Earlier this month in Thanjavur, India, 33-year-old man D. Anand Babu was beaten to death by four men after he objected to them drawing too much water from an overhead tank he operated. It was a small part of an increasing trend of violence over water access in the drought-gripped nation.
Last week, India suffered through a 50-degree heatwave. People were advised not to go outdoors after 11am. Animals dropped dead in the streets. Toilets couldn’t be flushed.
Also last week, the Queensland state government gave the Adani Carmichael mine project the go ahead — much to the pleasure of lobbyists; the lobbied; and Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, head of the Adani Group.
That the Great Barrier Reef is dead is now a certainty. That the mine will be one of the greatest environmental disasters in a great age of environmental disasters, a given. That its approval was an inevitable result of modern Australia’s propensity to churn out horrors both existential and banal on a near weekly basis, a sure bet.
Adani is death.
It’s a dramatic statement only if you actively deny the climate catastrophe that is currently unfolding, and willfully flagellate yourself with mutterings of jobs, “clean coal” and promises of Valhalla. What Adani and similar projects signal is the decision of an elite few to tacitly sign off on the end of the world.
Death is hard to grok, annihilation more so.
It is too big a concept for our politicians, both state and federal. I admit, it would be hard to be a Queensland MP and look at the half a billion dollars the mining industry poured into fossil fuel lobby groups, and the $8 billion spent by the government on projects that benefit the coal industry, then stack that wealth next to death, and wonder why it suddenly seems infinitesimal.
We are at a point, as Australians, where we must stop asking our politicians to have imaginations. Time and time again, they have proven incapable of it. Imagination, of course, being the doorway to empathy; a doorway our politicians must keep resolutely locked to maintain their version of sanity.
Adani’s supporters are the predictable few: the coal-loving politicians, the Murdoch hacks, and the private industry jackals out for their next suck of marrow.
It has become the flashpoint for this dire moment in the climate catastrophe narrative, a story of such black and white villainy that it is difficult for anyone opposing the project to maintain faith and hope for the future while taking in the consequence of the mine’s approval.
Adani’s supporters are banking on defeat turning to defeatism. It seems unlikely that people opposed to the mine (myself included) will be anything but galvanized by last week’s decision. Of course, there was a ripple of dread through the ranks. Understandably.
It is a dread I have become too familiar with as a young Australian whose fate is in the hands of a callously indifferent few. A dread that asks: “Why?” But never receives an honest answer.
To make a billionaire on the other side of the world that much richer, I suppose. To create a pittance of jobs in an ecologically disastrous industry that provides wealth for said billionaire, his cronies and few else. To dig a pit where there wasn’t a pit in the pristine Galilee Basin, to point at the pit and say, “Hey, at least we’re doing something!”
That, I think, is the new nihilism.
During the mining boom in WA there was a collective myth upheld by both the government and the populace that as long as we were mining, we were creating. I don’t have to drive far to see half empty suburban estates, shoddy infrastructure projects, and shameful homelessness to know what that “something” amounted to.
The Carmichael mine isn’t inevitable. Adani must machete through more red tape, while the reality of coal’s woeful economics may ultimately sway the Queensland government. But last week’s decision heralds a stupidity as disastrous as it is ultimately cruel. It is another notch on the belt of politicians who will buggerise reality for a dime if it means not having to question the moral turpitude lurking within the void of their “beliefs”.
Last week we were told to take one more step into our collective graves, with the promise of some hard candy some time down the line.
Officials say that Maharashtra’s drought is now worse than the famine that affected 25 million people across the state in 1972. It is estimated that 90% of the population south of Mumbai have fled in the wake of the water crisis. Eight million farmers in Karnataka and Maharashtra are struggling to survive. In Marathwada, 4700 farmers have committed suicide in the last five years, including close to 1000 last year.
D. Anand Babu was beaten to death in an argument concerning water.
Adani promises up to 1800 jobs.
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60 thoughts on “Make no mistake, Adani means death”
TheRabidHamster
June 18, 2019 at 12:45 pmTime for a BEX and a good lie down I think.
Bert
June 18, 2019 at 1:09 pm“The end of history is the enforced stasis of a decay- ing system stubbornly resisting its slow death. Its life support is imperial- ist war, ecological destruction, police-state surveillance and brutality, the degradation of culture by corporate mass media, and a mass psychology of hopelessness.” Indroduction to “Necroculture” by Charles Thorpe.
kyle Hargraves
June 18, 2019 at 1:39 pmYou seem to posses a very great contempt for the Crikey subscriber. One non sequitur after another. There is no coherence to the first four paragraphs and what exists for each paragraph is simple-minded assertion at best.
After another day I won’t be hear. I could read an injunctrue such as “Adani is death” from a JW-type rag. I don’t need to pay to be insulted. See my previous posts.
“Adani’s supporters are the predictable few: the coal-loving politicians, the Murdoch hacks, and the private industry jackals out for their next suck of marrow.”
Such may be so. I don’t fit any category identified and I am NOT a supporter of Adani but I don’t give damn if the thing is built or otherwise. It simply doesn’t matter; least of all to total global emissions. There is a middle ground of indifference.
> That, I think, is the new nihilism.
Do you indeed? I suggest the “new nihilism” is the embracing of post truth; the rejetion of evidence over “feelings”. Indeed, the concept of truth, itself, is being displaced; aided and abetted by the post-modern argument that all truth is relative.
The assertion anecdotal at best) is that truth changes via power relations or, alternatively, the truth of the matter is merely (i.e. only) a function of the power-relations that existed at the time. Merely to challenge the “revered view” has become politically and socially unacceptable. THAT is the new nihilism.
I’m unsure if I will have logon access tomorrow but either way “my dear, I don’t give a damn”.
TheRabidHamster
June 18, 2019 at 2:24 pmI find myself in the unfamiliar landscape of agreement with Kyle.
Reading this “article” was like being assailed by a horde of earnest teenagers wearing Che Guevara T shirts.
Ben.
June 18, 2019 at 5:45 pm“Reading this “article” was like being assailed by a horde of earnest teenagers wearing Che Guevara T shirts.”
Yeah, bit of an odd one for Crikey – who is this supposed to convince? Crikey’s been covering climate change as fact going back the 6-7 years I’ve been subscribed. This felt similar to the ‘If Labor formed a coalition with The Greens they would win every election EVER!” piece from earlier this month. More feel-pinions than analysis.
kyle Hargraves
June 18, 2019 at 6:18 pmI won’t be here to see it but I will bet anything that this trash will constitute the “new model” from the new batch of (on the face of it) illiterate (given the sentence structure) and uneducated (given the command of the subject) reporters that Crikey has employed.
Good luck guys and go easy on the Valium.
TheRabidHamster
June 18, 2019 at 6:22 pmYou’re off again Kyle! That’s a great shame. If you must, then take care.
AR
June 19, 2019 at 9:14 amAgree that this piece is likely to be the “new” form esp if the INQ editor’s style is any indication.
I renewed last month, before seeing her effusions, and am experiencing serious buyer’s remorse.
It seems to have been assembled – no-one could suggest it was ‘writing’, reminding me of Capote’s opinion of Kerouac’s outpourings – from alley graffiti, placard slogans and bumper stickers, a hodgepodge of abusive adjectives, silly cliches and tired tropes.
kyle Hargraves
June 19, 2019 at 12:37 pmThe option was to attract either a more informed audience or a dumber audience. Crikey has selected dumber.
AR
June 19, 2019 at 1:01 pmWe’ll miss our very own Sheldon.
Evil Brian
June 18, 2019 at 6:20 pmIn total agreement with all 3 opinions above.
David Thompson
June 18, 2019 at 7:03 pmMeh, I differ.
Don’t mind a little plain speakin’ – nowhere near enough of it, even if it does bring out the wobbles in the purists (whatever they might demand purity about).
One man’s non-sequitur is another’s series of dots begging greater connection.
Truth is, as I’ve noted below, this nation has been sold yet another pup, and the advertising has been provided by those who know how best to create the smoke necessary to disguise the fact this ‘hole’ is of absolutely no benefit to the citizenry of this nation, or any other, on any measure, or any other.
JMNO
June 18, 2019 at 2:42 pmThere are other reasons than climate change for this coal mine not going ahead. It will involve large-scale land-clearing including of conservation reserves, it is highly likely to adversely affect the local acquifers (draining and pollution) and possibly the Great Artesian Basin. It will require vast amounts of water to be piped from rivers that can’t afford to lose the water. It will affect agriculture and water supplies. And shipping it out will affect the Great Barrier Reef. Adani has already polluted the waters off Abbott Point, showing the same contempt for the environment here that it has shown overseas.
ratty
June 19, 2019 at 9:51 amAdani has got a track record of destroying and polluting regions it has mined, paid no royalties for the coal extracted and left the area looking as if a set for a post apocalyptic movie. All this in its own country.
We have gone from fawning grovelling (Tony Abbott) to grudging acceptance, with no concessions granted Queensland Government.
The CFMMEU has become a lot less strident in its support, now that Adani says there will be 100 jobs once the remotely controlled mine is operational. The CFMMEU will need to assess whether its support for this mine will lead to the closure of mines in NSW, with a net loss of jobs.
And, in the long run, yes this mine will cause deaths, lots of deaths.
Penny
June 19, 2019 at 1:11 pmYes. Thank you.
spicelab
June 18, 2019 at 6:28 pmThis sounds like a comment from Watts Up With That.
I love the way these posts bring out the self-styled ‘climate rationalists’ replete with their patronising assumptions and lofty persecution complex.
If you seriously think there’s a strategic response to climate at this point that doesn’t involve Australia then you don’t understand the problem on any level.
This article is absolutely spot-on.
Penny
June 19, 2019 at 1:16 pmAgree. With so much at stake and with such a dodgy company (Adani), there is no excuse for making excuses for these people who try to justify Adani going ahead. I wont miss the so called experts who will attack grammar when they cant provide a reason for the continuing destruction of environment and the planet. Tired old white men in denial, farting in the wind.
Watcha
June 22, 2019 at 8:28 amAgreed. The author is just saying that we have huge amount of evidence that this is the wrong thing to do including economical, number of jobs and the destruction this mine will cause and we have decided to go that route anyway. We are set on a course of self destruction and not even this plain evidence of well seemingly change our course. The writer doesn’t care about trying to convince Crikey readers. It’s a fact which should be stated again and again.
heavylambs
June 18, 2019 at 11:32 pmWhere have you been for the last thirty years?
This does matter to total global emissions. Every new mine does, and particularly those producing low-middling grades. Carmichael / Galilee basin resource is vast, and BAU there will be significant enough in its contribution to racing to the suggested emissions limits.
At current atmospheric CO2 levels we are guaranteed to go past 2C, despite the touchingly hopeful 1.5C chatter…that is the new nihilism, the spruiked target is already lost, and no politician will admit it anywhere yet.
This mine is a disaster in the immediate sense for the local environment…they have absolutely no fucking clue about what will happen to the water table and local wetlands and springs, beyond that they will depress it.. Adani have had nine years to really explore the water problem..they haven’t really bothered. I’ve read the impact documents.
And the black-throated finch habitat issue is another fingers-crossed exercise in ignoring expert input.
AR
June 19, 2019 at 10:03 amThe 350 ppm mark, once deemed the crisis level, is now 420… or is it 450? .. doesn’t matter.
We are well past tip-over point – if all human activity involving combustion ceased tomorrow, or last week/month/year it wouldn’t stop the inexorable.
The tundras of Siberia & Canada are already burping methane and the reflux will soon be the full-on chunder.
The Arctic is well on the way to being MIA which will be a boon for oil & mineral extraction.
As brain dead Joel Fitzgibbons expectorated last week, “gotta get the stuff outa the ground asap coz it won’t have any value is 50 years” – mainly due to lack of buyers left alive.
The Greenland, Himalayan & Antarctic glaciers are melting, a’slippin’ and a’sliding towards the sea and the Gulf Stream, which keeps the British Isles free of Continental winters will not survive.
Need I go on? It’s over! A few breeding pairs around the erstwhile Arctic circle and maybe the upper Amazon headwaters basin.
kyle Hargraves
June 19, 2019 at 12:05 pmThe remarks of spicelab and heavylambs amount to a Monty Python “yes it is – now its not” discussion. If one is to claim that “it matters” some arithmetic is required. Given that China consumes 1/4 of world energy produced and produces about 1/4 of total emissions; add Europe and the USA one has accounted for almost half of global emissons.
Australia at circa 1.6% of global emissions need not do anything other than make optimal decisions as to energy (preferred) but sup optimal decisions, as in this case, are not going to matter a damn.
Moreover, nor the Nth time, Lovelock writing 20 years ago declared that it was all over. Read the opening line of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”
dilettantebeth
June 19, 2019 at 9:31 pmDid you not even read other comments about environmental impacts apart from emissions Kyle? And the unlikelihood of any of the expected social benefits to materialise? You keep banging on but appear to totally miss the bloody point! Your pontificating won’t be missed by all of us if you take your bat and ball and go home!
heavylambs
June 20, 2019 at 12:39 amIncorrect.
This is not fiddling around the edges: consider the size of the Galilee Basin and the conga line of idiots waiting to extract its coal over the next century if we throw up our hands and say ‘Lovelock’. It will be a potentially massive contributor to global emissions for decades.
Yes, China is several orders of magnitude greater emitter. Who knew?
Every proposed mine still matters to the extremes and the shape of the AGW trajectory: Do you want 5m of sea level rise by 2200, or 4m by 2300, for example.
Do you want 6C of rise in GAT or 4C?…there is a material difference, even if its a choice between ghastly and ghastlier.
Neither are at all desirable but faster higher rises are obviously worse.
Lovelock’s ‘all over’ does not mean we have to make it as bad as possible. It’s going to be very hard for future generations, but it need not be absolutely bloody impossible!
Penny
June 19, 2019 at 1:17 pmA fossil defending fossil fuel. Who would have thought?
zut alors
June 18, 2019 at 1:41 pmWell articulated. The marketing boffin who coined the term ‘clean coal’ was a genius. It effectively sold an impossible product to the gullible.
Meantime the ABC reports that a $2 Billion coal fired power station is proposed for Collinsville in Nth Queensland (naturally, where else). It’s to be run by the Indigenous community & can be operating in 10 years’ time. It beggars belief.
Penny
June 19, 2019 at 1:26 pmThis needs investigation. Three dodgy people is not a ‘community’ run power station at all. It looks and smells a front set up by the coal industry. They are seeing 2 billion dollars to build this dinosaur. They are not seeking money to help end disadvantage in their communities. This is about the corruptible and the corrupt. We need to find out which they are.
klewso
June 18, 2019 at 2:02 pmIt’s going to be interesting – when it doesn’t deliver on promises made – where the Adani Cheersquad (from politicians to their one-eyed media cheerleaders to their incurious cohort, who couldn’t be bothered checking claims let alone using their position to let on) try to lay blame for failure.
Like they don’t own a mirror amongst them?
zut alors
June 18, 2019 at 2:15 pmLet’s hope TV newsrooms keep the camera grabs of boasting Adani execs, politicians & others with vested interests in their archives. To be aired in the not too distant future once cruel reality hits & – gasp! – the emperor is revealed to have no clothes.
Been Around
June 18, 2019 at 2:14 pmWhilst I empathise with you anger at the arrant stupidity of allowing the Carmichael coal mine development to proceed, you are wrong about one point, which I concede is bewildering. The Carmichael mine will not make anyone rich. You do not have to be an economic or accounting genius to work out that the capital investment will never be recovered. It really is a matter of simply pissing money up against the wall in the pursuit of a phyrric victory over Australian society’s best interests. It is the absolute zenith of corporate stupidity and environmental vandalism.
klewso
June 18, 2019 at 2:19 pmAnd the pushers will still say “A pyrrhic ideological victory is still a victory”.
David Thompson
June 18, 2019 at 6:50 pmIt’s not about making anyone ‘rich’, BA.
It’s about preventing the Adani conglomerate from being declared insolvent/bankrupt.
The entire Adani Balance Sheet ‘health’ depends on the Carmichael mine being able to be valued on the Balance Sheet as an asset destined to produce a commercial return. Without it listed as a viable asset, the Balance Sheet turns bright red.
There’s also how and where the Balance Sheet is structured – certain mine related assets are ‘owned’ in Mauritius. That’s for ‘tax purposes’, but if the mine ain’t viable, those related assets are also a bust.
There is also the rapidly developing bigger picture to consider – and, the country’s clearly been sold a pup.
About 6 weeks odd ago, Modi was ‘turning Trump’. This was popularly – in the West – perceived as Modi turning away from Eurasian integration (the multipolar model of Xi and Putin), because of the eternal India-China ‘friction’.
Then, Donnie came to the rescue, stripped India of ‘developing nation’ status, meaning finance and trade concessions, and shortly after whacked India with tariffs.
What largely went unnoticed, was prior to the imposition of tariffs, Modi rang Putin, and asked him to set up a 3-way meet ‘on the sidelines’ of the upcoming G20 meeting in Japan.
Putin is the conduit between India and China, and the 3 way meet involves India, China and Russia.
As one Indian analyst noted, yesterday;
“Without doubt, the little-noticed vignette out of the SCO summit is that the leaderships of Russia, India and China have agreed to have a trilateral meeting within the RIC format, too, alongside their summits on the bilateral track. And, the venue will be the Osaka — on the sidelines of the G20 summit (which will be attended by President Trump and where a galaxy of western leaders is expected.)
If international diplomacy indulges in symbolism, this must be one of the most poignant ones in world politics in the recent times. The RIC has always been a red rag for the US — ever since the great Soviet strategic thinker and Kremlin statesman Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov first proposed the tantalising idea in 1999. The profound symbolism cannot be lost on Trump that India is consorting with the two “revisionist powers” on the planet (Russia and China) which, according to the US, are each working its way toward making a power grab on the world stage.”
The Adani mine in the Carmichael is a pup, and we’ve bought it, lock, stock and a coupla smokers.
When I say ‘mine’, I mean to say ‘soon to be a stranded asset’.
Sue Miills
June 19, 2019 at 11:54 amNo clothes? They’ve been sold the vision of sunning themsleves on a tropical alps, surrounded by people telling them they have beautiful clothes on. In the dogeatdog world they want of course, everyone around them will be looking to do to them what they did to the rest of us.
I am really afraid the whole Lets Destroy the Gallillee Basin etc is about stealing the water
Agnes Hannan
June 18, 2019 at 3:12 pm“Death is hard to grok …” what the heck is grok?
TheRabidHamster
June 18, 2019 at 3:24 pmTo understand and empathise with.
kyle Hargraves
June 18, 2019 at 3:40 pmThe assertion is a.about RH. I ought to be thankful that I have been favoured with sample of the the ingenuity of the new writing team. After today I would have to be paid to maintain a login.
Graeski
June 18, 2019 at 4:15 pmI believe the word was invented by the science fiction author Robert Heinlein in his 1961 novel ‘Stranger in a Strange Land” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land). It’s a running joke throughout the plot: a supposedly Martian word that everyone on Earth interprets differently when first hearing it, but eventually is explained as meaning something like ‘comprehend’ in an almost spiritual sense.
A bit too hipster for Crikey, I would have thought.
mark e smith
June 18, 2019 at 4:25 pmYay “grok”. Far out man. Took me straight back to The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test.
Apart from a well meaning but silly piece. So grok was well placed. But then what is there left to say about this project….. As it happens, same thing I and others have said for some time now. The project makes no investment sense as a going concern. There are all sorts of urgers in the background, public money just begging to be siphoned off, balance sheet shenanigans and who knows what.
It’s not built yet and whatever’s going on is about a lot more than coal.
AR
June 19, 2019 at 12:55 pmExcept that Heinlein loathed the hippies like Kesey et al and STRANGER… was his riposte, showing that good ole amerikan greed trumps (pun unintended) warm & fuzzy empathy & gemutlichkeit.
Vasco
June 18, 2019 at 3:44 pmThe information about the drought in India shows the world water crisis starting to unfold. Parts of the Middle East and Africa are there already. The drought in NSW and the Murray Darling devastation are a tiny beginning for Australia.
John Hall
June 18, 2019 at 4:40 pmNow that the idiots have approved ADANI – please DONT use any taxpayer funds to build the infrastructure for it. Let it fail or succeed on its own merits – if any.
I won’t hold my breath for any significant benefits for the locals and I expect there will be a major accounting in the next election when this affair harvest’s it’s bitter fruit.
Roger Clifton
June 18, 2019 at 5:15 pmIt would be foolish to fall into the trap of saying that coal is the enemy of the greenhouse. In fact the main enemy of the greenhouse is fossil carbon. Carbon! Consider whose interests you serve by allowing coal to be replaced by gas. Far from being a step in the right direction, you would be committing the world’s industrial economies to another hundred years of unremitting emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. Translate each anti-coal slogan into its anti-carbon version before you repeat it. Coal, oil and gas must go!
kyle Hargraves
June 18, 2019 at 6:34 pmA major problem with this article, Roger, is that, laudable as it is, noting is going to happen. The major polluters will please themselves when and how they reduce emissions.