Dirty Lies Award for Outstanding Greenwashing

Ladies and gentlemen,

It has already been said here several times: everyone taking part in the conference over there actually deserves a special award. It is therefore a very special honor for me to present the World LNG Summit as a whole with the award for “Outstanding Greenwashing”.
It goes out to the many international corporations that are tirelessly forging bold plans for how they can continue to maximize profits with their tried-and-tested business model well into the second half of this century. After all: who cares about climate targets or fossil fuel phase-out. One example is the Australian energy giant Woodside, which is not only plowing up the habitat of countless species, some of which are endangered, with a mega gas project in the sea. They are also bursting one of the world’s biggest CO2 bombs with the project. Production is to continue north of Australia until 2070. Incidentally, all this is being done with the generous support of the German companies RWE and Uniper - also present at the conference - which concluded early and long-term supply contracts with Woodside and thus finally secured the financing.
The prize also goes to the many hard-working lobbyists who - I am confident - will do everything they can to continue to sell fossil gas as a promising “bridge technology”, a bridge that will lead us from the fossil status quo to the fossil lets-keep-it-this-way. Even more elegant is the narrative that LNG still has a place in a climate-neutral world - because that is of course what they are aiming for in the long term. Don’t believe me? How about, for example: “Cementing LNG’s credentials as a fuel for the net zero scenario” - I found that in the conference agenda. Incidentally, the most powerful German lobby association in there is called “Zukunft Gas”. Future. Gas. To mention these two terms in the same breath - I’d like to award a prize for marketing!
And last but not least, the politicians who are singing hymns of gratitude to the gas industry at the Adlon these days and happily repeating the lobby’s fairy tales. It is mainly thanks to politicians that new LNG terminals and infrastructure - here for import, there for export - are mushrooming all over the world, generously financed with billions from of tax money. They are defying the reality that this boom will lead to empty investment ruins in the long term. The plants in Europe are already only operating at just under half capacity. And who needs facts when you can daydream nice-sounding buzzwords like “hydrogen” or “CCS”?

It is networking meetings like these that are such an excellent distraction from the tiresome efforts to restructure our well known economic systems and production methods. All the courageous people there at the Adlon are making sure that when the world comes to an end, it will at least function in the way we are used to. And a few will even be able to still drink champagne. So I say: congratulations to the World LNG Summit. The award for “Outstanding Greenwashing” is more than deserved!

Thank you very much.