Essay by Eric Worrall
“… wrote off $244 million in clean energy spending …” after Trump 2024 Election win.
‘Sue me’: Forrest says Trump is telling lies on climate
Jessica Gardner United States correspondent
Washington | Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has accused United States President Donald Trump of lying about climate change as he pilloried the White House’s pivot away from renewable energy to polluting fossil fuel sources.
…
“There’s real damage being done to people’s lives all over the world by your president propagating a complete myth that global warming is not happening. That’s wrong. That’s utterly wrong,” Forrest said.
“Your administration … it’s put a bet on the oldest, tiredest horse on the line, which is fossil fuel,” he told the event hosted by the New York Times. “And by the way, all these other horses are fit, lean, they’re getting stronger every day, which is renewable energy, renewable technology, storage, everything.”
…
The company wrote off $244 million in clean energy spending after halting more than $1 billion worth of hydrogen projects, according to its annual financial disclosure in August.
Read more: https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/sue-me-forrest-says-trump-is-telling-lies-on-climate-20250925-p5mxqo
…
In addition to the $244 million Andrew “Twiggy” Forest had to write off over his failed clean energy schemes, Twiggy’s resource companies have likely been impacted by President Trump’s import tariffs.
Making belligerent speeches aimed at President Trump seems to be the latest fashion in Australia’s political and business circles. But I doubt President Trump can be bothered to remember who Twiggy is.
The truth is the world is moving on without Australia. While the USA and Asia build the world of tomorrow, Australia’s political and industry leaders are clinging to the failed green ideas of the past, desperately grasping at straws of international relevance, while pretending to the audience back home that Australia still matters.
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Twiggy is bent out of shape ?
Awww…
😉
Twiggy who?
“Climate crusader and renewable entrepreneur Andrew “Twiggy” Forest“
I am Groot?
“I am Groot!”
Twiggy hasn’t aged well. She looks like a “he” now.
You know what they say.
When men get older they look like Sean Connery,
when women get older they look like .. Sean Connery.
Maybe that’s the reason.
Must have converted into a Trans Activist
Knowing just how much electricity is required for electrolysis and hydrogen’s predictivity for leaking, I have known that Hydrogen was a non starter since the first time I heard it proposed back in the early 70’s. Why doesn’t this idiot know it?
He and his ilk DO know their shit stinks…they also know there’s no end to how much money their comrades in government will spend to buy their manure…
Money invested in hydrogen energy will disappear into thin air just like the gas itself.
“Why doesn’t this idiot know it” Like all good questions, yours embodies its answer.
The answer is contained in the question.
Corpulent corporate?
Co2rpulent co2rporate.
Co2rupt one.
The corporate pig with it’s snout in the govt trough is now squealing for more .
In Canada Trump probably would not be successful suing the jurk for defamation, as Trump is a ‘public figure’.
In UK probably would be, Australia I have no idea about.
(Is he using Trump as a scapegoat for his incompetence?)
Not really. He’s hiding the fact that his scam for bilking billions from gullible idiots just circled the bowl and went down the drain. He’s not incompetent. This is his rage that he made all these investments in green energy scams and US government policy made it all worthless.Think of this goof as a modern version of Enron.
Uh, in my opinion Trump tends to simplify things and rather than judging his statements as scientific truth, it might be more beneficial trying to translate what he actually said, I believe it was something like “global warming is a hoax!”
I would argue that most Republicans around that president are well aware that the global average temperature has increased and this might have affected some local climate.
However, I think it is also quite evident that so called attribution groups use simplified models and understate the uncertainty of their findings, with which they enter hoax territory..
And personally, I think the lukewarmer position is very reasonable and defensible!
Anthropogenic CO2 has contributed to the global increase of temperature, but there are large uncertainties about the amount of warming which can be attributed to it and even much larger uncertainties about the effect of this part of the warming on climate.
When the Sun becomes more active; it has two warming impacts on Earth’s climate. The first is the increase in total solar irradiance. The second is that the increased intensity of the Sun’s magnetic field has the effect of reducing the amount of cosmic rays which strike the Earth, reducing cloud cover and thus reducing the amount of sunlight which is reflected away from the surface.
“Anthropogenic CO2 has contributed to the global increase of temperature, “
That statement is not backed by any physical scientific measurements..
There is no sign of any CO2 caused warming in the UAH data.
Or any other data.
I am afraid you are very wrong!
There is ample evidence that any gas mixture existing in the atmosphere changes it’s IR absorption or emission when the partial CO2 pressure is changed. There are very reliable models available to describe the measured data, see MOTRAN/HITRAN!
Any claim that the direct CO2 effect in the atmosphere would not be known or well understood is just wrong.
However, that is very different for claims about potential feedbacks as a result of this in the real atmosphere. For that the models are not reliable and change dramatically with every CMIP generation
‘I am afraid you are very wrong!’
No need to be afraid once you realize that there is absolutely no evidence from the cores of either carbonate rocks or polar ice that CO2 has ever had any effect on the Earth’s surface temperature.
At that point it should become apparent that the ‘models’ are not just ‘unreliable and change dramatically with every CMIP generation’, but that they are in fact based on the incorrect assumption that radiative transfer equations actually describe how heat transfer occurs in the troposphere.
Like I wrote before, the direct effect of added CO2 in gas mixtures is very well measured and modelled, there is a very real warming effect from added CO2 near the surface, it is roughly 1K if the CO2 were to raise from 280 to 560ppm.
Given warming started around 1850, before we lifted CO2 significantly, there must be a natural component to the current warming. But how much is natural vs how much is anthropogenic, we don’t have good enough data or models to figure that out.
The fraud part IMO is the claim the mild warming we are experiencing is a problem. There is no observational evidence which supports the claim warning is a problem. The world is greening, crop yields are soaring, and paleo evidence tells us past warm ages were bursting with abundance.
The only “evidence” for any problem is the low quality predictions of the world’s climate models. Personally I prefer real evidence over shaky model predictions which contradict paleo evidence from past warm ages, but a lot of people have gone all wide eyed because the model predictions come from big photogenic computers.
On a longer timescale, it was warmer 10,000 years ago.
And it will eventually get cold again, then we will be in deep doo-doo.
The main human development with climates in my opinion has been the wholesale clearing of vast vegetated areas to be replaced with concrete, asphalt, brick, metal, glass, etc.
This results in new locality climates which take on changed characteristics and behaviors from what they historically exhibited.
CO2 addition to the atmosphere is an insignificant influence, as has been observed for millennia past.
I think of it more in terms of fraud and farce. The UN is selling IPPC, the Kyoto protocol and the Paris agreement as a framework to control CO2 emissions by encouraging developed countries to dramatically reduce their CO2 emissions. The developed countries spending trillions of dollars over the last 30 years are indeed cutting back on their emissions but the growth in emissions from the developing world vastly exceed the developed nations emissions reduction. The developed world is participating in a farce and the fraud is the climate that the climate change protagonists insisting that all the things they’ve done over the last 30 years is progress.
I agree. The last several years have amply demonstrated that the UN has no reason to exist. It serves no useful purpose whatsoever. A handful of its agencies have useful, well-defined roles such asn UNSCEAR and IAEA. But the UN itself has no reason for being whatsoever.
So, global warming is simply the UN’s main strategy to insert itself back into national policy as a relevant body.
The UN is indeed a farce. Its failure to avert a war in Europe shows that it failed the only reason the UN was created in the first place. Its participation in the war between Israel and Iran via UNWRA shows that the UN has now sided with a murderous gang of mercenaries.
“Its participation in the war between Israel and Iran via UNWRA shows that the UN has now sided with a murderous gang of mercenaries.”
Did you mean Israel and “Palestinians”?
Iran is the man behind the curtain.
LoN:
One can make a reasonable case that CO2 might have some additive effect to the warming that has occured, but its probably small and inconsequential.
The fraud [or hoax] is that 1) warming is going to be a crisis, 2) manipulating CO2 will prevent the warming, and 3) the climate science behind assertions 1 & 2 are solid.
Regarding #1-3, the Emperor has on no clothes (or at most just underwear).
The fraud is perpetuated by (B. Lomborg’s phrase): “a Confluence of Interests”. [which is very similar to conflict of interest]. Politicians, environmental NGOs, businesses, government bureaucracies, mainstream media, & academics all benefit in some way by keeping the “climate crisis” going [deriving some combo of power, fame, votes, money, tenure, legitimacy, subsidies or clicks, to name a few]. Then there are the geo-political angles like China (selling us $500 billion of grid endangering wind & solar products while they build coal plants) or the developing countries angling for $billions in “climate reparations”. It’s a scam.
Here in Arizona today we are having a delightful late summer rain after hitting 102F yesterday; all perfectly consistent with “climate change”. Lol
Suggested addition
“Regarding #1-3, the Emperor has on no clothes (or at most just underwear and the holes are showing)”.
And a rather prominent skid mark.
“translate what he actually said”
That’s the key to getting Trump. He has some great ideas but isn’t good at explaining them. Because of that, the other side attempts to crucify him- focusing on Trump’s less than Ivy League explanations and seldom discussing the point Trump is attempting to make.
A statement which nullifies itself! Congrats! If something cannot be measured, it is academic conjecture and close to meaningless.
>> A statement which nullifies itself!
Not really, the increased IR absorption and emission of atmosphere-like gas mixtures is very well known and documented by measuremens. There are measurable effects (increased thermaization of incoming radiation at higher gas pressures similar to near surface atmosphere and increased emission for gas mixtures at lower pressure like in the stratosphere) the question of potential feedback factors, however, has not been answered by direct measurements, hence the large uncertainties for the global atmosphere.
Thermalization of electro-magnetic energy? Bogus.
Thermalization is the approach to or achieving thermal equilibrium. That involves thermal (aka kinetic) energy and has nothing to do with EM.
Discovered by Eunice Foote in 1850.
“global warming is a hoax!”
Not quite.
“climate crisis is a con job!””
Hydrogen is so difficult to manage that it is unlikely ever to be suitable except for unique industrial applications such as hydrogen annealing and the manufacture of some chemicals. It is very difficult to liquify (requires about 20 degrees if absolute zero), expensive to compress, of a low volumetric energy density and possessing of other such difficulties that it simply cannot function as an industrial or domestic fuel. Twiggy should have studied it more before investing.
Energy lost at every step of handling, so what is H2 good for?
Industry? Laughable.
Subsides on every step?
I used to play with hydrogen as a kid. Nobody would buy me any helium, so being a nerd I figured out how to make hydrogen from household ingredients.
But that hydrogen was sooo dangerous. Around a third of the balloons exploded as I filled them, because a trace of air got inside, and the friction from filling the balloons was enough to cause an explosion. And they were never safe to bring inside, sometimes they just detonated for no apparent reason.
There’s a reason why lighter-than-air air transport failed in the 1930s.
For sure. After my experiences with the hydrogen balloons, I found it difficult to imagine how anyone ever thought getting onboard a huge airship held aloft by a hydrogen balloon was a good idea.
Absolutely, Eric. The innovator of rigid airships, Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GMBH, tried desperately to secure supplies of helium for their fleet of airships. They established the world’s first scheduled trans-Atlantic passenger air service in 1934. But the takeover of Germany by National Socialism doomed LZ access to helium for military reasons.
We could have a very long discussion about what were and were not the safety flaws of the Hindenburg in 1937. Use of hydrogen was certainly a safety flaw, but it had others which were the things which destroyed it at Lakehurst. Had these been properly understood and managed, the Lakehurst disaster would never have happened.
It’s important to note that two-thirds of the Hindenburg passengers and crew survived. This rarely happens in crashes of heavier-than-air aircraft.
The Hindenburg was in the process of landing when the fire started just before it was to dock with its mooring mast. It was just 90 m (about 300 ft) above ground. [It normally cruised at an altitude of 200 m.] Comparing this to a heavier-than-air aircraft “crash” seems a stretch. Those don’t have ropes touching the ground.
It takes a surprisingly small slowdown in descent velocity to make falls survivable.
Terminal velocity for a human free falling is between 50 – 90m/s
1 gravity acceleration is 9.8m / s / s. So to decelerate from 90 m/s to zero takes just over 9 seconds, which is obviously going to involve a lot of distance.
But humans can survive much more deceleration in short distances. Assuming 10g deceleration, which most people could survive for a few seconds, the survivable deceleration time is 1s, during which the person travels 25m. This is why people who fall thousands of ft from airplane wrecks sometimes survive if they hit a pine tree or a steep snowy mountain.
But surround that person with a big, lightweight structure and things get interesting. That 25m deceleration distance can be reduced dramatically, down to 1-2m. if the structure has a lot of drag.
Yes. I always thought it funny in one of the Marvel movies, that a free-falling chamber was supposed to kill the Hulk, or Thor, for that matter—Hollywood physics.
Latex balloons tend to create/attract static charges which would be sufficient to ignite hydrogen
They are already pivoting to ‘green ammonia’ for the reasons you suggested
Yep, compressed water soluble corrosive gas known for its ability to cut through and dissolve organic material will sure make it a whole lot safer. There is a reason they don’t use ammonia as the cooling gas in household refrigerators, it’s just too dangerous.
A subject covered somewhat amusingly in Theroux’s “Mosquito Coast”.
No, more like the oldest, tiredest horse against a Trojan horse. And even an old nag on death’s door is better than a Trojan horse. Ask the Greeks.
You would think a billionaire could buy better lines of bs!
How can Trump do any damage to anyone by simply saying global warming is fake?
I’m pretty sure Miss Twiggy can show as at least one person on this planet who was damaged.
On the other hand when other presidents did massive damage with real lies like WMDs,Yellow Cake, Horseshoe plans, Tonkin incidents etc. people like Twiggy never felt the urge to comment the massive bodycount.
And then the lies go on and on.
The “age” of an energy does not matter
Solar cells,windmills and hydrogen are way older than nuclear energy therefore we must go all nuclear by his own logic.
Yet nuclear is never an option for climate looneys – because it works.
And they are not the fittest.
They are going with a toothpick to a gunfight and are only alive because the others are being sabotaged so they can survive.
They don’t want Clean Air, that’s just a rouse, they want dominion over every aspect of your life
When you use energy
How you use energy
What you consume
How you travel
How far you can travel
Where you live
How you live
When you get neutered (sex reassignment surgery for kids under the guise of gender affirming care)
When you must die is next
“Your administration … it’s put a bet on the oldest, tiredest horse on the line, which is fossil fuel,”
— quote of billionaire Andrew Forrest, according to the above article.
Hey there, Andrew, the last I heard was that fossil fuels were going stronger than ever: supplying about 83% of all energy needed by the US in 2023 (ref: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ ). “tiredest horse”? . . . I think not!
Moreover, the US is a net exporter of fossil fuels and thus they contribute significantly to the US GDP and balance of trade . . . and thus to a high standard of living in the US.
If your “resource” companies and you, personally, lost your shirts recently by betting on “renewables” instead of fossil fuels industries, too bad. You don’t deserve any pity. You see, indeed, “global warming” is NOT a myth, but the meme that global warming is caused but mankind’s burning of fossil fuels is.
A little bit of knowledge about science, and the Scientific Method, would serve you well.
Don’t hear much about renewable energy supplies being sold/traded across oceans.
When was the last time Australia sold renewable generated energy to China?
When was the last time Australia sold Coal to China?
Which one contributes more to GDP?
Which one siphons money from the government just to stay solvent?
ATTN: Aussies
RE: No warming in Australia
Shown in the chart (See below) is a plot of the average annual temperature in Adelaide from 1857 to 1999. In 1857 the concentration of of CO2 in dry air was ca. 280 ppmv (0.55 g CO2/cu. m.) and by 1999, it had increased to ca. 370 ppmv (0.72 g CO2/cu. m.), but there was no corresponding increase in air temperature. Instead there was a slight cooling. This empirical temperature data falsifies the claims made by IPCC and the unscrupulous collaborating scientists that CO2 causes “global warming” and is the “control knob of climate change”. The reason CO2 caused no warming of the air is that there is too little of it in the air to absorb out-going long wavelength IR light to cause any warming of the air.
The chart was obtained from the late John L. Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at http://www.john-daly.com. From the home page, page down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on “Australia”. There is shown a list stations. Clicking on a station displays a chart with a plot of the average annual temperatures. The chart for Brisbane shows plots of the average seasonal temperatures, are flat, and show no warming.
John Daly found over 200 weather stations located around the world that showed no warming up to 2002.
The challenge is to convince Premier Anthony A. and the Canberra Climate Commissars that CO2 cause no warming of air and there is no need to reduce the use of fossil fuels. He surely knows that mining companies consume vast amounts of Diesel fuel.
NB: If you click on the chart, it will expand and become clear. Click on the “X” in the circle to return to comment text.
It is absolutely impossible to prove that co2 ,
especially at such low quantities is a control knob of anything.
Especially if it has to compete with the sun and oceans that are many magnitudes more impactfull than a 0.01 % of a weak climate gas.
But what surprises me is that Adelaide had 0 warming.
Ignoring co2 and if it may warm climate by 0.2 degrees or not
I’d have expected that urbanization,concrete etc would have lead to a temperature increase as result of UHI – therefore it seems there was some cooling during the last 150 years.
Scroll down and read my comment posted at 4:04 pm. There has been a sight warming in Adelaide.
BTW: Be sure to check out:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/adelaide/average-temperature-by-year. The reason I like Adelaide is that its long temperature record that starts in 1857. Consider the following:
At MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry air is currently
425 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has a mass of 1.29 kg and contains a mere 0.835 g of CO2 at STP.
In air at 70° and 70% RH, the concentration of H2O is 17,780 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has a mass of 1.20 g and contains 14.3 g of H2O and 0.777 g of CO2. To the first approximation and all things being equal. the amount of the greenhouse effect (GHE) due H2O is given by:
GHE=moles H2O/moles H2O+moles CO2=0.79/0.79+0.019=0.98
H2O is by far the major greenhouse gas and CO2 is a trace greenhouse gas that contributes very little if any to the greenhouse effect.
Check out the temperature chart for Brisbane from John Daly’s website. Note how flat the plots are.
MB: If you click on the chart, it will expand and become clear. Click on the “X” in the circle to return to comment text
Thx
Keep it up. You are finding the same thing I did. Look for cities that are still fairly rural from all over the globe. Look at Tmax and Tmin separately. Sooner or later climate science is going to be required to show where the amorphous warming is occurring and where Tmax is burning everything.
I dunno, the renewables horse sounds more like a nag that can’t keep pace with FF. If not then the renewables jockeys wouldn’t be nagging us all the time
Twiggy is such a supporter of renewables, it’s about time that he cancelled all those flights for his fly-in, fly-out workers and only employed people who live within a 15 minute walk of his mine sites.
Surely he would support the same sacrifices for his own business as he would wish upon the masses.
Come on Twiggy, drop the flights.
Big correction needed.
Twiggy is a supporter of anything that he thinks will make money… especially if it is backed by government subsidies.
He was right about iron ore mining… and wrong ever since.
ATTN: Aussies
RE: Update On Temperature In Adelaide.
I just discovered a new website for the easy acquisition and processing of weather and climate data for any city, state, country, region, and other sites such as parks. For more new temperature data on Adelaide, I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/adelaide/average-temperature-by-year.
In an instant, there was displayed a table of Tmax and Tmin data from 1887-2024. You have several options for the display of the data. You can have the data displayed for any month. You can have the Tmax or Tmax data displayed from the highest value to lowest value and vice versa.
Shown in the chart (See below) is a plot of the Tmax and Tmin data, which was prepared for me by my son. Note there is slight increase in temperatures at the end of the plots. Is this slight warming possibly due to the UHI effect or an “adjustment and homogenization” by the BoM?
At the top of page there is the “Select City” box which allows access to temperature data from any city in the world that is in NOAA’s data base.
When you type the name of the city in the box, it will appear below the box along other cities that start with first letters. You click on the first displayed city to get data for it. If you type in the name of city and if it does not appear below the box, then there is no data for that city. I was able to get data for Death Valley and Yellowstone Nat. Park.
If you go to: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/adelaide/weather/, the temperature data is displayed in a different format. At the end of the page, there is a list of options for display of data.
The home website is: https://www.extremeweaterwatch.com. Be sure to go there. You can obtain weather and climate data from many regions by clicking on the highlighted area selection.
Please send this comment to your friends and enemies so they can check for any warming in there area.
NB: If you click on the chart, it will expanded and become clear. Click on the “X” in the circle to return to comment text.
Twiggy Forrest should be given a prestigious diplomatic position in a remote area where he can no longer do damage to Australia.
Palestine. Too soon?
LOL – Twiggy and Tony Blair in the same room trying to work together would be hilarious.
How are those “Hydrogen Highways” coming along?
“propagating a complete myth that global warming is not happening. That’s wrong. That’s utterly wrong,”
What is wrong is conflating global warming, natural climate change, anthropogenic climate change, weather and weather disasters as if they are all the same thing. Unfortunately they are all used in sound bites as if they are interchangeable concepts.
One can deny that Mankind/CO2 is causing weather extremes while at the same time agreeing that the Earth is warming.
Another “Twiggy” debacle:
Sun Cable’s enormous solar project — backed by billionaires Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes — promises to supply up to 15 per cent of Singapore’s energy needs from 2028, and almost double Darwin’s current demand.
Its total carbon emissions abatement was estimated at 8.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.
But last week, the company went into voluntary administration.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-19/nt-sun-cable-voluntary-administration-explained/101860866
I wish Twiggy had stuck to mining iron ore…
All these side “climate” nonsense things he has done have been rather expensive to the shares I inherited.
Feb 2024 they were $28, now they are $19 (Aussie dollars)
Mind you, Dad bought them quite a while ago, when they were $4.30, so can’t really complain. 🙂
If Twiggy is right about renewables and storage then it shouldn’t make a lick of difference what Trump thinks or says about them. The truth is no matter how much of our money you squander on your useless projects they still won’t support the grid or a modern society. Grow up.
Wake up Twiggy as even the California of Oz wants more gas-
Victoria calls for domestic gas reserve scheme
Of course the drongos could lift their ban on fracking if they want more gas from their own backyard.