Abstract
Despite mounting urgency to mitigate climate change, new coal mines have recently been approved in various countries, including in Southeast Asia and Australia. Adani’s Carmichael coal mine project in the Galilee Basin, Queensland (Australia), was approved in June 2019 after 9 years of political contestation. Counteracting global efforts to decarbonise energy systems, this mine will substantially increase Australia’s per capita CO2 emissions, which are already among the highest in the world. Australia’s deepening carbon lock-in can be attributed to the essential economic role played by the coal industry, which gives it structural power to dominate political dynamics. Furthermore, tenacious networks among the traditional mass media, mining companies, and their shareholders have reinforced the politico-economic influence of the industry, allowing the mass media to provide a venue for the industry’s outside lobbying strategies as well as ample backing for its discursive legitimisation with pro-coal narratives. To investigate the enduring symbiosis between the coal industry, business interests, the Australian state, and mainstream media, we draw on natural language processing techniques and systematically study discourses about the coal mine in traditional and social media between 2017 and 2020. Our results indicate that while the mine’s approval was aided by the pro-coal narratives of Queensland’s main daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail, collective public sentiment on Twitter has diverged significantly from the newspaper’s stance. The rationale for the mine’s approval, notwithstanding increasing public contestation, lies in the enduring symbiosis between the traditional economic actors and the state; and yet, our results highlight a potential corner of the discursive battlefield favourable for hosting more diverse arguments.
Highlights
Mitigating climate change requires the development of low-carbon innovations, and efforts to steer the decline of fossil fuel-based technologies, infrastructures and related systems (Rosenbloom and Rinscheid, 2020)
Our empirical results support previous findings based on qualitative discourse analysis (Brevini and Woronov, 2017; Curran, 2020), but they are congruent with our hypothesis that the network of special interests is correlated with the pro-coal attitude of News Corp’s outlets, which are part of the broader political and discursive underpinnings of Australia’s pattern of economic growth
We have shown how the coal industry occupies a central role in Australia’s economy and its international insertion, which gives it structural power to influence key political dynamics in the country
Summary
Mitigating climate change requires the development of low-carbon innovations, and efforts to steer the decline of fossil fuel-based technologies, infrastructures and related systems (Rosenbloom and Rinscheid, 2020). PPCA does not, include the world’s major coal consumers (Jewell et al, 2019), and continued investment into coal in many countries is leading to ongoing carbonisation of energy systems (Cui et al, 2019; Edenhofer et al, 2018; Steckel et al, 2015, 2020) This deepening carbon lock-in is sustained by a variety of factors, which prominently include economic actors that draw private benefits from the continued use of fossil fuels (investors, utility companies, mining companies and so on) (Hess, 2014; Kim et al, 2016; Trencher et al, 2021; Unruh, 2000). The Australian political economy has become transnationalised due to the country’s embeddedness in international coal trade (Rosewarne, 2016) International businesses such as Adani Group, the Indian multinational conglomerate that applied for developing mines in the Galilee Basin in Queensland, have become an integral part of the Australian energy regime. This mine deepens the links between Australia and India, respectively the world’s largest exporter and second-largest importer of coal (data from UNComtrade)
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