{"id":928431,"date":"2026-10-15T00:22:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T00:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/928431\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T00:22:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T00:22:14","slug":"is-it-really-madness-to-account-for-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-burned-overseas-the-coalition-sure-thinks-so-graham-readfearn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/928431\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it really \u2018madness\u2019 to account for emissions from fossil fuels burned overseas? The Coalition sure thinks so | Graham Readfearn"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Coalition<\/a> has come up with the perfect solution to deal with the climate pollution from when Australian fossil fuels are burned overseas.<\/p>\n

We should either just pretend they don\u2019t exist, or ignore the reason why people are concerned about them, even if those people include a majority of high court judges or the international court of justice.<\/p>\n

This week the Coalition said it wanted to roll back new rules that ask fossil fuel producers to disclose the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning their products overseas.<\/p>\n

The step comes in response to a barrage of conservative outrage over a high court ruling last week that confirmed planners in New South Wales should have considered putting conditions on the overseas emissions from a coalmine.<\/p>\n

The high court\u2019s decision was \u201cabsurd\u201d and \u201cmadness\u201d, the Coalition said, with the Nationals leader, Matt Canavan, calling it \u201cnet zero on steroids\u201d<\/a>. Fossil fuel groups called it \u201cutter madness\u201d<\/a> and warned it could spark a wave of legal challenges.<\/p>\n

But none of those commentators tackle the reason why overseas emissions \u2013 known as scope 3 \u2013 are being counted and considered in the first place: they cause people harm.<\/p>\n

Rules are being phased in that require companies \u2013 the largest first, followed by smaller companies up to a threshold<\/a> \u2013 to report annually on these emissions which they are indirectly responsible for.<\/p>\n

\u2018The quiet part out loud\u2019<\/p>\n

The Coalition wants these requirements gone, describing them as \u201cabsurd\u201d<\/a>. Another way to look at them is that they help corporations and the public to understand the full impact of their activities on the climate.<\/p>\n

For fossil fuel exporters, these emissions make up the lion\u2019s share of their climate impact.<\/p>\n

What sparked that announcement was a high court judgment last week that also concerned scope 3 emissions.<\/p>\n

The high court\u2019s finding, by a majority of three judges to two, was clearly a victory for the retired NSW couple<\/a> who had previously taken on the Mount Pleasant coalmine and won in the court of appeal.<\/p>\n

In the cold light of the judgment, all that the high court judges said was that the NSW Independent Planning Commission had not followed the state\u2019s existing laws properly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese requirements on the planning commission to consider scope 3 emissions have been part of the New South Wales planning system in one form or another for almost 20 years,\u201d said Prof Jacqueline Peel, a leading international climate law expert at the University of Melbourne.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe high court has really just said the quiet part out loud. The majority of the court looked at the law and saw that the decision-maker didn\u2019t follow it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"WhatWhat is an El Ni\u00f1o and how could it cause the hottest year on record? \u2013 video<\/p>\n

Peel said the provision that the high court had considered did not prevent the planning commission from approving a coal project.<\/p>\n

All that it did, she said, was say the commission had to consider whether to impose conditions in relation to scope 3 emissions.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe [this decision] is construed as radical by some because if you do start to impose conditions on emissions generated overseas, then it could make coal production more expensive,\u201d Peel said. \u201cWhether you think that is good or bad depends on your views around climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

Wrongful act?<\/p>\n

The Coalition was angry with the decision because it said under the UN climate convention greenhouse gas emissions are assigned to the country where they are released<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Being able to wave away responsibility for these emissions by suggesting it is just an entry on a carbon accounting spreadsheet in a foreign land ignores the reason why they are being counted in the first place.<\/p>\n

The emissions might occur somewhere else but they generate harms around the world that climate scientists are increasingly able to quantify. Those harms don\u2019t stop at the NSW border.<\/p>\n

As one of the judges to side against the mining company on the issue, Justice James Edelman wrote<\/a> the \u201cnatural and irresistible interpretation\u201d of the planning commission\u2019s reasoning was that it was \u201cdistracted by the accounting concepts of the scopes into which greenhouse gas emissions are divided\u201d.<\/p>\n

What that meant, he wrote, was that the commission thought it didn\u2019t need \u201cto ensure that scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions are minimised to the greatest extent practicable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Coalition claimed the issue with scope 3 emissions \u201cturns on the wording of NSW planning law\u201d \u2013 ignoring the harms that emissions cause around the world.<\/p>\n

But the notion that a country should start mitigating scope 3 emissions has not appeared from out of the blue.<\/p>\n

As well as it sitting on the NSW state planning rules for more than a decade (rules which the Coalition is pushing to have rescinded), the international court of justice declared last year that a failure of a state to protect the climate from greenhouse gas emissions \u201cincluding through fossil fuel production\u201d may \u201cconstitute an internationally wrongful act\u201d.<\/p>\n

At the UN, 141 countries voted to back the court\u2019s opinion, against eight dissenters \u2013 Saudi Arabia, Russia, Israel, Iran, Yemen, Liberia, Belarus and, of course, the United States and its climate science-denying president.<\/p>\n

Rather than these growing calls to manage fossil fuel production being \u201cnet zero on steroids\u201d they should more accurately be understood as an attempt to cut the steroids driving the planet\u2019s climate to ever deadlier extremes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Coalition has come up with the perfect solution to deal with the climate pollution from when Australian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":928432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-928431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=928431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/928432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=928431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=928431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=928431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}