OPINION
Something happens to the very rich, to their detriment: they lose the presence of people to tell them, “No”. When, as invariably happens, the wealthy and powerful surround themselves with sycophants, there’s no one around them willing to tell them, “That’s a stupid idea. You’re making an idiot of yourself.”
Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest is very, very rich. And, apparently, no-one is willing to tell him that he’s talking a steaming pile of monkey bollocks about climate change.
The oceans are warming, Antarctica is collapsing and if the airconditioning fails, you’re toast. “Lethal humidity is already here,” Andrew Forrest said in a speech last week. “Millions of people will die. If you can’t get rid of that heat because of humidity, you cook yourself.”
Apparently, Forrest is in a rich-guy competition with the UN’s Antonio Guterres, to come up with the most idiotic climate alarmist phrase imaginable. Move over, “global boiling”, “lethal humidity” is here.
One takes it that Forrest doesn’t have a sauna installed in any of his collection of mansions.
No wonder senior executives of Forrest’s company are quitting in droves. The only people willing to sit around and stomach such drivel are fellow fools and/or charlatans.
The mainstream media drew a discreet veil over the Fortescue Metals chairman’s wild speech to the Boao Forum in Perth last week. Yet if it is a glimpse of the conversation with staff behind closed doors, the only surprising thing about the departure of two senior executives and a board member last week was that it didn’t happen earlier. Forrest is sounding like the people who glue themselves to train tracks instead of the chair of Australia’s third-largest mining corporation.
“Business is causing global warming,” he told the forum. “Business will kill your children. Business is responsible for lethal humidity.”
Forrest, in case anyone needed reminding of the planet-sized hypocrisy here, is a billionaire businessman whose entire fortune rests on exporting teratonnes of iron ore to the world’s single largest carbon polluter. The same country is also the world’s single largest slave-owning dictatorship, something Forrest the anti-slavery campaigner also conveniently neglects to notice.
It is an indication of how cosily woke the world of corporate investment has become that few have been prepared to call out the recklessness of betting the company’s future on green hydrogen, which has yet to be manufactured at scale anywhere in the world and for which there is not yet a genuine market.
Forrest described hydrogen as the “miracle molecule … the Swiss Army knife of energy and green products” in a speech to the National Press Club two years ago. “To make green hydrogen, you simply split water. Any old water. It can be wastewater, desalinated water, seawater.”
And you split water, how?
With energy. Lots and lots of energy.
It requires a grid-shattering amount of power to produce, roughly 50 TWh (terawatt-hours) per megatonne at an efficiency rate of 67pc.
The heavy consumption of power alone condemns Fortescue’s goal of manufacturing 15Mt by 2030 to the realm of fantasy. It is so far off the dial it makes the government’s target of 82 per cent green electricity by 2030 look puny. In the highly unlikely event Australia is producing 180 TWh of electricity from renewables by 2030, Forrest could gobble the lot and still fall 570 TWh short of what he needs.
At least one person at Fortescue was able to run some numbers — and show just how insane Forrest’s green dream really is.
Fortescue Future Industries NSW manager Joshua Moran set out the scale of the challenge at a conference in May last year. Fortescue will need to deliver 20GW of electrolysers a year by 2029, almost 20 times more than the current global output. It must install 20 wind turbine blades daily, each 80m long, and install 31 million solar modules a year.
All at the same time that the Australian government — and every other government in the woke West — is scrambling to carpet the landscape with solar panels and wind turbines.
Are these people insane? Will no-one beat some sense into them?
Certainly not the lickspittle ignoramuses in the mainstream media.
It is a measure of the strength of the prevailing vision among the corporate elite and journalists that so few have criticised Forrest’s monomaniacal obsession with green hydrogen. The uncritical woke press has succumbed to groupthink, hailing as a good thing the $2bn government subsidy of the research and development of green hydrogen announced in this year’s budget. Forrest, whose company stands to pocket a substantial chunk of that subsidy, somewhat ungratefully described it as “kicking the can down the road”, suggesting he’d be putting his hand out for more.
The Australian
And here we reach the nub of it: maybe Forrest is not so stupid or deranged as it may appear. Just very, very, very cynical and greedy.
Because it looks to all the world as if one of Australia’s richest people has figured out nicely just how stupid politicians and the mainstream media really are, and is playing them like a fiddle — and pocketing billions in taxpayer’s money.