Like mobile phones, you can now pick a coal mine up for $1. Literally $1. Isaac Plains coal mine in Queensland’s Bowen Basin changed hands this week for less than cost of a cup of coffee. But, like  cheap mobile phone, long contracts with expensive calls, cheap coal mines come with the liability to tidy up the enormous mess that comes with digging enormous holes, shifting millions of tonnes of dirt and extracting tens of millions of tonnes of coal…The fact that someone who bought a company for $860 million four years ago is willing to sell it for $1 today is their problem not ours, right? Wrong…We can never get money back for poles and wires we didn’t need but we haven’t yet lost the money we will lose when the mining companies walk away from their obligations… Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created in coming decades in energy efficiency, renewable energy construction, redesigning and rebuilding our electricity grid and in decommissioning old coal mines and power stations. The question isn’t whether it will happen, but how much it will cost and who will pay for it. The sooner we admit what is happening, the less money we will waste heading in the wrong direction…Whether it “believes” in climate change or not, surely Abbott government believes what the market is saying about the value of coal and the cost of renewable energy. If coal mines are selling for $1, then, whether you think it is good for humanity or not, coal clearly isn’t a good long-run investment.
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