Fortescue founder toys with reverse greenwashing - Reuters
Fortescue founder toys with reverse greenwashing | Reuters
Fortescue founder toys with reverse greenwashing
Andrew Forrest, the Chairman and Founder of Fortescue Metals Group speaks at the Sydney Energy Forum in Sydney, Australia July 12, 2022. Brook Mitchell/Pool via REUTERS Acquire Licensing Rights
MELBOURNE, Sept 1 (Reuters Breakingviews) - To lose one key member of a team in a week may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two, though, as playwright Oscar Wilde might put it, looks like carelessness. Fortescue Metals (FMG.AX) has gone one further.
First the $43 billion iron ore miner’s CEO, Fiona Hick, left abruptly on Sunday, barely six months after joining. Then on Thursday finance chief Christine Morris departed, followed on Friday by news that former Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Guy Debelle had vacated his seat on the board of Fortescue’s renewable energy unit. The turmoil at the top is leading to volatility: shareholders sold the shares down 5%. But in trying to shrug off the mounting exodus, founder and Executive Chair Andrew Forrest, also known as Twiggy, introduces a new risk: reverse greenwashing.
Usually, climate change virtue-signalling involves a company and its executives setting targets their policies won’t meet, or launching products that don’t achieve the claimed environmental outcomes. Forrest is turning that on its head. The tycoon on Wednesday claimed the “only reason” people would leave the company he leads was if they didn’t agree with his plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero.
Granted, he’s pushing hard to get there, setting an ambitious target of real zero emissions in its iron ore operations by 2030 – meaning no buying of offsets as is implied in net zero targets, which he derides as a “Faustian bargain” and a “sham”. He is also making a big push to develop green hydrogen and for the past couple of years diverted 10% of all mining profit to fund Fortescue Future Industries, the renewables startup where Debelle was a director. And he’s very vocal about his stance. His comments about Hick’s departure came after he delivered a speech about the danger to humanity of climate change-induced lethal humidity.
His approach to the energy transition is forcing a lot of change on the company in short order. That’s disruptive and perhaps accounts for some churn in the ranks over the past three years. Both Hick and Morris, though, were hired after these new strategies were put in place and after a long search – around a year in Hick’s case. That process surely would have involved rigorous discussions to ensure they were on board with Forrest’s goals and methods.
To part with so many hired hands so quickly suggests there was a difference of opinion over how, not whether, to hit those targets. That makes his absolutist twist to climate spin as unhelpful as the more traditional form of greenwashing.
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(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are their own.)
CONTEXT NEWS
Fortescue Metals finance chief Christine Morris has left the company less than two months after starting, the Australian company announced on Aug. 31. On the same day former Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Guy Debelle resigned from the board of Fortescue Future Industries, the company’s renewable energy unit, to become a director of and investor in Tivan, a company aiming to mine vanadium, titanium and other resources.
Editing by Una Galani and Thomas Shum
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”