Page 157 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

148 B. BREVINI AND T. WORONOV

sonal belief” (Oxford Dictionary 2016), post-truth politics has thus been
identified as a hallmark of the current era in the US and UK, which has had
the effect of downplaying the ways that forms of political communication and
spin that favour feelings and emotions over policy are spreading globally.
To demonstrate that post-truth politics and ‘truthiness’ are not only
American/British phenomena, we focus here on the way that politicians
and the media in Australia have debated the establishment of the one of the
biggest coal mines in the world, the Adani Carmichael mine in central
Queensland (Amos and Swann 2015; Taylor and Meinshausen 2014). We
suggest that post-truth politics are not merely a replacement of ‘truth’ with
‘lies,’ but a complex, overlapping set of “discursive manipulations”
(Carvalho 2007) that work together to produce very particular political
effects. We begin with a brief discussion of the concept of ‘truthiness’ and
provide a further theoretical elaboration. Then, drawing upon discourse
generated in both the Australian Federal and Queensland State
Parliaments, as well as reporting on parliamentary debates in the Australian
media, we argue that close analysis indicates that more is going on here
than simply a bitter partisan argument about the future of coal mining in
Queensland and Australia. Facts and facticity were far less important in the
argument in favour of building the Carmichael mine than regimes of
‘truthiness,’ where mine proponents generated ‘affectively legitimated
facts’ (Gilbert 2016) about the mine and the environment.
We begin by introducing the controversial Adani Carmichael mine in
Queensland.

ADANI IN QUEENSLAND,AUSTRALIA:FACTS AND FICTION
In November 2010, the Indian energy company Adani Mining Pty Ltd
began the process of seeking approval to build a massive greenfield coal
mine in the Galilee Basin, a remote area of north-central Queensland,
Australia. If built, the proposed Carmichael Coal Mine would be the lar-
gest in Australia and one of the largest in the world, producing 60 million
tonnes of coking coal per year (Taylor and Meinshausen 2014) targeted for
export to India’s coal-fired electricity generating plants. If approved, this
single mine would be a significant contributor to global climate change,
producing 4.7 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, far above the
0.5% of the world carbon budget for limiting warming to 2 °C (Amos and
Swann 2015; Taylor and Meinshausen 2014). In a recent joint report to
the Queensland Land Court, two experts reporting on the carbon emis-
sions of Carmichael’s output warned: