One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades

One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades(nytimes.com)

42 points by abhikarthick 6 years ago | 9 comments

spodek 6 years ago |

> When the vote came on May 18, it was not, as some had predicted, a watershed climate change election. Australians, especially in coal country, voted to keep the incumbent conservative coalition in power.

> Within days, the Carmichael mine had new momentum.

One billionaire plus the Australian voting majority.

People like to say and act like, "Oh, I'm one person, what I do doesn't matter," but that's rationalizing the decision not to act. Individual behavior makes a difference. I don't just mean using less air conditioning to conserve power, though that matters too. People can influence and lead each other.

5822130027 6 years ago |

According to Mark Blyth ( Prof. of political economy at Brown ).

India is going to continue to build 200 more coal powered plants despite knowing exactly how awful climate change is going to be for India.

Pakistan is following similar strategy.

The idea is that Europe/US have more to lose due to climate change, so when time comes they can use these coal fired plants as a bargaining chip ("bribe") for technology transfer, better trade deals, etc.

I do not agree or disagree with his assessment, it could very well be true.

But if you are India, spending MORE money to fix climate change wont make much of a difference as the biggest polluters are US / CHINA / EU.

So a MAD type strategy makes sense from their perspective.

mc32 6 years ago | |

It’s not a MAD strategy it’s a tragedy of the commons dilemma.

abathur 6 years ago | |

When reading comments or articles that acknowledge the problem, but have a rosy outlook on technical or market solutions to the problem, I rarely get the impression that they've spent time grappling with how many deliberative entities in a complex adaptive system are going to interact and recalculate as many social, political, economic, and climatic dynamics play off of each other.

lonelappde 6 years ago | |

It's Coasian economics. The colonizers can pay their debts or lose their environment.

alexstageint 6 years ago | |

Do you have a source for this?

5822130027 6 years ago | | |

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoe_daP0DE

Skip to Q&A

cmroanirgo 6 years ago |

Many here may not realise that there's massive problems with this crackpot deal cooked up by our politicians: It's actually 'protected' by Indigenous (Aboriginal) Land Rights.

https://wanganjagalingou.com.au/our-fight/

> We do hereby firmly REJECT a Land Use Agreement with Adani for the Carmichael mine on our traditional lands.

We DO NOT consent to the Carmichael mine on our ancestral lands.

We DO NOT accept Adani’s “offers” to sign away our land and our rights and interests in it. We will not take their “shut up” money.

We will PROTECT and DEFEND our Country and our connection to it.

kristianp 6 years ago |

Apparently the profitability of the future Adani mine in Queensland will not be assured [1], however I would guess the coal power plants Adani owns will make up for that.

How can India meet the Paris agreement[2] while letting Adani build new coal power plants?

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-numbers-on-ada...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Paris...