ABSTRACT
Australia is the world’s largest exporter of metallurgical coal and its second-largest exporter of thermal coal. Coal underpins its electricity supply. Yet its coal sector now faces an existential crisis.
This chapter outlines the drivers shaping the future for Australian coal. It examines institutional influences such as Australia’s federated political system, ideologically driven political hostilities affecting climate and energy policies, and the economic impacts of corporatization, privatization, and technological innovation.
It finds that Australia’s fossil fuel policies now run along two increasingly contradictory paths – one domestic and the other export-oriented. Coal output is divided between local and export markets, the first declining rapidly and the second growing but slowing. Overall, Australian coal is facing an accelerating decline as importing countries and Australia’s subnational States recognize the economic and ecological opportunities that renewable technologies increasingly offer, and as public alarm over global warming reshapes the political landscape ‘from below’.
