Hypocrisy at COP31

Written by: Nick G. on 12 November 2026

 

(Source: Earth Liberation Studios)

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese displayed at the COP31 Leaders’ Summit in Turkey his international standing as a specialist spin doctor who has sworn the Hypocritic’s Oath.

Standing before his bourgeois peers, he gloried himself in claims that “we proudly have one of the largest rooftop solar and battery markets in the world” whilst failing to mention Australia’s role in the fossil fuel industry driving the climate crisis.

Since coming to office, the Albanese Government has approved 39 new, expanded or extended coal, oil and gas developments. This includes the proposed $1 billion coal mine in Queensland's Bowen Basin. It includes the approval last April of an expansion to Chevron’s Gorgon gas project in WA.

This approval will allow the US owned multi-national to continue cooking our climate, exporting our gas and essentially hands $300 billion worth of Australian gas to Chevron.

Australia is the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter based on energy content, and the second largest by climate pollution content. Each year, Australia exports 2.5 tonnes of climate pollution for every tonne of pollution released in Australia. These emissions – no matter where they’re emitted – harm Australians and all others by heating the global climate and exacerbating extreme weather events. Because the emissions are made by Australian fossil fuel overseas, the Government hypocritically refuses to recognise its responsibility for them.

Meanwhile, US tech billionaires are circling Western Australia looking for opportunities to seize more Australian gas for their data centres.

They include Microsoft’s Bill Gates who went to WA last February looking for data centre opportunities in the Pilbara. Gates told the Australian Financial Review he was hoping to be able to advise Anthropic, Google and OpenAi on the availability of renewables and gas to power new data centres to be built in WA.

Anthropic is currently planning its Initial Public Offering (IPO), said to the world’s largest with a $US 1 trillion valuation. In its prospectus for the IPO, it declares its dependency on secure gas supply to power its AI data centres. The risks section talks a lot about potential gas shortages.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX - another US trillion dollar plus mega company, is also doing a massive and rapid data centre build out.

SpaceX shared similar gas supply risks in their own IPO prospectus a few months ago:

It is not only the Pilbara where giant US tech companies are nosing around. There is also interest in the Perth Basin. 

These giants and their data centres will need a lot of gas... which WA doesn’t necessarily have. The Australian Energy Market Operator is already forecasting WA gas shortfalls starting in 2028 and 2030 and getting worse every year through to 2045.

WA already has 26 data centres, operated by 13 providers.  

Two words missing from the PM’s speech at COP31: “fossil fuels”.  

Two more: “data centres”.

A hollow and worthless piece of wordplay.

 

 

Print Version - new window Email article

-----

Go back