- 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.”
Australia is currently the worlds largest producer of lithium, so it can’t be that much more expensive. It would definitely make more sense to invest in scaleing up than their the coal mines.
Compared to all the other expenses, safety measures really are marginal costs, so it’s kind of wild that bosses will cut them whenever possible.
But capitalists know that anything that constrains their abuse of workers gives them less power over them, and they can’t accept that. Being a boss is really about domination above all else. The money is a proxy for that goal.
The owner class have to view the rest of us as inferior. When they’re forced to acknowledge our humanity they respond with rage, because that sense of superiority justifies their position.
Without it there’s no explanation for why their money allows them to do what they do. It’s the floor they stand on, and if it’s not there then they look down and see a yawning pit of horror. That separation between them and us both protects them from seeing how monstrous they really are, and it traps them.