The moral case for coal: the ethics of complicity with and amongst Australian pro-coal lobbyists

Concern with climate change, and coal's contribution to it, has centred coal in an intensely moralised politics of accusation in Australia. This paper discusses the ordinary ethics through which pro-coal lobbyists in Australia relate to this moralised landscape and offers an analysis of the everyday and ordinary production of complicity with climate change. It argues that complicity is not just something that insufficiently ethical people engage in, but instead highlights the ways in which the coal industry derives a moral weight for its defenders. This complicity is made and reproduced precisely through the everyday practices of ethical deliberation figured in response to interpersonal moral accusations. These insights are made possible through the author's own positionality and surprising affinities with pro-coal lobbyists, and thus this paper argues for an anthropology of extractive industry which embraces the interplay of anthropological rapport with complicity.