Australia’s Coal Curse: Sitting on a Mountain of Energy While Choosing to be Poor

The world has just been reminded, yet again, that coal is not going away. A nasty conflict in the Persian Gulf has throttled oil and gas supplies into Asia. Fertiliser plants in India and Bangladesh are throttling back or shutting down. Governments that spent years talking about the "energy transition" are suddenly rediscovering the one fuel that is abundant, dispatchable, and already sitting in the ground.

Coal's near-term future looks brighter than the climate-industrial complex wanted to admit. India is pouring money into domestic production. China is not about to turn off the lights. South-East Asia still needs baseload power. When gas gets expensive or scarce, coal steps in. That is not ideology. That is physics and economics.

Australia should be the big winner. We have some of the highest-quality thermal and metallurgical coal on the planet, world-class ports, and decades of mining expertise. In a rational country this would be a moment of quiet satisfaction mixed with aggressive expansion.

Instead, we are busy trying to phase ourselves out of the game.

While India builds more coal-fired capacity and locks in long-term energy security, Australia's political class remains committed to the net-zero fantasy that treats our own resources as a moral embarrassment. New coal mines face endless legal guerrilla warfare. Existing ones operate under a cloud of political hostility. State governments compete to see who can sound more progressive about "ending coal." The federal government talks about a "just transition" while the actual transition is happening in the opposite direction; just not here.

The result is predictable. Global demand for coal is being supported by the very energy insecurity that Western net-zero policies helped create. The money and the strategic advantage are flowing to the countries still willing to dig and burn. Australia, sitting on enormous reserves, is choosing to be a high-cost, high-regulation, low-ambition also-ran.

This is not environmentalism. It is a form of national self-harm dressed up as virtue. We export the coal that keeps Asian economies running, then congratulate ourselves for closing the plants that would keep Australian industry competitive. We lecture the world about emissions while other countries prioritise keeping the lights on and the factories open. When the next energy shock hits, those countries will have power. We will have press releases.

Coal is not romantic. It is not clean in the Instagram sense. It is simply the most reliable, scalable, and currently available source of dense energy for large parts of the developing world, and for any developed country that still wants heavy industry. Pretending otherwise has already cost Europe dearly. Australia is determined to learn the same lesson the hard way, only with better weather and worse policy.

The Gulf conflict has shown, once again, that energy security is not optional. Countries that treat coal as a strategic asset will weather the next decade better than those that treat it as a sin. Australia has the resource. What it lacks is the political will to use it in its own interest.

That is not a market failure. It is a choice. And it is a stupid one. Done by a ruling elite who care nothing about our welfare.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/07/coals-unexpectedly-bright-future-but-not-for-australia/