Let’s unpack Ark Energy’s claims here:

There exist “levels of misinformation about (Chalumbin wind farm) and it’s impacts circulating around the community…we’re not knocking down rainforest…” – Anthony Russo, Ark Energy

False. Rainforest Reserves Australia has never stated that Chalumbin wind development will knock down “rainforest”. We know Chalumbin directly adjoins the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area and contains open woodland to Wet Sclerophyll forest, rare and unique habitat that harbours rich biodiversity and ecosystems. Everything we have learned about the land-parcel is from the EPBC Referral and Public Environment Report the proponent have themselves submitted to Gov.

“We’re developing the project to protect the World Heritage Area against climate change” – Anthony Russo, Ark Energy

False. What a joke! Ark Energy seek to build the wind development to make a profit from Australian taxpayers in the form of endless subsidies. It doesn’t matter if the wind blows or not (infact the wind barely blows in FNQ). It’s simply about profit. Once the project is up and running, the subsidies roll in for Ark Energy.

If Ark Energy truly cared about climate change and the Wet Tropics, the most ancient rainforest on earth, they wouldn’t put a wind development right next door. The mature forests of Chalumbin are already fighting climate change – leave them alone.

Dr Michael Seebeck, a conservationist based on the Atherton Tablelands, estimates “1000ha of deforestation of wet, moist & dry sclerophyll forests of Chalumbin will result in an overall loss of carbon of 600 tons per hectare, assuming 300 tons of carbon biomass loss above ground, and a similar amount below ground.”

He states “the ongoing loss of carbon uptake from deforestation & degradation of surrounding forests and increases fire risk & severity.”

“Deforestation contributes to direct warming of the earth’s surface due to loss of shading, loss of transpiration & loss of water cycles, and loss of direct heat storage from photosynthesis. So this project will categorically not help the climate one bit, but do the reverse.”

“We know that in the context of ongoing growth, the Chalumbin wind development is unlikely to replace fossil fuels. It will simply contribute to the overall increasing energy demands. It’s all about jobs and growth” says Seebeck.

(see his full statement below)

“There is quite extensive woodland on these properties that is not endangered.” – Anthony Russo, Ark Energy

False. 2 pastoral grazing properties will be impacted, but he fails to mention that 95% of the habitat is remnant and in great condition. The forests of Chalumbin are ancient. They have survived millennia. Many of the trees are well over one hundred years old.

The truth is, Ark Energy will clear these “of concern” threatened ecological communities:

• 4.3 ha of Casuarina Cunninghamiana woodland to open forest on alluvium fringing streams.

• 3.6 ha of Eucalyptus Tereticornis open forest to woodland on uplands on well-drained alluvium.

• 117.6 ha of Eucalyptus resinifera, Corymbia intermedia, Allocasuarina littoralis, Syncarpia glomulifera, E. drepanophylla +/- E. reducta woodland on granite and rhyolite in the dry to moist rainfall zone.

• 4.4 ha of Shrubland and low woodland mosaic with Syncarpia glomulifera, Corymbia abergiana, Eucalyptus portuensis, Allocasuarina littoralis and Xanthorrhoea johnsonii on uplands and highlands on granite.

• 24.6 ha of Shrubland and low woodland mosaic with Syncarpia glomulifera, Corymbia abergiana, Eucalyptus portuensis, Allocasuarina littoralis and Xanthorrhoea johnsonii. Uplands and highlands on granite and rhyolite, of the moist and dry rainfall zones.

• 23.1 ha of Lophostemon confertus (brush box) low shrubland or low to medium closed forest. Exposed rocky slopes on granite and rhyolite.

Additional to the above 177.6 ha of threatened habitat clearance, a further 871.9 ha of forest is being cleared, to a total of 1049.6 hectares.[i] This figure does not factor in a 200 metre buffer zone around the spatial footprint for edge effects, so the clearing impacts will be much larger than indicated.

“Wilderness is generally accepted as an area with no human influence, there’s no farming, there’s no powerlines, there’s no roads, there’s no settlement” – Nikki O’Donnell, Attexo

False. According to O’Donnell’s definition, precious little forest, including National Park, would be worthy of the mantle of ‘wilderness’ in Australia.

We define wilderness more accurately to be any area of intact remnant forest. The Chalumbin land-parcel is wilderness. It is remote, mountainous, and difficult to access. There are no roads to the pristine high elevation mountaintops in question – these will have to be brutally forced into the landscape via clear-felling, blasting, benching for the wind development.

The ridgelines of Chalumbin are hard to reach and likely too high for cattle. They are likely completely pristine. O’Donnell also fails to mention that cattle stations (that are not “wilderness” in her estimation) are sometimes converted to National Parks, as in the case of Bramwell Station in Cape York.

We say Chalumbin should be a National Park, not a wind development. The number of threatened species onsite warrants these landscapes be purchased by Gov and protected for evermore for all Australians to enjoy.

“There are currently weeds all across the site…we’ve got feral pigs…there’s a whole lot of wild dogs, there are cats..” – Nikki- O’Donnell, Attexo

False. Chalumbin is 95% good quality remnant vegetation, by Ark Energy’s own admission.

Yes there are invasive feral species in Chalumbin but they exist throughout FNQ, in National Parks and other reserves. Their existence onsite does not render a landscape void and disposable – by her own admission, even the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area contains ferals. The fact is, Chalumbin contains stunning, ecologically significant habitat. Chalumbin directly adjoins the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area and Bush Heritage’s Yourka Reserve.

Importantly, O’Donnell fails to mention that weeds will be increased by the excavation and earthworks required for Chalumbin wind development. Feral pigs, dogs and cats will gain easy access to the site thanks to newly created access roads for turbine footers and infrastructure. Any work done by the proponent to manage feral pests and weeds will be undone by the vast amount of land clearing and fragmentation caused by the wind farm.

Once Chalumbin is cleared, this land can never be restored to it’s former state.

“Jirrbal workers onsite will be upskilled with high qualifications. This is something that will benefit their lives” - Brad Go-Sam, Wabubadda Aboriginal Corporation

False. What sort of qualifications will working at Chalumbin really provide to Jirrbal workers? How many real, ongoing jobs for Jirrbal people will be created? Details aren’t disclosed. No journalist will follow up on the fine print, and the proponent knows it.

We’ve heard promises of Indigenous employment before by wind proponents. Kaban wind development proponent offered jobs to Jirrbal people as toilet cleaners and monitors. We know anecdotally that these were not considered good jobs by the Ravenshoe Jirrbal community. It is unclear now whether there are any ongoing jobs left for Jirrbal people at Kaban now the wind development is operational and construction over.

Jirrbal people need real, ongoing, meaningful jobs on Country. Not piecemeal temporary positions that disappear once a wind development is up and running.

There is no social license for Chalumbin wind development. Most of the wider community staunchly oppose Chalumbin, yet it still hasn’t been rejected by Minister Plibersek. It is morally reprehensible that Ark Energy offers paltry sums of “sweetener” money to the struggling Ravenshoe community as an incentive to support a destructive development that has already wrought so much harm and division and goes against their best interests.

“It’s really difficult to avoid all known sensitive habitat….you’ve got to offset. We’re creating a Magnificent Broodfrog reserve.”- Nikki O’Donnell, Attexo

The reality: “Offsets” are a convenient fiction developers use to tell us that no species will be impacted negatively. “Offsets” involve taking another area of land within the land parcel and designating it a substitute for land that is trashed. Yes, the economics make no sense. Land is trashed, and it is a net loss.

Little is known of the Magnificent Broodfrog’s behaviour and breeding habits. It is one of the most cryptic frog species in Australia. Developing a ‘reserve’ for the species is like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. Critically endangered Magnificent Broodfrogs will almost certainly be killed by development at Chalumbin. The ‘reserve’ may be a complete failure. You cannot offset habitat for critically endangered species – they have very particularly parameters required to survive. Their intact habitat needs to be left alone.

“Trees that have to be cleared, where they have a hollow that could provide habitat for the Greater Glider or Masked Owl, we’ll cut that whole trunk section intact and reattach it to an adjacent tree at same height…we will also use nesting boxes…this will lead to a net-gain in denning resources.” – Nikki O’Donnell, Attexo

The reality: Trees are homes. Cutting down a tree with tree hollows is destroying a Greater Glider or Masked Owl home. Greater Gliders are highly sensitive to habitat disturbance.  If Chalumbin goes ahead, Greater Gliders will be marooned as life-giving trees are destroyed. They are particularly stressed by disturbance to their habitat and will be incredibly vulnerable as they cross new haulage roads, exposing them to predators. They will be flushed from their homes by bulldozer activity, injured or killed, or relocated. Relocations generally don’t work as habitat elsewhere is occupied. In the case of Chalumbin, no relocated wildlife will be monitored or tracked for outcomes. Relocated wildlife will probably die. We will never know.

Nest boxes and re-attached tree hollows won’t make up for the over 1000 ha of habitat cleared for vast haulage roads and infrastructure.

O’Donnell conveniently fails to go into detail about the catastrophic impacts the development will pose to these threatened species[i]:

·        Magnificent Broodfrog will lose 120.5 ha of critical habitat

·        Masked Owl will lose 1026.3 ha of critical habitat

·        Koala will lose 843.81 ha of critical habitat

·        Northern Greater Glider will lose 887.9 ha of critical habitat

·        Spectacled Flying Fox will lose 976.1 ha of critical habitat

Also not mentioned will be the horrific impact to bats and raptors from 86 spinning turbines. Already bats and raptors are being decimated by nearby Kaban, Windy Hill and Mount Emerald wind farms. 2 critically endangered Spectacled Flying Foxes have already been documented killed at Kaban over the course of one year of operation. If Chalumbin is approved, the amount of raptors and bats killed on the Atherton Tablelands will multiply. This is so very wrong!

“We’ve developed nature-positive outcomes”. – Anthony Russo, Ark Energy

False. Chalumbin wind development is nature negative. “Nature positive outcomes” is marketing greenwashing. It’s industry jargon designed to stop us from interrogating the project critically. There is nothing positive instore for the nature if the wind development goes ahead. Reveging such a large site is basically impossible. Saplings won’t save a Koala or Greater Glider.

Instead, there will be rock blasting, benching, massive earthworks, sediment run-off into waterways that flow onto the Great Barrier Reef, clear felling of mature intact forest, wildlife including threatened species deaths, turbines colonising the skies killing aerial species, light pollution, weed and feral species incursion, edge effects, increased risk of bushfire from a dryer earth.

Ark Energy are grasping at straws because they know their development is an ecological shocker.

 Here are some of the voices from the people of the Atherton Tablelands who deserve to be heard:

“The larger community are absolutely against the development and that they passionately care about the adverse effects on the Ravenshoe community, forests and wildlife and there is no material gain for them to protest. Yet for Ark Energy, they have the biggest monetary loss and with their fear of losing, are paying many thousand of dollars to mislead the public by their recent advertising, by whatever means they can. That’s what big corporations do! Ark Energy know they have a huge problem, that is this community of Ravenshoe DO NOT CONSENT and they have NO Social licence. We are already a town suffering from the adverse effects of Kaban. Nearly 800 submissions were sent against the proposed wind industrialisation of Chalumbin, plus petitions and only 11 submission supported the project. I think these numbers says it all.” – resident of Ravenshoe

“In the name of truth, the claims of the ad for the Chalumbin “Wind Farm” (CT 19/8/23) need to be corrected. The project will clear approx.. 1200 hectares of tropical forest. 1000 of this will be a type more precious than rainforest: Wet Eucalypt (or sclerophyll). The terrain is not grassy meadow but rugged and hilly and was left to low intensity grazing. Old growth forest can handle that so it remains the habitat of koalas, gliders, rock wallabies, rare birds and frogs. It has rare plant communities. Shamefully the Qld Government is allowing Chalumbin to proceed without the assessment of its EPA, which has classified this county as essential for animal migration and diversity. Worse, there is no overall plan for this Great Divide strip from Ravenshoe to Rockhampton. This geography has long wind droughts in power hungry summer. Much better wind is to the west. But this Great Divide strip is heavily timbered and the last refuge of rare and endangered plants and animals. Tens of thousands of hectares will be felled as multinational wind developers, like Chalumbin, concerned only with cheap access to the HV lines, sell fools gold to the Qld Government, and to Canberran public and politicians, in the hope that the loose-loose outcomes for wind all along the Qld Great Divide can somehow be ignored.”- Resident of the Atherton Tablelands

“It is unfair and inequitable that foreign corporation investor groups can dish out money, akin to bribery that will end up destroying these intact forests and waterways. I have calculated roughly $500,000 has been spent on advertising for this round. They're trampling all over our under-resourced community. They will stop at nothing to take Chalumbin, our rivers, our wildlife, it's beauty and life itself as an entitlement and right for foreign investors.  Again, if taxpayers money are funding this industry,  it needs to stop in the public interest. Instead keep the trees in the ground if the government is really serious about climate change, and invest in power that benefits Australia's long term vision, that is safe, clean and reliable.” - Carolyn Emms, President of Rainforest Reserves Australia

“The 1000ha of deforestation of wet, moist & dry sclerophyll forests will result in an overall loss of carbon of 600 tons per hectare, assuming 300 tons of carbon biomass loss above ground, and a similar amount below ground. Also ongoing loss of carbon uptake from deforestation & degradation of surrounding forests and increased fire risk & severity. This equates to more than 120g CO2/kWh assuming a median capacity factor of 25% over the 20 year lifespan. This is in addition to the roughly 25g CO2/kWH embodied emissions of the wind turbines assuming the same capacity factor. Of course this includes none of the fossil fuels directly burned in transport, deployment, construction, earth works, maintenance, and decommissioning. And then add 200g - 600g/kWH for battery storage, plus an unknown amount for more transmission lines & synchronous converters required for this project to be operational and replace fossil fuels. And we know that in the context of ongoing growth, this is unlikely to replace fossil fuels, but contribute to the overall increasing energy demands. “Jobs and growth”. Don’t forget this deforestation contributes to direct warming of the earth’s surface due to loss of shading, loss of transpiration & loss of water cycles, and loss of direct heat storage from photosynthesis. So this project will categorically not help the climate one bit, but do the reverse. For comparison, emissions of natural gas are 490g/kWh, and coal emissions are around 880g/kWh. However that’s not the full picture, because gas emissions increase considerably with fluctuating output, such as when gas is used to balance the output of fluctuating renewable energy sources.” – Dr Michael Seebeck, conservationist

“Unfortunately, complete clearing coupled with soil removal or major soil disturbance renders rehabilitation to original simply impossible. A large proportion of species in the vegetation communities there are ground layer plants; fungi, lichen etc., and revegetation works are never able to successfully include all of these in their scope. Furthermore, machines will unavoidably be dragging weed infestations from the existing transmission line into the newly cleared and disturbed areas. Does the proponent realise that to attempt to restore even the tree and shrub layers would require seed collection from the site over a period of at least 12 months (to get all the seed), then a growing period of 1-2 years before they can be planted? If seed is not collected from the site, plants will either be the wrong species or will be sourced from the wrong region and will likely have very different genetics and therefore will not constitute “rehabilitation”. Worse, these incorrect species or this incorrect genetic stock will spread into the surrounding forest, compromising the ecosystems.” - Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland Far North Branch (WPSQFNB), submission to Ark Energy regarding their Public Environment Report Draft

Read the Chalumbin wind farm Public Environment Report in full here.

[i] https://arkenergy.com.au/documents/1286/Final_PER_-_Section_5.0_Impact_Assessment_46_pages_QL6NwR9.pdf, p. 7, 8

[i] Source: https://arkenergy.com.au/documents/1286/Final_PER_-_Section_5.0_Impact_Assessment_46_pages_QL6NwR9.pdf, p3