On Wednesday in Fiji, Pacific ministers said what Australian ministers have so far avoided saying. The region needs a plan to end its dependence on coal, oil and gas. At a high-level pre-COP31 side event in Nadi, Navigating the Pacific Energy Transition, ministers discussed their intention to develop a regional roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels.
Port Phillip Council has unanimously passed a motion calling for the Federal Government to fund a National Climate Compensation Fund with a levy on gas and coal production. The inner-Melbourne local government area, which covers suburbs such as St Kilda, Elwood, South Melbourne and Port Melbourne, faces increased risk of flooding and coastal damage in the face of climate change.
Last week, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission (IPC) approved the largest coal mining project in the state’s history: a massive expansion of Yancoal and Glencore’s Hunter Valley Operations (HVO) coal mine, extending its life to 2045.
The public consultation on the proposal received more than 10,000 public submissions. A key criticism raised by many groups and individuals (including myself) concerns the harm to the climate system from the project’s greenhouse gas emissions: a whopping 809 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) over its extended lifetime. To put this in perspective, Australia’s total emissions in the year to March 2026 were 456 million tonnes of CO2e.
In this first post in a series on the approval decision, I focus on the 98% of those emissions that will be produced when the exported coal is burned overseas. The way in which the IPC addressed these overseas emissions is typical among Australian fossil fuel producers and governmental decision-makers: it pointed to the existence of international climate agreements—in particular, the Paris Agreement—and assumed that such agreements would somehow adequately regulate those emissions. But that assumption is fantastical.
The Paris Agreement’s ultimate goal, as confirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its 2025 climate change Advisory Opinion and by a UN General Assembly Resolution, is to constrain the increase in global average surface temperature to within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. But the Agreement allows countries to submit their own ‘nationally-determined contributions’ (NDCs) to that effort and contains no enforcement mechanism capable of compelling countries to adopt domestic targets and policies that reflect their fair share of the effort to achieve the collective goal.
Collectively, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), countries’ targets are nowhere near sufficient to limit aggregate emissions to within the 1.5°C goal, and their policies are nowhere near sufficient to achieve their insufficient targets. Little wonder that the world is perilously close to overshooting that goal already and, without radical policy changes, will inevitably do so within the next few years.
In the eyes of the IPC, none of this matters. Its approach to this issue defies reality.
The IPC initially proposed a weak condition on the approval that would require HVO’s proponent to ensure the extracted coal would only be exported to jurisdictions that were complying with their NDCs under the Paris Agreement.
But a country’s adherence to its NDC means little if the NDC itself does not reflect a country’s fair share of achieving the 1.5°C goal. By this measure, the NDCs of the likely export destinations of the HVO coal are, according to the highly respected NGO Climate Action Tracker (CAT), ‘insufficient’ (Japan, South Korea), ‘highly insufficient’ (China), or ‘critically insufficient’ (Indonesia, Thailand) (the other two HVO coal destinations—Taiwan, which is not a party to the Paris Agreement, and Malaysia—are not rated by CAT).
But even this weak, reality-defying condition was too much for the NSW Government. Responding to the IPC’s proposed condition, the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure expressed that it was “very concerned about the restriction of exports” that such a condition would purportedly entail.
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It is unlikely that such a weak condition would result in any “restriction of exports”. But what’s striking about the Department’s advice is its assumption of a default position that the coal will be exported, which, in its framing, the IPC’s proposed condition would restrict. But this is akin to framing a person’s refusal of a marriage proposal as a “restriction of marriage”; it gets the situation backwards. The IPC’s role is to decide whether to approve a proposed mining project in light of (among other things) its climate impacts. If no conditions are available that can suitably mitigate those impacts, then this provides strong grounds for refusing it. And if the mine is refused, then the proposed coal will not be available to be exported in the first place; there will be no exports to restrict.
Instead, the IPC abandoned its proposed condition and adopted the even weaker condition proposed by the Department: the proponent merely has to ensure the produced coal is consumed in jurisdictions that are parties to the Paris Agreement (there’s also a work-around for Taiwan). So, in theory, a country could be failing to achieve its own woefully insufficient NDC, but so long as it’s a party to the Paris Agreement, HVO coal can be sold to it.
Another way to see the absurdity of the IPC’s approach is via a concept known as the Remaining Global Carbon Budget: the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that can be emitted globally from a particular point in time for the world to have a specified chance of staying within the 1.5°C limit.
The leading science tells us that the budget for staying within 1.5°C with only a two-thirds probability was, at the start of 2026, a mere 80 billion tonnes. The HVO expansion project’s CO2 emissions are so great that they will consume a full 1% of that remaining budget. Remember: that budget is for the whole world, and its start date was 9 months ago; the budget now remaining is likely around 30 billion tonnes smaller, implying that the HVO project will be consuming an even higher share of it.
It gets worse: if the world burns all of the fossil fuels from those extraction projects that are currently operating or under construction—and it’s highly likely it will—that would release more than 900 billion tonnes of CO2. That’s enough to consume the above-mentioned budget 11 times over. Despite this evidence being put to the IPC, its approval decision makes no mention of it.
In short, the IPC was wilfully blind to the obvious reality before it: that the Paris Agreement is failing to keep the world safe from catastrophic risks of irreversible climate harm; and that this project significantly decreases the already-limited prospects for turning that situation around.
We know how to tackle climate change. The NSW government knows, too. Pretending a giant coal mine is OK because the Paris Agreement exists is like pretending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is OK because the UN Security Council hasn’t declared it illegal.
Dr Fergus Green is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, University College London and an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. He made submissions in his personal capacity to two public consultations on the HVO Continuation Project, recommending the project’s refusal.
