Coal lobby's long game puts talking points into leaders' mouths

Extract from The Guardian

Graham Readfearn

Climate science denier and veteran lobbyist Fred Palmer is proud of getting Australia to adopt the sector’s arguments on climate and poverty

Malcolm Turnbull delivering his National Press Club address. He said Australia needed more efficient coal plants. Photograph: Stefan Postles/Getty Images

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Friday 3 February 2017 06.41 AEDT 

If you’re a lobbyist or an industry advocate, then you know you’re winning when you hear your own talking points coming back at you through the mouths of ministers.
Better still, if it’s the Australian prime minister.
During his address to the National Press Club this week, Malcolm Turnbull told Australia it needed more efficient coal plants, and that this would deliver “cheap”, reliable power that could help Australia meet its international climate change targets laid down at the UN climate talks in Paris.
Joining Turnbull this week in touting for coal have been his environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, and treasurer, Scott Morrison.

A second talking point is that coal can help lift poor countries out of poverty – another argument willingly adopted by Australian government ministers, including Turnbull.
Who can forget Tony “coal is good for humanity” Abbott?
There is a stream of analysis that says building new coal plants, even the most expensive and slightly less dirty versions, are incompatible with targets to keep global warming below dangerous levels. They’d also likely be much more expensive than renewables. That’s for another day.
But how did the coal industry do it? Where did these two talking points come from and how did they make their way into ministerial speeches and presentations by prime ministers?
One possibility is incessant lobbying to a willing administration that’s happy to meet a coal industry executive at the drop of a hat.
The coal industry has been playing a long game on these two talking points and we can trace them back to a 2010 World Energy Congress conference in Montreal.
Greg Boyce, then the boss of US coal giant Peabody Energy, gave a speech where he laid out the coal industry’s future.

Peabody Energy CEO Greg Boyce gives a 2010 speech to the World Energy Congress

Amid video images of African children in developing countries, Boyce dismissed climate change, said coal could help the poor and that more efficient coal plants and “clean coal” could help reduce emissions. These are the exact same arguments being made by Australian ministers today.
The man who developed that plan of attack within Peabody Energy was its vice-president for government relations, Fred Palmer.
In the years that followed, Peabody would develop and roll out its Advanced Energy for Life campaign, based on these talking points. One of its stated target audiences was Australia.
Palmer is also a grandfather of fossil fuel-funded attacks on climate science.
He told me in an interview that while he was the boss at Western Fuels Association, a group representing coal haulers and power plants, he was a key member of one of the very first fossil fuel-funded projects to publicly undermine the credibility of climate science.
He still thinks there is no evidence linking fossil fuel emissions to dangerous climate change. He thinks coal is part of a “divine plan” by God to help people live longer and says adding CO2 to the atmosphere will be a good thing.
Back in late 2014, the Australian pime minister at the time, Tony Abbott, was defending the coal industry to world leaders during the G20 summit in Brisbane.
A month earlier, Palmer was in Australia holding meetings in Canberra with government personnel, including the then industry minister, Ian Macfarlane (Palmer is now a senior fellow at climate science denial group the Heartland Institute and Macfarlane heads the Queensland Resources Council).

Palmer tells me:

Greg Boyce took all of these concepts that had been developed, and I was the one that developed them in the 90s at Western Fuel. I didn’t have international exposure but I talked in terms of universal access to energy and talked about everyone on Earth having the right to live as well as we do and talked about more people living longer, living better.

Peabody made a major push surrounding that. That was the genesis of what was being said in Australia in 2014. That’s where Tony Abbott and Ian McFarlane and the conservative party in Australia – that’s where it all came from. There is no question that’s where it came from.
We were proud of the fact that it had penetrated such an important government and this was all designed for [the 2015 climate talks in] Paris. That was such an important part of this process and everything we did was designed for Paris when it became apparent that Paris was going to be a seminal event.”

Palmer describes Abbott, who he has met personally, as a “precursor” to Trump in the context of climate change and energy policy.
“When Tony Abbott came in, he came in running against the carbon tax. When Donald Trump came in, he came in running against the Clean Power plan. That’s the parallel I am talking about.”

So was it difficult to get a meeting with the government?
“No it was not. I was thrilled to have that meeting and reception that I got,” says Palmer. “I had zero problems. If they had time, they talked to us.”
Buried away in documents previously released under freedom of information rules, there is more evidence of just how easy it is for a foreign-owned coal company to get a meeting with senior government personnel.
On 2 February 2015, a lobbyist, Bernie Delaney, emailed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Sam Gerovich, at the time the country’s ambassador to Apec, asking for a meeting with the ambassador “and relevant colleagues” the following week.
Two Peabody personnel would be in tow. Peabody wanted to “discuss US moves to have the OECD enact a policy guidance document which restricts funding for coal-fired power generation projects”.
Ten minutes later, Gerovich emailed back with a slot on the requested date.
The following day, Delaney emailed another Dfat ambassador, Brendon Hammer, asking for a meeting on behalf of Peabody. Hammer replied with a suggested meeting time.
“Always happy to see you and Peabody. Hope the new year has begun well for you,” wrote Hammer.
Later that year the Australian government announced it was pleased with the new arrangements from those OECD meetings that would ensure coal was not locked out of government funding.
Also in early 2015, there are emails between peak coal industry group the Minerals Council of Australia and Gerovich, where the MCA supplies Dfat with a “concept paper” touting the benefits of more efficient coal plants in the context of international climate talks.
With easy and regular access like this, is anybody surprised at how fluent government ministers are with talking points and policy positions on coal that come straight from the industry itself?
Certainly, Fred Palmer isn’t.
“It would be shocking to me if Australia turned its back on those resources for something that’s as elusive as what the world might be like 100 years from now based on computer models based on CO2 in a hotly debated area,” he says.

Like many climate science deniers and fossil fuel advocates around the world, Palmer is emboldened by the election of Trump and thinks he will be “spectacularly successful”.
He says: “We are going down the path of his America first energy plan. There is nothing in there about renewables and there’s nothing in there about carbon taxes. It’s fossil fuel-centric and it is meant to be. It’s a fossil-fuel future for the United States.”
“I guarantee you the world is going to follow.”
The big question is, can the fossil fuel industry push back against the tsunami of growth and investment globally in the renewables industry?
As long as you don’t deny reality, then there’s an awful lot riding on that question.