IIf we are looking for evidence of Australia’s inability to develop a coherent and sustainable response to the climate crisis over the past few decades, we will find it in the reaction to the fossil fuel giant Woodside’s 70th anniversary dinner.
This response is part climate science denial, part political patronage, and a fair amount of fossil fuel propaganda barely disguised as journalism.
“WHO’S SIDE ARE YOU ON?” screamed the front page of the West Australian – the newspaper angry that the Prime Minister had failed to turn up for Woodside’s big party at Perth’s Crown Casino on Saturday night.
“Not a single federal Labor politician attended an event honouring one of our state’s largest exporters and employers, despite Anthony Albanese declaring his commitment to Western Australia and the resources sector just days ago,” the article said.
That’s right. Saying you’re committed isn’t enough. We want you to be part of our birthday party, too.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton was also a no-show, the newspaper noted in a fruitless sentence further down the story. Two former prime ministers, Tony Abbott (more on him in a moment) and Scott Morrison, were there, as were a group of former prime ministers and the current opposition leader of Western Australia.
The state’s Energy, Environment and Climate Minister Reece Whitby was on hand to celebrate with Woodside and said he was “looking forward to the decades ahead” for the company.
Is this appropriate, asked one critic, considering that the same minister will soon have to decide on one of the company’s most important gas projects – an extension of natural gas production on the Northwest Shelf until 2070?
And why didn’t Western Australia’s Premier Roger Cook come to the birthday party? According to another report, he was in the Pilbara “with members of Woodside”.
It’s like getting upset that your friends didn’t come to your birthday party, only to find out that they helped your parents bake the cake.
Emissions, anyone?
The West Australian’s reporting failed to mention Woodside’s disproportionate contribution to the climate crisis, nor the fact that the company faced what is believed to be the biggest shareholder revolt ever for companies publishing their climate plans.
So let’s take a look at this.
Australia’s largest oil and gas company says it wants to “meet the energy transition with a low-cost, lower-carbon, profitable, resilient and diversified portfolio”.
But earlier this year, Woodside’s climate plans were overwhelmingly rejected by 58% of investors.
According to Woodside’s most recent climate report, which was released before this vote, emissions from direct and indirect operations in 2023 were 5.53 million tonnes of CO2e (the “e” stands for equivalent and includes carbon dioxide and methane), which was 12.5 percent below the company’s baseline (the average emissions between 2016 and 2020, which were 6.32 million tonnes of CO2e).
However, to reduce these emissions, the company has made 0.66 million tons of carbon offsets. Without these offsets, the 12.5 percent reduction looks more like 2 percent. The company has set a goal to reduce these emissions by 30 percent by 2030, which analysts say is incompatible with the global Paris climate agreement.
However, the real climate impact of Woodside’s activities comes when the gas is used by customers to manufacture products or burn as fuel.
According to Woodside, these emissions, known as Scope 3, amounted to 71 Mt CO2e in 2023. In total, Woodside’s annual emissions are equivalent to about 17% of Australia’s current annual footprint.
Woodside has no real target to reduce these Scope 3 emissions.
Instead, the company says it will invest US$5 billion (AU$7.5 billion) in “new energy products and lower-carbon services” by 2030. With this spending, the company aims to enable its customers to save 5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually by 2030 (the 5 million tonnes compares to the 71 million tonnes of its current Scope 3 emissions).
Nearly half of that $7.5 billion goal will go toward the company’s plans, announced earlier this month, to purchase a clean ammonia plant in Texas.
But how does that $7.5 billion compare to spending in other areas of the company? Last year, the company announced it would spend $7 billion to build an oil project off the Mexican coast.
Analysts from the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) have looked at Woodside’s projects that have not yet been funded.
These include plans to spend $45 billion on the Browse project to drill around Scott Reef, as well as gas projects in Timor-Leste and Trinidad and Tobago, the expansion of an oil project in Senegal and a new gas project off Timor-Leste, and a newly acquired LNG project in Texas. In total, ACCR says, these projects will emit more than 500 million tonnes of CO2e over their lifetime.
The Driftwood LNG project in Texas is estimated to emit 68 million tonnes of CO2e when the gas is burned, according to ACCR, dwarfing the 3.2 million tonnes of CO2e per year that the ammonia project could save.
“This is a fundamental problem with Woodside’s existing climate change plan,” ACCR said.
Climate calculation
When considering whether you, as a public figure, feel like stepping into the breach for a major fossil fuel company during the climate crisis, it must be helpful if you are not even sure whether man-made climate change is even worth the effort.
Enter a pearl-clutching Abbott, who wrote in The Australian that Woodside’s “appalling disregard” (he puts down pearls and picks up sulphur) was due to “fear of violating the climate cult”.
Abbott claimed that “nothing Australia does will make any difference to the climate”, adding that this was under the assumption “that humanity’s carbon emissions are indeed the main culprit in climate change”.
The tired argument that we shouldn’t care because Australia’s contribution to global emissions is so small is essentially another way of saying we shouldn’t join any global agreement to reduce emissions.
The evidence that human activities are causing rapid warming of the oceans and atmosphere, threatening communities and species around the world, has been around for much longer than Woodside.
