GREG:

Perth Airport feels like a mining airport now.

The plane you got on when you flew out of Perth was full of, you know, boots and orange and yellow. You get off the aeroplane, it's hot. You look around, it’s red. Look in the other direction, oh there are these great big massive plants, they're liquefied natural gas plants. It feels high-vis, it is high-vis.

RUBY:

Greg Bourne works at the Climate Council. But before that, he was an executive at BP – at one point working in partnership with Woodside’s North-West Gas Project, one of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas hubs.

GREG:

And then just to the south of Karratha, 20 kilometres or so, about 30 kilometres I think, is this amazing rock art, the petroglyphs that have been there for 45-60,000 years.

RUBY:

There are tens of thousands of those ancient rock carvings - the Murujuga petroglyphs.

And they're now weathering under a haze of pollution.

GREG:

And that was the decision that Murray Watt had to make. On the environmental grounds and cultural grounds should this project go ahead. And he has basically waved it through. And that then allows Woodside to go to the next stage of can we bring in the Browse Basin oil fields.

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Now that Woodside has won the approval to keep its massive Karratha gas plant running another 40 years – there are questions as to whether new gas-fields, like the Browse Basin, will be opened up to keep the plant full.

Today, Greg Bourne on lobbying efforts that helped make the approval happen – and the reform he says would stop future fossil-fuel behemoths like it from going ahead.

It’s Thursday, June 5.

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RUBY:

Greg, thank you for joining me on 7am, it's great to have you on the show.

GREG:

Delightful to be here.

RUBY:

So, Greg, the Labor government recently approved the Woodside development, which is Australia's largest gas project, all the way to 2070. Can you just tell me what your first thought was when you heard that news?

GREG:

My first thought was, I can't believe it. The Albanese government have just won an election. Climate change was very important, may not have been talked about too much, but very important for all of those people who are not baby boomers like me. And so I was just so surprised.

Audio excerpt – ABC Reporter:

“The life of Australia's largest oil and gas project will be extended to 2070 with Environment Minister Murray Watt to give the long-awaited environmental approval for the North West Shelf Project to be extended beyond 2030.”

GREG:

The 2070 date, everyone's been talking about net zero to 2050 and here we are approving. The ability for that project to go on till 2070. So shocked, amazed, it was like a bombshell.

RUBY:

Can we interrogate that decision making a little bit more because the minister had to consider the world's significant rock art, which is close by, but tell me what other considerations he had to make, what wasn't included in the decision making process.

GREG:

So under the act that he's operating, he has to take into account the environmental effects of flora and fauna, but also the cultural heritage. In this particular case, it's the rock art. He was not and does not have the powers to approve anything with regard to climate change, global warming emissions. He doesn't have the powers and nor should he have the powers to approve a pipeline route offshore or the emplacement of the drilling and production platforms. He doesn't have those powers, they are held elsewhere. So in one sense, he could sort of sit back and say, well, my hands are tied, I can only do what is within the law. He could have, on the other hand, spoken to the prime minister and said, we have a problem here. Maybe we should delay this decision and maybe we should be strengthening the laws. But he did what he had to do. You know, yes, Minister. He ticked the box.

RUBY:

Okay. And so this project, we know that it's already one of the biggest emitting facilities in the country. So if we were to look at this extension, what will it potentially mean for Australia's emissions?

GREG:

So there's two parts to the emissions really. There's the part of the emissions which actually occur here in terms of drilling gas, some of it escapes and so on. So there are those emissions which occur in the country. But then there's the emissions that occur when it's sold to Japan, Korea and so on. In that case, the overall amount of emissions that would go into the atmosphere over that period of time up to 2070 from the Browse Basin. Is something like four billion tonnes, four billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is roughly 10 times the amount of emissions that the whole of Australia, the whole Australia's economy emits in a year. It's vast. Now Woodside will be saying, well, we're only being measured on what we emit here. Murray Watt can't actually speak about that, but he would have to say the same. And of course, the prime minister has already said, you know, it's a small amount of emissions here in Australia.

But the premise, basically, behind Woodside's making sure they could get through this box. Is to make sure they can get through the next box, which is basically development approval pipeline routing. So the way I look at it is this, and coming from my old company BP, the way I look at is, Woodside by saying they want to produce gas right out to 2070 at an even faster rate than they're doing now, basically says our strategy relies on the world's climate talks to either break down or go slow. Being rejected by a Trump, for example, there'll be another one that comes along. It basically is saying, we actually don't give a stuff about the future. Our job, we're in it, we, an oil company, a gas company are in an existential crisis. If climate change is really acted upon by everyone in the world, we go out of business.

RUBY:

Talk to me a bit more about the economic argument.

GREG:

So the economic argument for the oil and gas producers, what they are having to judge is, can I produce it at a cost and then sell it overseas into the market and can I do that again for a bunch of years out to 2070? Can I actually do that? If it were not to be the case, we would stop. But at the moment, their view is, we will be able to sell it 20 to 30 years out with no problems at all. What does it mean for Australia? Well, yes, we get some gas tariffs, as it were, or resource rent tax comes via the gas, the companies pay taxes within Australia. But by and large, compared with what other countries do and how they exploit their gas, we get, in Australia, a pittance. We struck some extremely bad deals in the mad rush to get gas out in the 1970s, the 1980s, and 1990s, compared with other countries in the world. It's not much of our economy really.

RUBY:

And there's not a huge economic benefit for us.

GREG:

No, it's a bonanza for the board and the executive and the shareholders who get dividends. It's definitely a bonanza for them. We reek a disbenefit by more weather events, whether they be the disastrous floods on the East Coast that we've had or the bushfires that we had, and we will see more of those as we go into a warmer and warmer world. So, in a sense, you know, Western Australia gets lots of jobs, that's for sure. It gets a bit of money, it gets some taxes, but by and large, we are feeling it. We've have floods in Queensland, floods in Northern New South Wales. We have a drought in South Australia at the moment. You know, it's pretty parlous at the moment.

RUBY:

After the break - the lobbying that keeps feeding our gas habit.

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RUBY:

Greg, this decision, which would potentially allow the Woodside project to continue on for the next few decades, it's been six years in the making. Tanya Plibersek, the former environment minister, she put off making that decision twice during her term. As someone who has worked in the industry, can you enlighten me at all as to the kinds of conversations and the kinds of lobbying that would have been happening behind the scenes over the past six years in the lead up to this approval?

GREG:

Yeah, so let me start from the woodside point of view or oil and gas company point of views. So you drill a hole in the ground, you find some gas. You work out how much it is and then you say, is this the right time to develop it? And you might say, no, not now, but let's start working the process and we would probably want it to come on in 2030 or 2035. And then you work year by year, knowing that you're not gonna develop it now. But that you might want to develop in the future if the prices are right. So in terms of how you think about these projects, you know that you're going to go through a Labor government in Western Australia, a Liberal government in West Australia, Coalition at the federal level, a Labor one at the federal level. And basically you walk the corridors of power and you lobby with politicians, you lobby you with junior public servants who in 10 years time are senior public servants and you build a relationship so that it becomes, if you like, the inertia over time is, oh, of course it's gonna go ahead.

We've been talking about this for 25 years, so of course, it's going to go ahead, and that mental model is, oh, it is an extractable resource. We’re Australia, we do well at that, and we've done it in iron, we've done it in gold, we're doing it in bauxite, we dig it and ship it.

So that's what you do at the supply end. At the demand end, if you want to keep going, then the argument you make, and Woodside have been making this argument since 1996, is that gas is good, it will help you get off coal, it'll help you clean up your cities. They don't say it'll slow down the introduction of renewable energy within your country. They don't say, if it's a nuclear country, they don't say it will slow down the expansion of your nuclear power stations, if those what you have, Japan, Korea, China, for example, doesn't say that at all. No, it is, we want to sell to you.

RUBY:

Which brings us to where we are at today. Given that then, is it really down to governments to change the legislation that they consider when they're deciding whether or not to approve projects like this?

GREG:

Absolutely, absolutely. So I think the Albanese government have got around about three months in which to signal to Australia and indeed signal to the world that they're going to accelerate their action on climate change. And some of that would be seen, for example, as bringing in legislation to parliament with regard to a climate trigger, whether it's in a current act or future act or whatever else. That they're actually going to do that. The reason I say three months is because Australia also wants to host in Adelaide and in the region, COP 31, and they want to do that with the Pacific countries as well. A decision was expected to be made in June, but has to be by the end of September. And already we are hearing from the Indo-Pacific countries that, hang on, what are you guys in Australia doing? Do you actually care about us going underwater? Do you care about climate change? They understand, they're smart, they understand the decision that Murray Watt had to take and they also understand the portents it sends with regard to are we going to develop more and more gas and oil, coal and just keep going on out to 2070. The 2070, as I come back to the beginning, is the big shock. So that's what people will be looking for now. Will the Albanese government in this next three months begin to start signalling that they're going to be tackling climate change, tackling it hard and actually going to put some legislation behind it?

RUBY:

And what impact would a climate trigger have?

GREG:

The climate trigger would be basically saying, you are producing emissions and you are actually trying to reduce not only the emissions that we have within Australia, but you are working all along the supply chain to the customer, trying to help them reduce their emissions because Japan has to reduce its emissions, Korea does as well, China does and so on like that. But if all you're doing is feeding a habit and I have been known to say that we push our products with the zeal of a drug lord. You know, you have a supplier, you have a consumer, and unless you tackle that chain from both ends, deliberatively, trying to reduce emissions here, where we have real control over it, and also control those emissions when you sell them into Japan or elsewhere, unless you're doing it diligently along the totality of the supply chain, you're just continuing the habit.

RUBY:

Greg, thank you so much for your time today.

GREG:

Thank you, Ruby, I enjoyed chatting.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Accused triple-murderer Erin Patterson has given her account of how she made a beef Wellington dish that resulted in the deaths of three relatives and made another seriously ill.

Ms Patterson has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Giving evidence in her murder trial, Ms Patterson told the court she accepted the meal contained death cap mushrooms, saying she prepared the dish using mushrooms she believed were purchased from a grocer – but conceded they may have been foraged.

And

Opposition leader Sussan Ley says she’ll work with the federal government to secure Australia an exemption from higher US steel tariffs.

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to double tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from 25 to 50 per cent.

The UK has negotiated an exemption from the increase, and Sussan Ley says she would assist the government in negotiating to get the same result.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.

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