Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The Albanese government’s approval of a 45-year extension to Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project, signed off last week by federal environment minister Murray Watt, is wrong from every possible perspective.
Last month’s big Labor win was Anthony Albanese’s chance to take a longer view, to stand up for the national interest. Instead the PM blinked, and we are the poorer for it. The only beneficiary of this horrendous decision is Woodside’s bottom line: profit as far as the eye can see.
Watt’s predecessor, Tanya Plibersek, knew all this and wrestled for years with its implications. Her failure to embed a climate signal in federal environmental law is testament to the might of the fossil fuel industry.
So how is this decision wrong? Let me count the ways.
First, cultural heritage: where we came from and largely what makes us. Aboriginal cultural icons go further into the past than that of any other people anywhere. They include 40,000-year-old rock engravings on the Pilbara coast, known to archaeology for half a century, in the midst of which is the Burrup petrochemical hub.
With World Heritage assessment imminent, last week WA premier Roger Cook called the site “a place of incredible cultural significance”. At the same time, he was sprung trying to hide evidence that acidic emissions from gas processing since the 1970s had affected the rock art. Culture and mammon rarely present a more glaring contradiction.
Then there’s the marine life of Burrup Peninsula, the next-door Dampier Archipelago, and offshore Scott Reef – biodiversity rivalling the Great Barrier Reef’s. A huge array of corals, whales, turtles and over 100 species of birds, including migratory shorebirds from the Arctic – all this and more are threatened by gas extraction, processing and export.
Watt said his approval of Woodside’s 2070 “vision” included strict conditions to protect cultural and natural attributes, but it’s impossible to evaluate those conditions because they haven’t been made public – a distinct advantage to Woodside as opposed to the public interest.
The third reason we are wrong to celebrate Watt’s decision is government’s failure to capture any revenue benefit from the huge profits won in the extraction of this public resource – a victory of might over right that harks back to the sorry defeat of the mining super-profits tax proposal by the Rudd government.
Finally the big one – climate.
Late last month the Australia Institute released its estimate of CO2 emissions from the Burrup Hub expansion alone: 132 million tonnes a year, which is higher than emissions from all Australian coal power stations and 36 times the emissions from Western Australia’s only coal-fired power station, Muja.
CO2 emissions resulting from the decision, says the Australia Institute, add up to 250 million tonnes annually and 15 billion tonnes over the expected life of the projects, equal to 33 years’ worth of all Australian emissions. This goes on to the carbon accounts of China, Japan and other countries, but climate doesn’t recognise national boundaries.
The Burrup approval is a carbon bomb by any measure. But it’s not the end of the story; it excludes the even bigger Browse gas field to the north-east, waiting in the wings for the tick of approval.
The CEO of Woodside, Meg O’Neill, is not one to let criticism of her company go unchallenged. At the gas industry’s annual conference in Brisbane last week she took a shot at our youth, well-represented in anti-gas protests.
Young people “are happily plugging in their devices, ordering things … shipped to their house without any sort of recognition of the energy and carbon impact of their actions”, she said. “That human impact and the consumer’s role in driving energy demand and emissions … is a missing space in the conversation.”
Go big, they say, when you want to distract people. Young people do understand supply chains. They also understand who’s making the mega-decisions. But O’Neill is right about human impact, neatly (if accidentally) putting the case for permanently shelving all her company’s future plans along with those of the whole global fossil fuel industry.
The “missing space in the conversation” is this: base-level energy consumers like you and me help to drive global warming, but between the raw product and us is a whole vast ecosystem of enablers, most critically the big extracting and processing companies and the governments meant to regulate them.
These enablers have the power to shift consumer demand by emphasising the extreme peril of global warming. Murray Watt, for one, might choose to insert that critical climate signal in new environmental legislation.
Otherwise, as Meg O’Neill says, it’s up to us consumers. Good luck everyone.