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  Federally, too, there is a lack of scrutiny in the scramble to approve the Carmichael mine. When seeking Federal environment approval for the mine, Adani failed to disclose the background of its CEO and Country Head of Adani Australia, Jeyakumar Janakaraj. Janakaraj had been Director of Operations at a copper mine in Zambia which was prosecuted for serious environmental charges involving major pollution of a river in Zambia, a fact revealed by Mark Willacy on the ABC-TV in December 2015.7/8

  The environmental history of companies’ executive officers is relevant when assessing the environmental history of a company in determining whether that company should be entrusted with potentially risky operations in Australia according to The Adani Brief, an investigation by Environmental Justice Australia into Adani business practices.

  In February 2018, following a decision by the Federal Government not to prosecute Adani for the omission about Janakaraj’s past history, Samantha Hepburn, writing in the The Conversation, questioned the viability of our environmental laws to protect the environment, when falling between Queensland State and Federal legislation. According to Environmental Justice Australia (EJA), the Environmental Protection Act 1994 (Qld) is woefully inadequate. The public is supposed to be able to have access to copies of environmental authorities. But, in Adani’s case, when EJA filed a right of information application to obtain it, it discovered that in August 2011, the type of environmental authority Adani Mining Pty Ltd held was changed. Then in March 2012, the environmental authority number was changed again apparently due to an administrative error resulting in the original authority having three different numbers in two years. EJA pointed out that the Queensland Auditor General in 2014 found that the Department is “not fully effective in its supervision, monitoring and enforcement of environmental conditions and is exposing the state to liability and the environment to harm unnecessarily.”9

  EJA also pointed out in its report that in March 2013, the Act was amended to require a company to be registered as “a suitable operator” before being granted an environmental authority. But it deemed anyone with an existing environmental authority to be “a suitable operator.” As Adani Mining Pty Ltd held an environmental authority, it did not have to go through a statutory process to assess its suitability to operate. For example, when being assessed, a company “must disclose information about its environment record” which includes executive officers working for the company “and any other corporations of which the executive officers are, or have been, an executive officer.” EJA states that Adani Mining Pty Ltd had received four more environmental authority permits all without having its environmental record assessed.

  Adani’s track record of environmental pollution has also seemingly been ignored, the brief noted. In 2011, an unseaworthy ship carrying Adani coal sank off the coast of Mumbai causing a massive oil spill of 60,054 metric tonnes of coal which devastated beaches, tourism and marine life. Five years later, the company had still not cleaned up the mess according to The Adani Brief and was fined AU$975,000. The Federal Environment Minister did not consider this “because Adani Mining Pty Ltd failed to provide that information, even though it was specifically requested to do so,” the Brief noted. It continued: “With this international track record, the Adani Group’s plan to ship Carmichael coal out of Abbot Point port and through the fragile Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area is of serious concern.”10

  Nor was Adani’s track record in handling coal at its ports in India without blemish. In 2015, according to the Indian Business Standard,11 the Goa State Pollution Control Board (GSPCB) issued notices to Adani and one other company for allegedly causing an environmental hazard after dust pollution emanating from coal dust was found to have increased in the Port of Vasco near Goa. Data had been collected from an air ambient monitoring station which showed the number of suspended particles was above the permissible level.

  In addition to the environmental accusations, there has been disquiet for several years about the Adani Group’s financial state. According to Tim Buckley, Director of Energy Finance Studies, who prepared an Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) 2017 Report,12 India’s Adani Enterprises is one of four listed companies majority owned by the Adani family. Alongside Adani Enterprises (75% owned by the Adani family) are Adani Power (72% owned), Adani Ports and SEZ (64% owned), and Adani Transmission (75% owned).

  In August 2010, Adani Enterprises acquired the Galilee Basin Carmichael export thermal coal deposit for a total of AU$680 million via its Australian subsidiary Adani Mining Pty Ltd. At the time, the Adani Enterprises had a US$10 billion market capitalisation, making it one of the largest conglomerates in India. However, a major corporate restructuring in 2015 saw a de-merger into four (now in 2018 five) independent, separately listed entities, albeit all still controlled by a single promoter. In 2017, Adani Enterprises was significantly downsized, with a remaining US$1.9 billion market capitalisation. More worryingly, according to the same report, the Adani Group has current capital expenditure proposals underway totalling US$36 billion in aggregate. Buckley states: “With the Carmichael coal proposal still well away from financial close to seven years after Adani Enterprises first acquired the coal deposit in 2010 for a collective AU$680 million, it is clear that the company is struggling to secure financing for the project.”

  As of May 2018, Tim Buckley wrote that Adani Power Ltd is in clear financial distress, with US$7.4 billion of debt against a shareholder equity of just US$133 million.13 However, he notes, the rest of the Adani Group is “powering ahead.” Adani Ports’ full year results for 2017/18 proved that it is the largest and most successful port operator in India. And Adani Transmissions and Adani Green Energy (both only created as new business units just over three years ago) each now stand as two of the largest private grid and renewable energy firms in India. Adani Gas 2018 results forecast it continues to deliver an 18% annual growth rate in revenues and the company is set to become the largest private gas distribution firm in India.

  For all its travails in Australia, Adani Enterprises is also on track to become the largest private coal mine operator in India, if it can deliver on its target to double output to 14 Mtpa (million tonnes per annum) in 2018/19 according to the report. The Carmichael mine, however, Buckley suggests, is “a stranded asset.” The demise of the Mundra power plant, a project where Gautam Adani launched his career, has contributed. India is turning its back on thermal power plants and the Adani Group has admitted the Mundra coal fired power plant, where the Carmichael coal was destined for, is financially unviable.14

  Writing back in June 2015, before the Carmichael mine was approved by Federal and State Governments and having accessed documents through FOI from the highest level of the Queensland Treasury, Lisa Cox from The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the Queensland Treasury harboured grave doubts about the Adani Group’s capacity to see the Carmichael project through to completion and believed that the project was “unviable.”15 The documents, wrote Cox back then, identified the high level of debt within the company and labelled the mining giant as a ‘risk’ because of its unclear corporate structure and use of offshore entities. The project, principal commercial analyst Jason Wishart wrote to David Quinn, the Executive Director of Projects Queensland was, “unlikely to stack up on a conventional project finance assessment.” Gautam Adani, he wrote, could argue the ‘blue sky’ on controlling the supply chain for development of new power stations in India but that made the Adani Group “an Indian energy market player not a coal project.” Expansion would put Adani’s financial position under ‘increased strain’. Briefing notes also stated: “the group is highly susceptible to cost shocks.”

  Lisa Cox had already earlier scrutinised the operational setup of the complex web of international companies. This would later become the focus of other media coverage, including the Australian ABC’s TV Four Corners Program, ‘Digging into Adani’.16 Company documents suggested billionaire Gautam Adani did not ultimately control many of the companies.
Instead his eldest brother Vinod Shantilal Adani held pivotal positions. Vinod was also, according to The Adani Brief, the sole director of a number of Singapore companies which own nine of the Adani group entities operating in Australia.

  But neither the financial investigations at that time nor the environmental status of the Adani Group appears to have made any difference to the Queensland Premier or Australian Prime Minister and their associated entourages in their exuberant bid for the Adani mine.

  The hastily constructed local government budgets to fund the March 2017 trip for the mayors is buried in media coverage trumpeting Australians’ nostalgia for yesteryear when times were good ‘and the livin’ was easy’ when you lived off the fat of the land with no consequences.

  Adani is the saviour on everyone’s lips. Plastic bags swirl in the wind-blown, often deserted canyons in what were once shopping malls in the regional Queensland towns of Bowen and Townsville where unemployment has dramatically risen since the mining bust. Adani, everyone appears to be saying, will restore everything to how it used to be. A collective community sigh: the community’s fearless leaders will provide. And the Federal Government will follow. Adani logos are creeping into the most prominent positions in the regional North Queensland cities of Townsville and regional towns and Adani is funding community events from powerboats to tourism awards. The saviour is here.

  In April 2017, when Turnbull lands in New Delhi, he will discover that the last liquorice-allsort layer closer to the ground is faeces-brown as the oxygen is starved. The hue is puce grey. Turnbull is well aware of the catastrophic consequences of his Government soliciting a mine that, according to the Australian Institute17 will spew about 79 million tonnes of CO2 – three times the annual emissions from New Delhi, double those from Tokyo, six times those of Amsterdam and 20% more than New York City. If the mine goes ahead, it will leave a legacy of a 4.6 billion tonne carbon footprint in its proposed lifetime.

  Back in July 2011, as Shadow Minister for Communications, at the Virginia Chadwick memorial lecture,18 Turnbull defended the Great Barrier Reef and climate change scientists’ claims, criticising anyone who was seduced by far-right anti-science propagandists. He warned that the effects of climate change would “be felt painfully and cruelly by the generations ahead of us.” The people in the world who will suffer the most cruelly, he said, “would be the poorest and the people who have contributed the least to the problem. There is an enormous injustice here. When people suggest to you that climate change is not a moral issue, they are wrong. It is an intensely moral issue.”

  But, after being appointed Prime Minister in 2015, Turnbull joined the chorus of doubters of climate change and global warming, compromised by heading a political party of largely urban voters which clings to power only by forming a coalition government with a right-wing National Party whose leaders mostly debunk climate change. Since the election in 2016, after initially not even having enough seats to govern, the coalition held government by a one-seat majority after Turnbull negotiated with independent members. Yet, it is this government in particular, that is making the most catastrophic environmental decisions that will have an irrevocable outcome not just for Australia but internationally as well.

  The Australian media, particularly its Murdoch-dominated newspapers, support anti-climate change sentiment. As my flight leaves the Indira Gandhi airport in New Delhi, the brown-coal power station, Hazelwood, in the Latrobe Valley, which had powered the state of Victoria for half a century and was known as ‘Australia’s dirtiest power station’, is being closed down. Environment Victoria recorded that Hazelwood had accounted for 14% of Victoria’s greenhouse gas emissions. Closing it down could cut emissions by 16 million tonnes. But the Murdoch press, far from praising such a move, leverages the news to spray caustic headlines privileging doomsayers and the climate change sceptics. Later, less than a year after the closure, in the dazzling heat of a Melbourne summer, The Australian runs a story on 18 January 2018: “A power supply crisis gripped southern states yesterday, forcing Melbourne’s hospitals to dim their lights as several major companies in Victoria and South Australia were paid to reduce their electricity consumption.”

  The heat wave and dire consequences, particularly if it can undermine a move to clean energy, sells newspapers especially if it hits the moral panic button. Even better if it hits the hip pocket. A breakaway story on the front page focused on the price of electricity bills rising in Victoria due to the Hazelwood closure.

  The spin of ‘doubt’ generates fear and after all is a lucrative business.

  It was my father who presented me with the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (2010).19 “Lassie, if you’re going to research all this stuff about Adani, you’d better read this.” Dad, now in his 80s and still an avid newshound, has forever been my fountain of knowledge. I have consulted him on my weekly current affair quiz questions for my undergraduate journalism students at JCU and asked for his assistance with historical research for my doctorate which included focusing on Canadian convicts in Port Arthur, Tasmania.

  Merchants of Doubt showcases how the individuals who denied the links between smoking and lung cancer are the same type of people who now debunk the science of global warming. The book details how a deliberate counter narrative, similar to that which countered negative statements about tobacco, was constructed to deny global warming even though scientific research on carbon dioxide and climate change has now been around for at least 40 years. The book also documented how all too often governments focused on the fact that any changes under consideration were “beyond the lifetimes of contemporary decision makers.” The old adage: “when in doubt, do nothing” could still be applied to many politicians’ attitudes to the question of climate change today. Dispel doubt about the figures and pass it on to future generations as a problem.

  Doubt, after all, even if it is ‘fake’ news, sells. Even Malcolm Turnbull in his Virginia Chadwick memorial lecture back in July 2011 noted the use of doubt criticising those “with vested interests” who “were trying to muddy the waters on climate science to prolong the export of coal” and compared their actions to tobacco companies discrediting the connection between smoking and lung cancer.

  As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, the authors of Merchants of Doubt outline, Irish experimentalist John Tyndall first established that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas – meaning that it traps heat and keeps it from escaping to outer space. Human activities are responsible for almost all of the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere for the past 150 years.20 It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, however, that a British engineer named Guy Callendar came across the consequences of how this would impact on the Earth’s climate. That was plenty of time for us to have become prepared.

  Seven years ago, Sir David Attenborough, an erstwhile climate change advocate, spoke out after making his 2011 documentary Frozen Planet and witnessing the effects of climate change on the North and South Poles. He has often said that if we had acted in the 1980s, we may have been able to cut greenhouse gases. Unbelievably, we only began measuring global temperatures on the ocean and land in the 1970s. What have we done about it since then? Clearly not enough.

  Chapter 2

  The Dirty Truth

  In the plane’s seat pocket in front of me in the Delhi Times a headline brags: “In past two weeks, Delhi city air is cleaner than Mumbai’s according to the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR).” In India, the media has long given up pretending that the air will improve. Instead, headlines revert to jocular, competitive ribbing – poking fun from one major city to another. The Indian businessman watches under sleepy eyelids as I take photos of the story on my phone.

  What the newspaper story does not record, reported in The Times of India in January 2017,21 is that from 1991 to 2017, deaths in India’s largest cities due to air pollution have doubled. Mumbai’s death toll has risen from 19,291 to 32,014. In Delhi for the same
period there were 48,651 deaths in 2017 compared to 19,716 in 1991. While the reasons for India’s air pollution are many, according to the World Health Organisation, such as indoor cook stoves and road traffic – including the ubiquitous auto-rickshaws that use a toxic mix of kerosene and diesel – fossil fuel burned by industrial plants is listed as a key contributor.

  In May 2016, with 370 coal power stations planned and construction beginning across the country, it would have been all but impossible to meet, let alone exceed, India’s commitment to the 2015 Paris agreement, the first ever global agreement to confront climate change.22 The pledge is to get 40% of India’s electricity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030. Piyush Goyal, then India’s Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy and Mines, even pledged to end coal imports, repeatedly stating that he is committed to making India a global hub for renewable energy. He is now the Minister of Railways and Minister of Coal.

  Meanwhile, India’s carbon emissions are rising. In 2016, they rose almost 5%.

  But India is a developing country. Although as recently as May 2018, the Indian Government pledged that 100% of India’s villages would be electrified; the definition of ‘village electrification’ is that a transmission line from the grid reaches a transformer in each village. Only 10% of homes in the village need to receive power for the village to qualify as ‘electrified’.23 In 2017, it was estimated 240 million Indians are living without electricity.24

  Australia is a developed nation. As the rest of the world is turning its back on fossil fuel, the Doomsday Clock, set up by the Chicago Atomic Scientists after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, monitors the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. Since 2007, the ‘clock’ has included climate change, along with nuclear threat, as a major catastrophic contributor. Meanwhile, in 2018, Australia remains the largest exporter of coal in the world with a clear lead in metallurgical coal25 and an increasing share of thermal coal exports.26/27 Over the past decade, it has doubled coal exports. Far from scaling back on coal as part of global efforts to reduce emissions, Australia plans to give public subsidies for new coal mines.