the habitability of the Earth.
Furthermore, consider the sheer physical scale of the operation. Hunter Valley Operations isn’t just a coal mine; it is a geographic re-imagining of New South Wales. For too long, the environmental lobby has treated the earth as something precious and immutable, rather than a raw material awaiting its final, more profitable form. The extension will ensure that the region is thoroughly and permanently transformed, freeing future generations from the burdensome responsibility of having to conserve it. Once a valley is a 400-meter-deep pit of exhausted carbon seams, you never have to worry about protecting the local birdlife again. It is a permanent solution to the endless headache of conservation.
During a recent closed-door luncheon with several major institutional investors—people who actually understand how the global economy functions, unlike the children gluing themselves to traffic lights—the mood was overwhelmingly positive. They were thrilled. Not because they hate the environment, but because they love certainty.
For the last five years, we’ve had to pretend we were worried about stranded assets, which forced us to hide our Hunter Valley investments in incredibly complex offshore trusts. Now we can just put them on the front page of the prospectus where they belong.
And let us talk about the scope-three emissions. The protest lobby loves to throw this term around, demanding that Australia take responsibility for the coal we export when it is burned overseas. But the commission has brilliantly sidestepped this moral quandary by leaning into absolute finality. If we are already endorsing 809 million tonnes of localized atmospheric vandalism, why should we fret over what happens when the product reaches a power plant in Asia? We have crossed the Rubicon. There is no point trying to keep our feet dry now.
Just last week, a young, bright-eyed climate organizer accosted me outside a symposium in Sydney, practically in tears over the greenhouse gas this project will unleash. She asked me how I could fend off despair. I had to laugh. I told her that despair is the only logical resting heart rate for a thinking adult, and that her insistence on hope was actively damaging her skin. I suggested she take a long, hard look at the commission’s ruling, recognize the institutional permanence of the decision, and perhaps pivot her career toward something more practical, like grief counseling for displaced coastal mayors.
What we are witnessing in New South Wales is the glorious end of the transition narrative. We are not transitioning. We are digging. We are digging the largest hole in the history of the state, and we are going to set whatever comes out of it on fire. The government has finally found the courage to admit this on official letterhead.
So, to the protesters, the policy wonks, and the weeping scientists at the CSIRO: I implore you to take a deep breath of the rapidly warming air and let it go. The Independent Planning Commission has done us a favor. They have freed us from the exhausting burden of trying to prevent the end of the world. Now, all we have to do is sit back and watch the remaining 19 years of the show.