{"id":1287387,"date":"2023-10-23T08:06:52","date_gmt":"2023-10-23T08:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/10\/australia-greenwashing-billionaires-andrew-forrest-mining\/"},"modified":"2023-10-24T10:05:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-24T10:05:00","slug":"a-green-transition-wont-be-led-by-billionaires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/10\/23\/a-green-transition-wont-be-led-by-billionaires\/","title":{"rendered":"A Green Transition Won\u2019t Be Led by Billionaires"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Australian billionaire Andrew \u201cTwiggy\u201d Forrest has been hailed as a climate messiah for his pursuit of green energy. But his vision has nothing to do with improving human lives and shows why the green transition can\u2019t be handled by the elite. <\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest, who markets himself as a climate savior, at a rugby match on August 17, 2018, in Perth, Australia. (Paul Kane \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

The global financial press loves mining magnate Andrew \u201cTwiggy\u201d Forrest. Forrest is a brash Australian billionaire who has made great use of a heavily massaged rags-to-riches origin story. He commands the world\u2019s fourth-biggest iron ore producer, and the attention of some of its most powerful people.<\/p>\n

The media has been particularly fixated on Forrest lately. His high-profile divorce<\/a>, a string of departures<\/a> from senior executives at his Fortescue Metals Group, and rumored shareholder discontent over his mental state have set tongues wagging.<\/p>\n

Much of the gossip has centered around setbacks to Fortescue\u2019s green hydrogen projects. Some of the blame has fallen on his alleged environmental ideology. Last month an Australian media outlet produced a fawning<\/a> contribution to the discussion, asking whether it was reasonable to call Forrest a \u201cclimate messiah.\u201d It quoted an off-the-record Fortescue investor, who declared \u201cI reckon he\u2019s lost it. He genuinely thinks he\u2019s the chosen one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Forrest\u2019s supposed climate activism might seem like welcome news. Australia is the world\u2019s third-largest fossil fuel exporter and has roughly 112 new coal and gas projects planned<\/a>. It is currently experiencing a record-breaking spring heatwave<\/a>, and has another horrendous season of catastrophic fires and floods looming<\/a>. Ordinary Australians might be forgiven for thinking anything is better than nothing.<\/p>\n

But Forrest\u2019s participation in any global green turn is conditional on him residing at the profitable helm. It\u2019s about market share, not human well-being. And unfortunately for the rest of us, he plans to ramp up the destructive contradictions of the present day, not break with them.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

With Saviors Like These, Who Needs Enemies<\/h2>\n \n

Much has been made of Forrest\u2019s humble origins. The Saturday Paper<\/em> even recently wrote<\/a> that,<\/p>\n

his roots in the rusty dirt of the Pilbara have helped him build a reputation as the battler\u2019s billionaire. . . . Unlike the leaders of his largest competitors in the Pilbara, Rio Tinto and BHP, Twiggy Forrest is reliably, and avowedly, of the place he is exploiting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Forrest is indeed from Western Australia. But his family were part of the squattocracy \u2014 Australian landed gentry with large pastoral holdings worked by Aboriginal slave and semislave labor<\/a>. His great-uncle was the state\u2019s first premier: a gold rush\u2013era power player whose antagonism of poor prospectors<\/a> in favor of large mining companies helped shape the state\u2019s uneasy federation and its secession-happy<\/a> politics.<\/p>\n

Forrest made his own fortune through Fortescue Metals Group. It broke an existing duopoly in the Pilbara region of Australia, selling enormous quantities of iron ore to China during its early twenty-first-century boom. This rise to prominence involved dispossessing the Yindjibarndi people<\/a>, who never gave permission nor received compensation for Fortescue’s destruction of their lands. Their long list of grievances against Forrest are currently being heard by the courts.<\/p>\n

While Fortescue has paid plenty in mining royalties over the past two decades, it has steadfastly fought any attempt to pay taxes proportionate to its superprofits. Fortescue was part of the group of mining companies that toppled Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2011 in order to avoid paying windfall taxes. Shut out of the postcoup negotiations by his larger corporate rivals, Forrest later denied<\/a> having anything to do with Rudd\u2019s ousting. He was thus the only member of the coup gang to oppose<\/a> even the largely symbolic tax brought in by the miners\u2019 preferred prime minister, Julia Gillard.<\/p>\n

Like all mining magnates in Australia, Forrest and Fortescue are capable of pragmatism when it comes to the labor movement. Forrest\u2019s green hydrogen ambitions, for example, gel nicely with trade union demands for the expansion of manufacturing<\/a> in Port Kembla \u2014 at least for now.<\/p>\n