Fallout from Woodside’s birthday bash shows Australia is far from united in climate fight | Graham Readfearn

If we are looking for something to illustrate Australia’s inability to have any coherent and sustained response to the climate crisis over the past couple of decades, we can find it in the reaction to the fossil fuel giant Woodside’s 70th birthday dinner.

That reaction being a little bit of climate science denial, plus some political patronage and big servings of fossil fuel cheerleading barely disguised as journalism.

“WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON” screamed the front page of the West Australian – the paper upset the prime minister hadn’t rocked up to Woodside’s big do at Perth’s Crown casino on Saturday night.

“Not a single Federal Labor politician went to an event celebrating one of our State’s biggest exporters and employers, despite Anthony Albanese just days ago declaring his commitment to Western Australia and the resources sector,” the story read.

That’s right. Saying you’re committed isn’t enough. We want you at our birthday party too.

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, also hadn’t turned up, the paper noted in a sterile sentence further down the story. Two former prime ministers, Tony Abbott (more on him in a minute) and Scott Morrison, were there, as were a gaggle of former premiers and the current WA opposition leader.

The state’s energy, environment and climate minister, Reece Whitby, was there to celebrate with Woodside, saying he looked forward “to the decades ahead” for the company.

Is that appropriate, one critic asked, given the same minister will have to decide soon on one of the company’s major gas projects – an extension to 2070 of its north west shelf operation?

And why did the WA premier, Roger Cook, not make it to the birthday bash? He was in the Pilbara “with members of Woodside”, according to a follow-up story.

This is all like getting upset your mates didn’t make it to your birthday party only to find out they were helping your parents bake the cakes.

Emissions, anyone?

Not mentioned in the West Australian’s coverage was Woodside’s outsized contribution to the climate crisis, or how it has faced what is thought to be the largest shareholder revolt anywhere for companies that publish their climate plans.

So let’s look at that.

Australia’s biggest oil and gas company says it wants to “thrive through 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 latest climate report, which came before that vote, in 2023 emissions from direct and indirect operations were 5.53m tonnes of CO2e (the e stands for equivalent, and includes carbon dioxide and methane), which was 12.5% below the company’s baseline (the average emissions between 2016 and 2020, which was 6.32 Mt CO2e).

But to reduce those emissions the company used 0.66 Mt in carbon offsets. Without those offsets, that 12.5% cut looks more like 2%. The company has a target to cut these emissions by 30% by 2030, which analysts say is not aligned with the global Paris climate agreement.

But the real climate impact of Woodside’s operations comes when its gas is used by its customers to make products or to burn as fuel.

According to Woodside, those emissions, known as scope 3, came to 71 Mt CO2e in 2023. So all up, Woodside’s annual emissions are the equivalent of about 17% of Australia’s current annual footprint.

Woodside has no real target to reduce those scope 3 emissions.

Instead it says it will invest US$5bn (A$7.5bn) in “new energy products and lower carbon services by 2030” and it wants this spending to enable its customers to avoid 5Mt CO2e annually by 2030 (the 5Mt is compared with the 71Mt from its current scope 3 emissions).

Almost half of this $7.5bn target will be taken up by the company’s plans to buy a clean ammonia plant in Texas, announced earlier this month.

But how does that $7.5bn compare to spending elsewhere in the business? Last year, the company said it would spend $7bn constructing an oil project off the Mexican coast.

Analysts at the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) have looked at Woodside’s projects which are not yet financially closed.

Those are plans to spend $45bn on the Browse project to drill around Scott Reef, plus gas projects in Timor-Leste and Trinidad and Tobago, expanding an oil project in Senegal, and a new gas project off Timor-Leste, plus a newly acquired LNG project in Texas. All up, ACCR says, those project will emit more than 500Mt CO2e over their lifetimes.

The Texas LNG project, called Driftwood, will release an estimated 68 MtCO2e when the gas is burned, ACCR says, which sends shade over the 3.2Mt CO2e per year that might be saved from the clean ammonia project.

“This is a fundamental problem with Woodside’s existing climate transition plan,” ACCR said.

Climate calculus

In the calculus of whether, as a public figure, you feel like going into bat for a major fossil fuel company during a climate crisis, it must help if you’re not even sure human-caused climate change is a thing worth bothering about.

Step forward a pearl-clutching Abbott, who wrote in The Australian that the “appalling snub” on Woodside (puts away pearls, picks up brimstone) was down to the “fear of transgressing against the climate cult”.

Abbott claimed that “nothing Australia does will make any difference to climate” adding that this was “assuming that mankind’s CO2 emissions really are the main climate villain”.

This well-worn argument that because Australia’s contribution to global emissions is small, we should not bother, is in effect another way of saying we should not be part of any global agreement to cut emissions.

The evidence that human activities are driving rapid heating of the ocean and atmosphere, putting communities and species at risk around the world, has been around much longer than Woodside.