By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
“GREEN” iron ore billionaire Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest should think a little more about his obsession with all things renewable. Fortescue Metals shareholders should also take a closer look at what he’s up to.
Forrest was recently caught up in a slanging match with Wide Bay MP Llew O’Brien who called Forrest, who was in Canberra selling his green schemes, a ‘f…ing charlatan’ and a ‘f…ing snake oil salesman, when Forrest tried to defend the multi-billion dollar solar and wind farm power line network that is wiping out productive farmland.
O’Brien, a National Party MP, said he was representing his Wide Bay constituents and that “these people are getting pushed off their farms by these projects”. But to Forrest and his Davos mates, anything called “sustainable” has to be good – even if it destroys farms and small business. After all, that’s the whole objective of Klaus Schwab’s neo-fascist Great Reset.
Forrest, ironically, is also a big shot in the beef business with his Minderoo Group, which is one of Australia’s largest beef producers. His properties are the ones that should be hosting the thousands of hectares of wind and solar farms he needs to produce his beloved green hydrogen to run his iron ore trucks during his “net-zero” future.
The number and staggering costs of these power lines highlights the stupidity of the so-called “transition to renewable energy” which will cost Australia an estimated $320 billion. But don’t worry folks, your power bills will get cheaper. Albo, Bowen and the Greens said so, and Forrest and his green billionaire buddies couldn’t care less.
Because wind and solar farms provide intermittent electricity and are spread out all over the country, they need a vast network of interlinking power lines. They also need new gas-fired power stations to back them up. In contrast, the coal-fired power stations provide constant, intense electricity supply without interruption, except for scheduled maintenance shutdowns. The value of coal-fired power is that it easily meets the daily peak consumer and industrial demand.
But the fools who have bought into the “climate change” narrative want to make power supply unreliable and expensive at the same time. And to do it, the so-called renewable energy suppliers get big fat subsidies such as the $600k per wind turbine. It’s a taxpayer milking scam all the way.
Meanwhile Forrest’s hydrogen-powered iron ore fleet is going to cost him a packet, although taxpayers are helping out. So far he’s only got one ore truck up and running but “transitioning” from diesel is going to have his competitors in places like Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa keenly comparing cost structures.
Hydrogen, like wind and solar, is low-density power, and to produce it actually requires a lot of electricity – usually coal-fired. In 2021 the ABC reported: “To produce green hydrogen, you need access to green energy and, given it’s an energy-intensive business, lots of it. That means vast plains of solar panels, wind turbines and hydro-electricity schemes on a scale hitherto unimaginable.”
So not only do farmers and consumers get hit for a six by Chris Bowen’s hare-brained “transition to renewables”, they get hit again by Twiggy Forrest’s idiotic grand plan to get everything running on so-called “green hydrogen”.
But Twiggy Forrest has another big picture problem. People are waking up to this green business scam, including some of the biggest players in the business.
Giant global firms JP Morgan and State Street recently quit a global investor coalition called Climate Action 100, which discourages investment in “climate damaging emissions”, as Reuters called them. Even BlackRock, one of the key WEF backers, has downgraded its membership CA100 to its BlackRock International arm.
According to Reuters “the decisions together remove nearly $14 trillion of total assets from efforts to coordinate Wall Street action on tackling climate change”. That’s a huge chunk of money taken away from the global green cleptocracy.
Reuters says the reason for this is “growing pressure from Republican politicians” over financial firms’ membership of such groups, and accusations that “committing to shared action could be a breach of antitrust law or fiduciary duty.” In other words, increasing numbers of people and politicians are waking up to this monstrous, green con job.
Neverthess, our boy Twiggy is spending up big on all sorts of wind, solar and hydrogen projects around Australia. Is he really a green crusader or is this obsession just another way of raking in multiple millions of dollars worth of carbon credits while they are still around? That scam’s days appear to be numbered.
Forrest is spending a fortune converting his iron ore trucks to hydrogen power because diesel has become so unfashionable among the woke Davos billionaire set. Or is he just trying to compensate for his “green guilt” in digging up vast areas of landscape for iron ore?
A big part of it is the global DEI (diversity, equity inclusivity) and/or EIS (Equity, Inclusivity and Sustainability) religion. In recent years the big corporate chiefs have swallowed this claptrap hook, line and sinker – incentivised of course by their banker friends who push the same cultural Marxist poison. That was until JP Morgan, State Street and BlackRock started getting cold feet.
Is it finally sinking in to these people that going woke could indeed send you broke. One thing we can be sure of: No Wall St financier likes losing money, regardless of how much they have already, and pouring billions into questionable green virtue signalling with little or no return is not good business.
China, for instance, is making a packet off western countries like Australia, rushing like fools into wind farms and electric cars, while they, India and Russia just stick with their coal, gas and nuclear to supply cheap industrial power and a generally reliable energy supply system. We, of course, are doing the opposite by turning to dispersed, inefficient sources of energy, hoping that some miracle battery of the future will store all this intermittent wind and solar power.
China, despite being dominated by a totalitarian, CCP fascist state, knows some basic economic principles and how to manufacture stuff. They know very well that it was their massive list of 1142 coal-fired power stations that has made the country first or second in global economic stakes.
The Greens who fret like frightened children about “greenhouse gas emissions” from Australia’s 18 coal-fired power stations, make themselves look like the utter fools they are when China’s power station numbers are cited. Australia could soon have only 17 if Eraring Power Station near Newcastle is closed in 2025, as proposed by the woke idiot owners Origin Energy.
But Twiggy Forrest, whose family holdings are worth $21.5 billion, has flown his Squadron Energy company to become the biggest renewable energy player in Australia. The Twig must be revelling in waves of good vibes from the Green-Labor-Lib-Teal sustainability tribe. But that honeymoon is quickly turning sour.