Quarterly Essay 99: Woodside vs the Planet - How a Company Captured a Country

Why is Australia doubling down on fossil fuels?

The world may have committed at Paris to hold back dangerous climate change, but Australia's fossil-fuel giant Woodside is doubling down: it has bold new plans to keep producing gas out to 2070. Support from the major parties is locked in, so something has to give.

This is a story of power and influence, pollution and protest. How does one company capture a country? How convincing is Woodside's argument that gas is a necessary transition fuel, as the world decarbonises? And what is the new "energy realism" narrative being pushed by Trump's White House?

In this engrossing essay, Marian Wilkinson reveals the ways of corporate power and investigates the new face of resistance and disruption. The stakes could not be higher.

"The gas companies and the Labor governments in WA and Canberra had refined their defence: the gas industry was helping the world decarbonise, curbing its emissions and providing energy security. It sounded like the planet could hardly have a better friend than Australia's LNG industry and companies like Woodside." —Marian Wilkinson, Woodside vs the Planet

This issue contains correspondence relating to Hard New World by Hugh White from Lachlan Harris, Emma Shortis, Ali Wyne, James Curran, Susannah Patton, Mark Edele, Brendan Taylor, Clive Edwards, and Hugh White.