Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
more by buoyant prices than by increased output. The current expectation is
that the next leg of this boom will be driven by increased quantities of ex-
ports while prices are expected to moderate, and led by coal and LNG
exports.
While the early minerals booms employed around 15% of workers in
mining-related jobs, subsequent minerals booms have had substantial
macroeconomic impacts on balance of payments, exchange rates, etc., but
mining-related employment has never recovered the prominence it
enjoyed in the late 1800s. In 2012, a time of high minerals production and
even greater investment in new mining and processing facilities, mining-
related employment was little above 2%, but minerals accounted for al-
most two-thirds of the total value of exports.
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Arguably, Australia's Reserve
Bank, concerned to resist inflation and spread some of the minerals
benefits to the broad mass of consumers during the current minerals
boom, has also exacerbated the so-called 'Dutch disease' by maintaining
high exchange rates that disadvantaged other exporting and import-sub-
stitution sectors.
This historical legacy has left Australia with property rights that en-
courage minerals exploration and extraction and favour the minerals sector
over land-owners and communities, and a body politic that (for fear of
killing the golden goose) is reluctant to charge adequate royalties and/or
impose non-trivial mineral taxes that would ensure that Australia retains
the economic rents attributable to the extraction of its exhaustible mineral
resources.
1.3 Conflicting Worldviews
Unconventional fossil fuels pit market values against non-market values
from the local to the global, i.e. from environmental concerns in the oil and
gas fields and around the ports under construction to serve exports, to global
climate issues. They pit short-term against longer-term considerations as the
benefits from extraction accrue within 40 years while costs of land and water
degradation continue long after the minerals operators have moved on. CSG
extraction in Australia is concentrated in prime agricultural regions, pitting
multinational minerals powerhouses against rural and traditional values on
a playing field that seems tilted in favour of CSG. So it is unsurprising that
CSG is controversial in many quarters.
Resolving these conflicts is not a simple matter of laying the facts on the
table, because the facts themselves often are subject to dispute. Research has
shown that worldview is cognitively prior to fact - i.e. worldview tends to
shape what propositions people believe about the consequences of actions -
so that mutually inconsistent views of particular prospects about, say, out-
comes of CSG development may be manifestations of different worldviews.
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While this insight has many interesting implications for conflict resolution,
I raise it here only to suggest the diculty of finding amicable resolution for
many of the conflicts surrounding CSG development.
