- Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest is attending the COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates.
- He says energy bosses should have their heads “put up on spikes” for not committing to phase out fossil fuels.
- It comes as some companies, including the national oil company of the UAE, defy calls for a wind-down of fossil fuel use.
Quote with context:
And he took particular aim at the oil and gas bosses who were dismissing the calls, describing them as “selfish beyond belief”.
He said their actions were jeopardising the lives of millions of people in overwhelmingly poor countries who were at risk of “lethal humidity”, or an inability to cool themselves down. “If you can’t cool yourself you’re actually an oven burning around 100 watts all the time,” Dr Forrest said.
"If you can [sic] get rid of that heat energy, you cook.
"And when these deaths occur — and they’re occurring now, but when they occur at much larger-scale — I want these so-called people who are very smart to be held to account.
“It’s their heads which should be put up on spikes because they wilfully ignored and they didn’t care.”
It’s worth noting that hydrogen is key to a large number of industrial processes, including the majority of metal and fertilizer production. While its use in fuel cells and small vehicles is rather silly, it’s about the only contender outside nuclear for ships. The conversion loses make it impractical for anything you can directly electrify, but that’s would only be a small fraction of a large industry.
Given this hydrogen is currently produced near entirely with natural gas and with several times the emissions of diesel, the idea of replacing that production with production powered by renewables is reasonable, especially since you need to overbuild solar and wind capacity so much to ensure constant power. Useing that spare capacity to make hydrogen, which doesn’t care about when it gets made, is also responsible.
We need green and pink hydrogen, the scam is coming up with more consumers of our currently minuscule supply.