Black beauty

With this being prompted by a piece about coal in the FT earlier in the month, with the picture above catching my eye and being saved.

The next thing to catch my eye was the chart above, showing that the biggest coal exporters in the world were Australia and Indonesia. I had known that the former was big into coal, but not the latter.

Then while coal worldwide might be set to fall, from the chart above, the fall does not seem to be kicking in big any time soon, with demand in Asia-Pacific, interpreted broadly, looking set for a modest rise over the next few years. So the Australian miners should be OK for a while. That said, not at all clear to me from the chart what is going on elsewhere in the world. Not the best graphic to come out of the FT.

I then turned my attention to the first of the snaps above. What on earth was it? I eventually ran it down to a feature shown up in Satellite View in gmaps, a little to the west of a small community called Baralaba, in the county of Banana, in Queensland, Australia, with the dark splodge middle right being a mountain called Mount Ramsay (24°15'41.2"S, 149°53'35.5"E), visible in the distance in the first snap. A sandstone wonder which is not, it seems, accessible to the general public.

The Dawson River runs just to the west of the two circular patches, a river which I think regularly floods the surrounding land.

The main business of the area is coal, with cows as runner up, and it also seems that a new coal mine (I think, reference 2) has been the subject of an epic battle between a man in the street (Paul Stephenson) and big coal. Bing turns up lots of stuff about it, including, for example, reference 3.

But all that apart, I failed to trace the first of the snaps above, in the sense of finding out what it was. I decided, in the absence of anything more positive, that it must be an environmentally reclaimed open cast coal mine - with environment figuring quite large in the second half of reference 2. Important birds like Monarcha melanopsis and Myiagra cyanoleuca.

I learn along the way that Murdoch - the chap who brings us the 'Sun' and who brought us the 'News of the World' - is big for big coal. A big supporter of the more coal the merrier.

PS: I only found my way back to the article at reference 1 below by asking Google Image where the circular snap above came from. FT search returned far too many hits for 'australia coal' to be helpful and it didn't seem to bite on the date at all.

Reference 1: Climate change: Australia wrestles with its coal mining dilemma: Even as demand falls, federal and state governments are pumping billions into the polluting fossil fuel industry - Jamie Smyth/FT - 2021.

Reference 2: https://www.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/108312/baralaba-south-ias.pdf.

Reference 3: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-04/grazier-son-nears-end-of-david-and-goliath-battle-cockatoo-coal/7002034.