The Australian mining magnate and climate campaigner lashes out at oil and gas supremos he says are "selfish beyond belief".
  • Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest is attending the COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates.
  • He says energy bosses should have their heads “put up on spikes” for not committing to phase out fossil fuels.
  • It comes as some companies, including the national oil company of the UAE, defy calls for a wind-down of fossil fuel use.

Quote with context:

And he took particular aim at the oil and gas bosses who were dismissing the calls, describing them as “selfish beyond belief”.

He said their actions were jeopardising the lives of millions of people in overwhelmingly poor countries who were at risk of “lethal humidity”, or an inability to cool themselves down. “If you can’t cool yourself you’re actually an oven burning around 100 watts all the time,” Dr Forrest said.

"If you can [sic] get rid of that heat energy, you cook.

"And when these deaths occur — and they’re occurring now, but when they occur at much larger-scale — I want these so-called people who are very smart to be held to account.

“It’s their heads which should be put up on spikes because they wilfully ignored and they didn’t care.”

  • 520@kbin.social
    10·
    1 year ago

    As much as I agree with him, if the guillotine were to come out for the fossil fuel executives, what exactly makes him think he’ll be spared?

    • levi
      7·
      1 year ago

      what exactly makes him think he’ll be spared?

      I don’t really know anything about this but… the article says he acknowledges that his own companies are prominent greenhouse gas emitters, he is investing $6b to improve his companies, and that he has large investments in renewables as well.

      IDK how true that is, but thats what it says.

        • levi
          4·
          1 year ago

          You’re going to have to explain how green hydrogen is a scam because I’m not going to listen to an obscure podcast to try to understand your point.

          • Chetzemoka@startrek.website
            3·
            1 year ago

            You need electricity to make hydrogen. Hydrogen maybe maybe could be part of the overall energy solution someday by providing a similar portable, fluid energy store as gasoline and diesel do now. But the technological challenges (like just getting the lightest gas in existence to stay in a container, for example) make it not the thing we should be investing large sums of money in right now.

            We need to fix the underlying electricity generation problem before we can really even think about hydrogen as a fuel.

            • Sonori@beehaw.org
              3·
              1 year ago

              It’s worth noting that hydrogen is key to a large number of industrial processes, including the majority of metal and fertilizer production. While its use in fuel cells and small vehicles is rather silly, it’s about the only contender outside nuclear for ships. The conversion loses make it impractical for anything you can directly electrify, but that’s would only be a small fraction of a large industry.

              Given this hydrogen is currently produced near entirely with natural gas and with several times the emissions of diesel, the idea of replacing that production with production powered by renewables is reasonable, especially since you need to overbuild solar and wind capacity so much to ensure constant power. Useing that spare capacity to make hydrogen, which doesn’t care about when it gets made, is also responsible.

              We need green and pink hydrogen, the scam is coming up with more consumers of our currently minuscule supply.

            • levi
              1·
              1 year ago

              You need electricity to make hydrogen.

              Indeed. There’s a number of huge solar farms in the development / approval phase in Western Australia.

              The largest in the South East of Western Australia is the Western Green Energy Hub which could generate 50GW of wind and solar energy and use that to produce 3.5m tonnes of green hydrogen every year. It will take several more years before a final investment decision is made and another decade to construct, but that’s the nature of large scale projects.

              I don’t know how real the transportation problems actually are. Australia is already exporting liquid hydrogen. The industry doesn’t seem concerned about it.

          • sqgl@beehaw.org
            2·
            1 year ago

            Nobody in Australia is producing green hydrogen. It would be nice if they started. None of his projects include renewable power to make the hydrogen. He just says he’ll buy it somewhere. That story is 2021, yet no renewable powered hydrogen production yet.

        • NathA
          2·
          1 year ago

          He isn’t only investing in this. Look into Tatterang and its portfolio. He and his (ex) wife are among the biggest players in the domestic green energy space.

          Yes, he has made billions digging up dirt and selling it to China. But he seems to recognise that he has enough money to get by and there might be a bit left over to try and make the world a bit better.

          • Taleya
            2·
            1 year ago

            He and his (ex) wife are among the biggest players in the domestic green energy space.

            and theeeeeeere it is.

            If there’s no shift to that space, there no money to be had.

          • sqgl@beehaw.org
            1·
            1 year ago

            This is one of his (note there are no WA operations)

            https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CWP_Renewables

            The other venture it seems he didn’t want to invest as much in as his project partner Cannon-Brooks so the latter bought him out. At least that is how I quickly read it. It also was not in WA.

            https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

            So it still looks like his WA Green Hydrogen investment is indeed a scam.

            Last month we learned that quietly scrapped plans for a multibillion-dollar wind and solar farm that was a centrepiece of its plan to decarbonise the Fortescue’s iron ore operations in WA.

            • NathA
              2·
              1 year ago

              I don’t understand the point you are making. He’s trialing the concept of using renewable energy to generate hydrogen that can later be used. What about this is a scam, exactly? That the process isn’t profitable at the moment? I think that’s the whole point, he is going to try and make the process more profitable and well, he can afford to run it at a loss for a while.

              He’s spending $3 Billion on this trial, great if he has that to experiment with. If it pans out for him, it might become a profitable venture. If it doesn’t pan out, well at least he’s trying to do something worthwhile with his money.

              • sqgl@beehaw.org
                1·
                1 year ago

                It looks like a cynical ploy to greenwash gas. Simple.

                well at least he’s trying to do something worthwhile with his money.

                I wouldn’t call accelerating the burning of gas “worthwhile”.