Let’s face it, we’re green
refinement process. Emissions from the hydrogen-reduction process are pure water instead of carbon dioxide produced by the metallurgical coal process.
With steel production responsible for 9 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, the Bell Bay dream promises not only jobs and prosperity but environmental salvation. Gupta talks a big game. “[This will] transform the Whyalla business into a globally competitive steel manufacturer,” the CEO and chair of GFG Alliance said in a press release. “It will be our first primary steel plant to transform to green steel, helping fulfil our ambition to become the world’s largest carbon-neutral steel producer by 2030.”
GFG Alliance is building one of Australia’s largest solar energy plants in Port Augusta, which is to be combined with a big battery, similar to Tesla’s $100m battery facility in SA.
What is going on at Bell Bay and Whyalla is globally significant. GFG Alliance employs 35,000 people, with annual revenue of $26bn. It’s a serious steel player and is not alone in going green.
Resources and chemicals group Australian Vanadium is to use green hydrogen in its proposed vanadium mining and value-added processing operation in West Australia. The company, which secured land for a processing facility near the port of Geraldton to refine ore, is hunting for partners in green steel. And they’re not the only ones.
THE tourist boom in the five years before the pandemic was proof to Tasmanians that this island’s nature is our most precious asset, whether on farms and beaches or suburbs or neighbourhoods or national parks or world heritage — and the re-evaluation brought about by the lockdown quiet just confirmed that reality.
The Greens, as a political party, have been banging on about this fundamental truth for decades, and time has proved them overwhelmingly correct. History will duly record the likes of Bob Brown, Cassy O’Connor, Di Hollister, Nick McKim, Christine Milne and Peg Putt as visionaries.
However, the problem with the Greens Party as a political force is that its very existence has meant that care for the environment and green thinking have stubbornly remained issues of the Left.
This arbitrary and quite random positioning of green thought alongside progressive thought from the Left has tied environmental concerns to issues that are repugnant to political conservatives, and has enabled green concerns to be erroneously dismissed as the antithesis of development.
That’s why, in Tasmania, it’s inevitably capitalists and conservatives versus the Greens on most issues. Environmental issues are marginalised and demonised, including the daddy of them all, climate change.
However, the reality is that caring for the environment is no more an issue of the Left than of the Right, and any thoughtful conservative or intelligent fascist has as much right and reason to campaign against global warming and the extinction crisis as anyone.
ENVIRONMENTAL sustainability and green thinking will continue to drive jobs and growth just like we have witnessed this week at Bell Bay and, as we saw before the pandemic, during the tourism boom.
Our island must, once-andfor-all, go green and adopt environmental sustainability as a flagship priority in a genuine and wholesale transformation of all things “Tasmania”, stretching from business to government and across the community.
The benefits — in terms of jobs, health, wellbeing and prosperity — are astronomical.
Like it or not, Tasmania’s brand is green, and it has been for years. Let’s stop grinding the axe and finally embrace who we are as a people.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it, as they say. It will add value. The business world is changing, despite the political impasse, let’s take a leadership role.