The arrest last week of three identifiably religious people drew attention again to Whitehaven's new coal mine site at Maules Creek, in northern NSW.
The arrests came after a Catholic priest, three Uniting Church ministers, a Buddhist priest and the three arrestees faced off against a line of heavy haulage trucks at the entrance to the site. Why did these people of faith feel it was time to put their bodies on the line?
Simply put, when the law is fully harnessed to keep in place a system that many consider to be immoral, the most ethical action is peaceful, non-violent disobedience. Such action was taken by those protecting Jewish people from the Nazis during World War II, by the Jesuit Berrigan brothers in the Plowshares Movement, and during India's independence struggle, led by Mahatma Ghandi.
What has the Maules Creek coal mine got in common with these rather extreme examples? A great deal.
Probably the most underestimated crisis of our time is the developing ecological calamity resulting from climate change, driven by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Increasingly, humanity's collective investment in fossil fuels, which many people unwittingly support through our banks and super funds, has become dangerously disconnected from its ultimate outcome, the destruction of the biosphere. Coal is a major culprit.
Analysts have calculated a carbon budget, beyond which we will exceed the gravely dangerous threshold of a two-degree temperature rise. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the current pace, this budget will be exhausted in just 15 years. Yet the business model of fossil fuel companies assumes that the extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas, will continue well into the future.
The fossil fuel industry globally has the confidence of governments, the finance sector and the public. Here in Australia, Big Coal uses its wealth to pay well-connected lobbyists at federal and state levels, as well as climate denial think tanks. The public's support is secured through misinformation about 'clean coal' and vastly inflated claims that the sector provides wealth and jobs. The finance sector's support is secured by promoting the perception that coal is a highly profitable, low risk option that renewables will never realistically replace.
The logical next step is for the legal system to protect the interests of companies. This is what is happening at Maules Creek.
Whitehaven's behaviour has been demonstrably unethical. Local ecologists have established that the company was given federal and state