Decision to reject coal mine makes perfect sense
Only those dead set on mining Rockies seem confused,
One thing I learned from reading the submission and evidence Robin Campbell of the Coal Association gave to the Grassy Mountain Hearing was that I needed to take it with a grain of salt.
His July 17 column in this newspaper is no different.
Campbell's outrage is understandable. Arguably, Grassy Mountain is the linchpin to the future of coal mining on the Eastern Slopes. Rejecting Grassy darkens the skies of penny stock Australian companies like Montem Resources and Atrum Coal even more. Companies like these, that have never mined a tonne of coking coal, make up the vast majority of his Association's “miners.”
But, is the outrage justified? Was the regulator's rejection truly as incomprehensible as he wants you to believe? Was a categorical rejection from an AER panel really as unprecedented as he claims? I don't think so.
First, Campbell never says why the regulator rejected Benga's project. The AER concluded the project wasn't in the public interest because its “significant adverse environmental effects on surface water quality and westslope cutthroat trout and habitat outweigh the low to moderate positive economic impacts of the project.”
Benga simply didn't demonstrate convincingly that it could mitigate the former. For example, the panel wasn't persuaded by Benga's experts that the risks of its approach to reducing selenium levels were acceptable. (Selenium pollution is a major, unsolved problem for B.C.'S Elk Valley coal mines). Apparently, the panel was more persuaded by other experts — the experts who appeared on behalf of those who opposed the project.
On the economic side, Benga simply couldn't demonstrate that its project would deliver the rosy economic future it promised. And, very significantly, what Campbell doesn't share is a dramatic conclusion from the commissioners about the economic merits of Grassy. Even if they accepted Benga's economic arguments, they still would have rejected the project. The panel wrote “even if the positive economic impacts are as great as predicted by Benga, the character and severity of the environmental effects are such that we must reach the conclusion that approval … is not in the public interest.”
The commissioners, in other words, clearly explained why they rejected Benga's applications. The balancing of risks and rewards they conducted throughout their 680-page report is only incomprehensible if you're dead set on mining coal on the Eastern Slopes.
Campbell argues these AER commissioners ignored precedent by refusing to approve the project. When Campbell states the commissioners didn't follow what he called the “decades of precedent set by the regulator,” it is overstated. Rejecting projects may be uncommon, but it isn't unprecedented. In our coalition's final argument to the Joint Review Panel, our counsel gave eight examples of petroleum projects that were flatly rejected after a regulatory hearing. Our counsel's list was not exhaustive.
Furthermore, applications are to be decided based on their merits and furthering the public interest. Surely those criteria don't make precedent a trump card. If society was a slave to precedent, how many unreasonable practices of the past would we be forced to endure today?
The times, as a certain Nobel laureate wrote, they are a-changin'. The Grassy Mountain AER panel's decision recognizes this. The Grassy Mountain decision is incomprehensible only to those who are married to the spirit of past generations. Those were generations where issues such as selenium pollution, species-atrisk legislation, and climate change didn't exist.
I'm happy to be part of today's generation, one that takes those risks seriously. I'm pleased to see the AER'S Grassy Mountain Panel seems to agree.
Benga simply couldn't demonstrate that its project would deliver the rosy economic future it promised.