There were big questions about the proposal to gouge the world's biggest coal mine on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, long before it emerged the federal government had been slapdash in its environmental approval.

Few projects in living memory have attracted such widespread opposition, nor raised such critical questions about the immediate local and downstream global dangers they pose.

Tony Abbott has waxed lyrical about coal being good for humanity, and successive state governments of both stripes in Queensland have fallen over themselves to facilitate the lucrative Adani Carmichael project.

But such prejudice does not extinguish legal responsibilities nor remove the right of Australians to expect sober decision-making in accordance with the law.

The whole point of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is that its provisions be rigorously observed. This is expressly so that environmental impacts are not overlooked, and to ensure that native values are not compromised by economic ventures, however profitable they might be for someone.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt has been commissioned under the constitution to ensure just this. It is arguably, his primary responsibility. Yet Hunt and indeed all of the parties to a Federal Court application from the Mackay Conservation Group seeking to stop the mine, have now conceded that the environmental act has not been properly adhered to.

Project apologists are already grumbling that a mere "technical glitch" is being used to nobble the project, but failure to properly consider the impact of this project on two native reptile species is a substantial matter. And there are others.

As embarrassing as this halt is to the coal evangelists, it offers both governments a chance to reconsider this project and to measure it against even deeper environmental considerations.

These include the impact of burning coal on global emissions and the material ramifications that combustion will have for the reef in terms of acidity and rising water temperatures.

Also critical - assuming the plan in Canberra is not to wilfully ignore the facts - is the record of Adani in its native India, where it has been associated with serious environmental destruction.

Neither of these considerations is set out in the act but they are absolutely material to the risk profile of the Carmichael project.

After all, next week, the Abbott government will demand to be taken seriously as it announces its post-2020 emissions reduction targets.

In the 21st century, as the world looks to ways to reduce carbon output to limit global temperature growth to no more than 2 degrees, the headlong rush to vastly increase Australia's coal production seems wrong-headed.

A bare minimum is that all the risks of such a colossal venture be genuinely assessed.

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