The Rocky Hill Land and Environment Court decison-Did the Court ignore the basic rules of causation?

by Ganesh Sahathevan

BJP portrait
Justice Brian J. Preston
As reported by the ABC:
Gloucester Resources Limited took the NSW Planning Minister to court over the matter of his disallowing the Rocky Hill coal mine after his delegate, the Independent Planning Commission, rejected the company's application for the Rocky Hill mine in late 2017.
The company argued the development would have created 170 jobs, with the mine expected to produce 21 million tonnes of coal over 16 years.
However Chief Judge Brian Preston ruled the negative impacts of the mine outweighed its economic and other public benefits.In his words:
"...... the [greenhouse gas] emissions of the coal mine and its coal product will increase global total concentrations of [greenhouse gases] at a time when what is now urgently needed, in order to meet generally agreed climate targets, is a rapid and deep decrease in emissions".
As one can readily see from the above statement,there are a number of assertions, indeed declarations made by the Chief Judge which cannot actually be proven.

 First, the precise mechanism via which which greenshouse gases from the mine and its coal product will feed into the atmosphere need to be established.Preston said nothing about that.

 Then , even if the above could be safely assumed,  Rocky Hill if operational  is just one mine, so how its greenhouse gas emissions "will increase global total concentrations" is hard to comprehend.

 How and when greenhouse gas emissions from its coal products "will increase global total concentrations"is even harder  to comprehend.The Chief Judge has again said nothing about causation expect to declare that Rocky Hill will produce something "bad" at a time when reduction of that thing "is now urgently needed, in order to meet generally agreed climate targets".

 Any junior lawyer can tell you that nothing gets taken to court if one cannot prove causation, regadrles of how obvious causation might seem.
END 


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