The Coalition has come up with the perfect solution to deal with the climate pollution from when Australian fossil fuels are burned overseas.

We should either just pretend they don’t exist, or ignore the reason why people are concerned about them, even if those people include a majority of high court judges or the international court of justice.

This week the Coalition said it wanted to roll back new rules that ask fossil fuel producers to disclose the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning their products overseas.

The step comes in response to a barrage of conservative outrage over a high court ruling last week that confirmed planners in NSW should have considered putting conditions on the overseas emissions from a coalmine.

The high court’s decision was “absurd” and “madness”, the Coalition said, with Nationals leader, Matt Canavan, calling it “net zero on steroids”. Fossil fuel groups called it “utter madness” and warned it could spark a wave of legal challenges.

But none of those commentators tackle the reason why overseas emissions – known as scope 3 – are being counted and considered in the first place: they cause people harm.

Rules are being phased in that require companies – the largest first, followed by smaller companies up to a threshold – to report annually on these emissions which they are indirectly responsible for.

‘The quiet part out loud’

The Coalition wants these requirements gone, describing them as “absurd”. Another way to look at them is that they help corporations and the public to understand the full impact of their activities on the climate.

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For fossil fuel exporters, these emissions make up the lion’s share of their climate impact.

What sparked that announcement was a high court judgment last week that also concerned scope 3 emissions.

The high court’s finding, by a majority of three judges to two, was clearly a victory for the retired NSW couple who had previously taken on the Mount Pleasant coalmine and won in the court of appeal.

In the cold light of the judgment, all that the high court judges said was that the NSW Independent Planning Commission had not followed the state’s existing laws properly.

“These requirements on the planning commission to consider scope 3 emissions have been part of the New South Wales planning system in one form or another for almost 20 years,” said Prof Jacqueline Peel, a leading international climate law expert at the University of Melbourne.

“The high court has really just said the quiet part out loud. The majority of the court looked at the law and saw that the decision maker didn’t follow it.”

Peel said the provision that the high court had considered did not prevent the planning commission from approving a coal project.

All that it did, she said, was say the commission had to consider whether to impose conditions in relation to scope 3 emissions.

“Maybe [this decision] is construed as radical by some because if you do start to impose conditions on emissions generated overseas, then it could make coal production more expensive. Whether you think that is good or bad depends on your views around climate change,” Peel said.

Wrongful act?

The Coalition was angry with the decision because it said under the UN climate convention, greenhouse gas emissions are assigned to the country where they are released.

Being able to wave away responsibility for these emissions by suggesting it is just an entry on a carbon accounting spreadsheet in a foreign land, ignores the reason why they are being counted in the first place.

The emissions might occur somewhere else, but they generate harms around the world that climate scientists are increasingly able to quantify. Those harms don’t stop at the New South Wales border.

As one of the judges to side against the mining company on the issue, Justice James Edelman, wrote, the “natural and irresistible interpretation” of the planning commission’s reasoning was that it was “distracted by the accounting concepts of the scopes into which greenhouse gas emissions are divided.”

What that meant, he wrote, was that the commission thought it didn’t need “to ensure that scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions are minimised to the greatest extent practicable.”

The Coalition claimed the issue with scope 3 emissions “turns on the wording of NSW planning law” – ignoring the harms that emissions cause around the world.

But the notion that a country should start mitigating scope three emissions has not appeared from out of the blue.

As well as it sitting on the NSW state planning rules for more than a decade (rules which the Coalition is pushing to have rescinded), the International Court of Justice declared last year that a failure of a state to protect the climate from greenhouse gas emissions “including through fossil fuel production” may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.”

At the UN, 141 countries voted to back the court’s opinion, against eight dissenters – Saudi Arabia, Russia, Israel, Iran, Yemen, Liberia, Belarus and, of course, the United States and its climate science-denying president.

Rather than these growing calls to manage fossil fuel production being “net zero on steroids” they should more accurately be understood as an attempt to cut the steroids driving the planet’s climate to ever deadlier extremes.

• Graham Readfearn is Guardian Australia’s environment and climate correspondent