One of the oldest coal mines in the country was handed a fine of just over $500,000 last week, after a bushwalker noticed that a creek flowing into the Royal National Park looked like a “congealed black custard”.

James McCormack was walking past the creek that flows past the Metropolitan coal mine back in September 2022, when he noticed that “the water was really dark as if Coca-Cola (minus the bubbles) was flowing down it.”

Soon after he notified the NSW EPA via its public pollution line.

This led to an extensive investigation, which identified coal sludge had leaked into waterways nearby to Metropolitan mine, flowing into the Royal National Park.

On one occasion, scientists found a frog upside down, writhing on its back. They couldn’t say for certain if it was caused by the coal sludge directly, but they noted that frogs are “particularly sensitive to environmental change”.

When the court hearings finally began in November last year, many locals were dismayed that the full extent of the pollution hadn’t even been cleaned up.

Two years after the original pollution events, the local Sutherland Shire Environment Centre highlighted that “Camp Gully Creek and the Hacking River are still littered with chunks of coal and the sandy river beds are still contaminated with coal sediment”. Who will pay for this clean up?”

Now, almost three years later, Peabody Energy, was fined $196,650 for the water pollution and licence breach offences. It was also ordered to pay the EPA’s legal and investigation fees amounting to $304,806 – coming to a grand total just north of half a million dollars.

According to the EPA, this fine is a symbol of “how seriously it takes these pollution incidents” after “strengthening environmental laws last year” by increasing the  maximum penalty for each of these offences from $1 million to $2 million.

This might sound like a pretty big stick, but it is utterly inconsequential when you compare it to what a coal mine like Metropolitan makes every year.

While it’s challenging to estimate the exact profits from Metropolitan mine specifically, Peabody’s financial reporting indicates it’s an incredibly profitable mine.

The mine digs up close to two million tonnes of largely metallurgical coal each year. In 2023, Peabody reported that across its metallurgical coal mines, average sales revenues were as high as $284 a tonne.

While this dropped to $219 a tonne last year, it’s still a lot of coal at a very high price. At this company-wide rate, total revenues over the last two years from Metropolitan mine could have exceeded a billion Australian dollars alone.

In the past two calendar years, Peabody also reported over a billion Aussie dollars in profits from its five Australian and one American metallurgical coal mines (adjusted EBITDA). In each of those years, the coal mined at Metropolitan made up between a quarter and a third of its seaborne metallurgical sales.

With prices high in 2023, this could have put the mine’s total profits at close to $200 million that year.

Compare that to the fine that was handed down this week by the NSW Land and Environment Court, and it amounts to approximately one-thousandth of what the mine potentially made in profits in 2023.

If you compare that to the median Australian worker, earning about $72,000 a year, this fine would be like getting a $7.20 parking ticket.

If we include the additional legal and investigation costs, it’s still nothing more than a blip for Peabody. In fact, after the company’s stock price fell by more than 40 per cent in the past year, investors saw the EPA’s fine as a positive signal. The stock rose almost 4 per cent the day after the fine was handed down.

In the end, even if the fines for massive levels of water pollution have risen from $1 million to $2 million dollars, that’s still unlikely to make anyone working in the corporate suite of Peabody sweat.

Late last year Peabody agreed to pay over $5.8 billion to acquire four Queensland coking coal mines from Anglo American. One of these mines exploded just before the acquisition, coming at a bargain. If it can get that mine opened again, that bill will rise by an additional billion dollars.

The reality is, if we are ever going to shift business interests towards protecting the environment in which they operate, we need to get real about the bargain basement prices we are charging on pollution, and that needs to be nationwide.

This government’s back-and-forth soap opera of promises to create a national EPA has offered nothing but a wink and a nod to our biggest resource companies. The offset opportunities within our reformed Safeguard Mechanism offer much the same, and the so-called Salmon laws could lock out critical reviews of major projects across the country.

We have some of the best regulations in the world when it comes to the mining sector and they are regularly improving, but the broader signal is still that if they pollute it’s not going to cost the bottom line. Until that changes, expect to see more of the same.