I think food vs. industrial energy conflicts are a sign that things are out of balance. Another is irrigation vs. environmental flows in river systems. Perhaps the day will come when households have to choose between cheap food and say cheap air conditioning powered by gas or coal fired electricity. As the gas wells spread like a cancer a large acreage of farmland is replaced by access roads and brine ponds. Equivalent food production will then have to be done further out in the backblocks. Meanwhile population increase brings not only more mouths to feeds but more demand for industrial energy. I think miners will have to pay more in compensation.

Thanks for this very informative article. This stuff's happening not too far from where I live, and I think it's going to be the next big environmental issue in Queensland, if not elsewhere.

We have to find economic alternatives to simply digging up finite resources and selling them to the cheapest bidder, permanently buggering the land in the process.

“Should a successful outcome emerge from an effective participation process,...... legal standards of environmental protection would be complied with (voluntarily), and public trust and confidence in government would be enhanced.”

The Environmental Protection Acts were established in various states of Australia during the 70’s and the expectations of successive state governments and communities, for miners to voluntarily comply with regulations, has seen mining catastrophes on a grand scale and the poor regulatory control of mining has the potential for calamitous mining events to continue.

Alas, fake “effective” participation processes have been and continue to be conducted where community stakeholders inevitably come off second best.

Today, we witness state premiers overriding Environmental Impact Assessments to appease the mining industry and even a government environmental agency ignoring the determinations of its minister - determinations which would have protected citizens from pollution.

Communities suffer damage because of an environmental agency’s wrongful administrative decisions and even when conditions of licence may be sufficient, agencies do not regularly inspect the premises and rely instead upon the results reported by the licensee.

Which reminds me of an explosion at Apache Energy's shoddy Varanus Island gas plant in WA, which cut almost a third of the state's supply in June 2008, closing mines, refineries and damaging the economy. Late 2007: The ignominious lead poisoning of Esperance WA, the slaughter of 9,500 native birds and the miner’s continuing non-compliance with its lead exports, through the Port of Fremantle.

Additionally, drill holes and other activities in small and large mining projects in Australia continue slaughtering millions of native species every year and seemingly with impunity.

Methane gas is around 20 times more potent than CO2 - no comfort when miners continue breaching guidelines for hazardous emissions (mere guidelines are unenforceable anyway) and fail to mitigate fugitive or stack emissions. The conditions of licences are often few and rarely include 'will' and 'must' (which would be enforceable.)

And until an enquiry is conducted into the impotence of all state EPAs and the inactions of the entrenched dancing boys in state parliaments and government agencies, mining and agriculture cannot co-exist sustainably.

Two great economists invented the Kaldor-Hicks rule as part of social choice theory, welfare economics and applied to cost benefit analysis. Simply stated, if the winners can compensate the losers, and still be better off, then a course of action increases net welfare. A powerful and useful framework. The trick of course is to fully capture the value of wins and losses from a particular course of action, to determine net benefit or dis-benefit from a particular course of action for the community.