BHP a carbon dupe
Townsville BHP has embraced stupidity as its core corporate strategy. It thinks that by feeding “someone else” to the global warming tiger, which it has by the tail, that that will avoid the tiger eating it.
Earth to the BHP boardroom, located somewhere up there in the clouds – in cloud- cuckoo land indeed – all that will achieve will be to make the tiger both hungrier and more agile. It will even more certainly turn to also consume you.
BHP has gone public in adding its corporate voice to the demonisation of coal- fired power: the only form of power generation that can ( if we let it) deliver reliable, plentiful and cheap power to Australians, including, I might add, pensioners facing the prospect of shivering through next winter.
It has done so by both publicly backing a so- called “Clean Energy Target”, which would irresistibly rule out any new coal- fired stations and see the existing ones progressively closed, and forcing the sacking of ( rational and sane) coal generation supporter Brendan Pearson as head of the Minerals Council.
One has to assume that these actions by Mike Henry, BHP’s Australian operations chief, have the explicit support of BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie and the company’s board. They amount to nothing other than peak stupidity. BHP seemingly believes that if it joins the Global Warming campaign against energy sanity at home, it will be left free to keep pumping more and more iron ore and coking coal, and oil and gas – and so hundreds of millions of tonnes of explicit and implicit CO2 emissions – into the northern hemisphere.
Earth again to the BHP boardroom: do you realise that every single tonne of what you dig or pump out of the ground is going to either directly or indirectly involve the emission of CO2?
To Henry, in particular: does he understand that the 250 million tonnes of iron ore that BHP is digging up and sending north only has any use when combined with around 150 million tonnes of CO2 rich – and emitting – coal?
To say nothing of the thousands of millions of tonnes of energy coal that are being used each year, to keep the lights on and to power their industries ( which have also replaced ours).
So we’ll pretend to do something – utterly meaningless, except in imposing pain on ourselves – about “Global Warming” and hope that Asia won’t follow us.
That Asia will continue to take more and more of our, and BHP’s in particular, coal and iron ore and gas, and indeed copper and everything else that gets fed into an energy- consuming industrial process, and spews out countless multiples of Australia’s CO2 emissions as well.
Well, a word to the BHP boardroom: if you think the global warming fanatics will happily give BHP a pass on the embedded CO2 emissions it sends to the northern hemisphere, because it “feeds them” ( the local coal- fired power generation industry), they won’t.
Did Henry, Mackenzie – and the other MacKenzie, BHP’s new chair- man – notice the unrelenting ( and still unrelenting) assault on the Adani energy coal mine in Queensland? And that not a single tonne of that coal is destined to ever enter an Australian power station; it’s all going to India?
Do they have the ability to understand that today the fanatics might be coming after domestic coal- fired power generation and export energy coal; but tomorrow – and tomorrow is not that far away – they’ll be coming after global warming “facilitators” exporting not just met coal but iron ore?
Back in the day when Pearson and the Minerals Council were – successfully – helping fight the resources tax, on behalf of BHP and others, we saw a similar combination of hypocrisy, stupidity and blinkered vision at the political level.
Successive prime ministers in Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard at the same time aggressively embarked on cutting domestic CO2 emissions while falling over themselves to endorse more and more emissions in the northern hemisphere, courtesy of Australian natural resource exports.
What seemingly neither political or BHP leadership understands is that Australia’s absolute fundamental comparative economic advantage is in the production of CO2. If you trash the use of these resources you are trashing the national interest.
We used to believe in cheap, reliable and plentiful electricity. Not just to keep the lights on, for cooling in summer and even more critically heating in winter, but to power industry. The best thing the rest of our presumably still sane and rational mining industry should now do is to abandon the Minerals Council to BHP ( and similarly inane Rio Tinto), and starts a new industry body.
As for the new, stupid BHP, it is neither effective corporate branding nor good corporate strategy to effectively tag yourself as the Big UNAustralian.