The deputy prime minister's commitment re-frames the debate over coal mining in the Hunter. No longer is a major party arguing coal mining should continue forever. The debate now focuses on when will mining end, and how will the exit be managed?

The National Party was under enormous pressure from Prime Minister Scott Morrison to make its net-zero commitment. Morrison was due in Glasgow a few days later for the United Nations conference on climate change, COP26. Without a commitment from his Coalition partner to net zero by 2050, Morrison would have been ridiculed by the conference.

COP26 ended late last week. It did its work in the ways international conferences usually do. It stuttered, it stalled, there were sideshows, but forward it lurched. Net zero by 2050 is now a global goal. Some nations boldly announced interim targets. Key buyers of Australian coal, Japan and South Korea, committed to cuts in CO2 emissions by 2030 of 46 per cent and 40 per cent respectively. Brazil and Indonesia say deforestation of their vast tropical territories will end by 2030. The world's leading banks and savings funds say they will purge fossil fuel investments from their $US130 trillion portfolios.

In the first instance, Australia's commitment to net zero by 2050 will end domestic coal-burning power stations. Then, as all nations commit to net zero - and this will come now that scientific evidence, political pressure and financial power are aligned - burning coal to generate electricity will also cease worldwide.

The commitment - in Australia and globally - to net zero gives the Hunter three options in respect to coal mining.

Option 1 is to go gangbusters, mining and selling as much coal as possible to all comers before the boom gate falls. Option 1 trashes the environment at a pace with, in the closing scene, the Hunter looking like a set from a Mad Max movie.

Option 2 is to move rapidly to shut down coal exporting, summarily ending Australia's most significant contribution to global warming. This is the Pollyanna option, heart-warming but impossible. Exiting coal will take time, and re-building the Hunter's landscapes and regional economy will be a tough task.

Option 3, then, is this tough-task path. Option 3 resembles Newcastle's exit from steel in the 1990s when 10,000 full-time jobs were shed over the decade. It also resembles the Lower Hunter's exit from textiles and clothing manufacturing when 3000 full-time jobs disappeared in roughly the same timeframe; although, being predominantly women's jobs, the Hunter's exit from textiles and clothing manufacturing features little in Newcastle's heroic industrial history.

The lessons from the 1990s are plain. Substantial government and industry effort enable worker and community adjustment to industrial decline to proceed in an orderly, humane way, and at a pace that allows other sectors time to take the economic slack.

Together, the timely commitment by the Nationals' to net zero on October 24, the assurance from knowing net zero by 2050 is now Australia's goal, and the knowledge there is global momentum to cut greenhouse gas emissions, these give the Hunter the most precious of all assets when faced with its tough task: enough time.

With coal mining locked in for some years yet, there is time to harvest the royalties flowing into government coffers, royalties that can be re-allocated to the costs of exit. There's time to harvest the profit streams of mining companies, mimicking the generosity of BHP to Newcastle workers in the 1990s. There's time to investigate and fund the shift to alternate economies, to restore ravaged rural landscapes, nurture towns, invest in public infrastructure. Importantly, there's time for miners to take up job opportunities elsewhere, retrain, for spouses to reframe their careers, for kids to complete schooling.

In the 1990s, politicians, corporate executives, and community leaders fronted up to the tough task of transitioning Newcastle out of steelmaking.

But a quarter of a century on, where is the leadership to enact the tough task the Nats started on October 24?

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