The Carbon Club : How a Network of Influential Climate Sceptics, Politicians and Business Leaders Fought to Control Australia's Climate Policy (2020) by Wilkinson Marian

Author:Wilkinson, Marian [Wilkinson, Marian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In the lead-up to the G20 summit in Brisbane, some of the coal giants had been keen to capitalise on Australia’s support. One in particular, America’s Peabody Energy, was closely in tune with the government’s thinking. Earlier that year, Peabody’s chief executive, Greg Boyce, had launched a worldwide public-relations campaign pushing back against renewable energy and promoting coal-fired power plants. The company’s big message was that energy poverty, not climate change, was ‘the world’s number one human and environmental crisis’.

Peabody’s ‘Advanced Energy for Life’ campaign was designed in part by the global lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller. It pushed the alarming statistic that 3.5 billion people in the world were ‘without adequate access to energy’. Images of desperate children and babies pressed the case that coal could end ‘energy poverty’ using today’s ‘advanced clean coal technologies’. The problem was, of course, no technology was actually delivering commercial clean coal at this point but a small footnote in the glossy brochures had a very broad definition of clean coal that included plants that were simply more efficient. Coal power could replace highly polluting wood stoves, but even the most efficient new coal plants would still produce a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than renewables.

Despite this, by the time of the G20 meeting in Brisbane, Peabody was claiming 500,000 people around the world had joined its social media campaign to lobby world leaders to end ‘energy poverty’. At the end of the G20, Abbott was echoing Peabody’s messaging.

Peabody’s line on energy poverty wasn’t new. It had pushed it since 2011. But Advanced Energy for Life rebooted the message at a time when the company needed to keep coal on top in the energy mix. Prices had slumped and climate change was posing an existential threat to coal’s long-term future. Peabody was also under big financial pressure. In the past, the company had aggressively attacked climate science and funded climate-sceptic groups, but this was becoming less and less effective. The campaign to end energy poverty was a far easier sell for its political allies. Peabody’s critics believed it was designed in part to fight Obama’s new regulations in the US restricting carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power stations. But it was also pitched at the Indian and Asian markets, where coal imports were rising.

Peabody was a big coalminer in Australia with a board seat on the peak mining lobby, the Minerals Council of Australia, alongside BHP, Rio Tinto and Glencore. It had been part of the campaign against Gillard’s emissions trading scheme run by the old coal lobby, the Australian Coal Association. That lobby had now been absorbed into the Minerals Council. The council’s new chief executive, Brendan Pearson, had just finished a two-year stint at Peabody’s Australian arm.

Peabody’s energy poverty message in Australia was a bit disingenuous. While Australia’s thermal coal exports were powering electricity plants in Asia, its lucrative coking coal exports, largely from Queensland, were fuelling steelmaking in Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan, not exactly lifting the world out of grinding poverty.

But Abbott embraced the cause of ‘energy poverty’ with a passion, and so did his key ministers.

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