‘A real-life moment from The Castle’: the retired Australian couple who took on a coal giant and won — SkimNews
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- Australia's High Court ruled 3-2 that the NSW Independent Planning Commission failed to consider scope 3 emissions when it approved MACH Energy's Mount Pleasant coalmine expansion, invalidating the 2022 approval.
- Wendy Wales and Tony Lonergan, retired schoolteachers and former Greens candidates in the Hunter region, spent four years fighting the expansion through courts on behalf of their community group Dams Heg, after neighbors initially thought they were "crazy."
- The Mount Pleasant expansion would have doubled the mine's output to 21 million tonnes a year through 2048, with 98% of projected emissions being scope 3 emissions — from coal burned overseas after export.
- The case was the first time Australia's highest court had been asked to consider climate change, and the majority ruled on a different legal basis than the NSW Court of Appeal's 2024 ruling that had first gone in the community group's favor.
- NSW Greens climate spokesperson Sue Higginson said the ruling could create "significant legal difficulty" for the recently approved Hunter Valley Operations extension — which she called the largest coal project in NSW.
- Elaine Johnson of Johnson Legal, which represented the community group, noted Australia is the world's second-largest coal exporter and predicted "courts and communities around the world" would study the ruling.
- MACH Energy initially won at the NSW Land and Environment Court before losing on appeal and then losing its High Court challenge on Wednesday.
Why it matters: The 3-2 ruling forces Australian planning authorities to consider how to limit emissions from exported coal — directly threatening not just Mount Pleasant but also the recently approved Hunter Valley Operations extension, the largest coal project in NSW. With Australia the world's second-largest coal exporter, the precedent reshapes the legal grounds on which new thermal coal can be approved.
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