Wow! BHP Billiton, the largest miner in the world, has publicly acknowledged the existence of climate change.......
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that fossil fuels cause climate change and the extreme weather we’ve been seeing — and that the world needs to wake up and kick the fossil fuel habit.
Sure, those of us who call ourselves environmentalists take those as truths, but a major coal company? Yet that’s exactly what the Australian BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company, has just copped to.
Explaining the company’s decision to retrofit one if its coal-exporting facilities against significant weather events, BHP Billiton executive Marcus Randolph was quoted as saying, “As we see more cyclone-related events … the vulnerability of one of these facilities to a cyclone is quite high. So we built a model saying this is how we see this impacting what the economics would be and used that with our board of directors to rebuild the facility to be more durable to climate change.”
Yes, you read that right: climate change. You gotta love the irony. Not only is this major coal company acknowledging that climate change is real, but they’re investing in protections against the effects of said climate change — which they helped cause. They’re making a significant investment to protect themselves — from themselves.
At what point will a company like this decide that the costs of producing coal and other fossil fuels are no longer worth the return on investment? Weak prices have already led some coal companies, including BHP Billiton, to cut jobs. Add to this the cost of protecting their facilities from storms, and the ROI diminishes even more."
Comments