Once You Start Down The Wood Side, Forever Will It Dominate Your Destiny
YODA (V.O.) Gas is the path to the Wood Side. Gas leads to emissions, emissions leads to warming, warming leads to suffering.
Step right up and get your tickets for Chaos Trivia!
Team LMSU is joining forces with the fabulous folks from Currently Speaking for a blockbuster crossover event, with special guests, the NEMchat Singers! Chaos Trivia is set for the first night of the All Energy Conference on Wednesday 29 October in Melbourne. There will be trivia! Role playing? Musical interludes! Food! Drinks! And Tennant in some wizard cosplay, which should frankly be reason enough! All proceeds go to the First Nations Clean Energy Network and we reckon tix will sell like hotcakes, so - run, don’t walk and snag tix for you or a whole trivia team.
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Targets! Targets! Targets! Have we reached peak 2035 target fever? You betcha, and it’s a smorgasbord with climate and business groups serving up their preferred target. Which one is just right? From the bottom-up analysis from EY with practical can-do actions to achieve 65-75% to Deloitte’s top-down analysis for Business for 75 suggesting a 75% target would grow the economy more than a 65% target, there was one bit of modelling the subject of much chatter, and that didn’t recommend a particular target at all! McKinsey’s modelling for the BCA took a look at modelled costs for achieving 50, 60 and 70% targets but omitted any analysis of benefits, didn’t consider global impacts and seemed to make some drastic assumptions about the impact on gas exports (but hard to know as no assumptions were published). The verdict? BCA seems to be trying to thread the needle in navigating different members’ views and… it could have been worse!
Our main course
This week your intrepid hosts pack the passports and FIFO into that GST-sapping, resource-rich, beachy utopia that is WA as we soak up Marian Wilkinson’s Quarterly Essay, ‘Woodside vs The Planet: how a company captured a country’. This cracker of an essay unpacks the complex relationship between Woodside, successive WA and Federal governments, and local communities. A particularly nuanced and sensitive account of impacts to the Murujuga people’s struggle for influence in the preservation of their cultural heritage is contrasted with accounts of shareholder action and activists calling out the cognitive dissonance from Woodside in claiming support for climate action while expanding plans for fossil gas extraction and export well beyond 2050. This was not the policy solutions paper Tennant wanted it to be, but we debated the merits of supply-side activism to shut down fossil fuel exports and whether the WA community would even be on board with that. This essay paints a vivid picture of Woodside’s omnipresence in WA and for a bunch of blow-in east coasters, we learned a lot!
One more things
Tennant’s One More Thing is: the International Maritime Organisation’s upcoming vote on a global carbon pricing scheme for shipping— even with the US reportedly opposed, the vote is expected to pass. Yay for rare moments of multilateral innovation!
Frankie’s One More Thing is: the Investor Front Door is officially open! Or at least ajar for a couple of pilot projects. This could grease the wheels for Future Made in Australia projects OR could add more layers of helpful bureaucracy. Implementation matters!
Luke’s One More Thing is: for the fans of good periodicals out there, a solid vote for the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, which features essays on US-China tech competition, critical minerals, AI, and Australia’s role in the Pacific.
And that’s it for now, Summerupperers. There is now a one-stop-shop for all your LMSU needs: head to
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