STEVE GALILEE: HVO, Mount Pleasant, activists, and an optimistic future

I want to go back to that High Court decision and talk about Scope 3 emissions.

What are your thoughts on Scope 3 emissions? Should they be playing such a seemingly big role in mining project approvals or not?

It's a good question.

I think it's important that the industry needs to be mindful of the scope three emissions that are generated by our exports or by...

Yeah,

actually.

And let's talk about scope three emissions.

So basically they are emissions that end up being generated by our coal overseas once we've exported it and gotten it out of the

country.

That's right.

That's right.

Well, they can also be...

That's right.

Essentially they're emissions that are generated by the customers.

And most of our customers are overseas, of course.

And those scope three emissions generated overseas are those countries' emissions that are accounted for by those countries in relation to their Paris Agreement commitments and global emissions accounting frameworks commitments.

that they've signed up to.

So what we've seen over the last four or five years or so, Jess, is a regulatory creep in relation to scope three missions.

So while initially they were acknowledged as part of the assessment process, they've become more and more of a focus of the assessment process to the point where then I believe, and I think there's a general view, that they are a disproportionately high factor in relation to south wales uh because i mean if you just only got a look at the the statement that was put out by the independent planning commission in relation to the hbo approval dedicated several paragraphs to the issue of emissions and in particular scope three emissions and dedicated one one sentence to air quality dust noise those sorts of things which would traditionally be a very significant focus and local communities would argue should be a very significant focus.

And of course, those things are still considered to a high degree in the process itself.

But it was instructive that in the press release that was issued by the IPC, they were at pains to point out how much they had done in relation to emissions considerations.

and dedicated just a sentence to those other issues, which suggests where they think the legal challenges are likely to come from, from the activists.

But it also means that because we've had this creeping regulatory process in relation to scope through emissions, It's been a bit of a grey area in relation to how these scoped through emissions should be treated and how important they should be in relation to the assessment process and the different court outcomes that we saw from the High Court in relation to Mount Pleasant in relation to...

Essentially, what happened in that court case was... that the activists won and were able to overturn that appeal on the basis that they argued that the emissions generated overseas, the impact of that locally around Musselbrook, around the mine, weren't considered strongly enough.

And that was at the New South Wales court level that the approval was overturned.