Siemens Decision On Adani Coal Mine Shows Once And For All That "Green Capitalism" Will Not Save Us
Global engineering company Siemens will not pull out of a contract at the new Adani coalmine in Australia, rejecting calls from climate campaigners including Greta Thunberg. President and CEO of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, announced Monday that after reviewing the rail signalling contract the company had “a legally binding and enforceable fiduciary responsibility.”
He said: “While I do have a lot of empathy for environmental matters, I do need to balance different interests of different stakeholders, as long as they have lawful legitimation for what they do.” He said the company, based in Germany, “should have been wiser about this project beforehand” and claimed had it been his own company, he may have “acted differently”. He added that the company “fundamentally shares the goal of making fossil fuels redundant to our economies over time”.
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The Adani coalmine will extract an initial 10m tonnes of thermal coal per year from a site 300km inland and transport it along a railway line to Adani’s Abbot Point Port for export. Kaeser said there were competitors to the railway signalling contract the company signed on 10 December 2019, which meant “whether or not Siemens provides the signaling, the project will still go ahead”.
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Australian Conservation Foundation senior campaigner Christian Slattery said the Siemens announcement, “while bushfires rage in Australia, is nothing short of shameful”. He said: “The company has shown its true colours with this decision. It has a climate change policy, but it is hollow and empty. Sadly, Siemens has shown it is no better than the fossil fuel companies it works with.” The Galilee Basin has been identified as one of the largest untapped sources of coal in the world, and campaigners and scientists have warned the Adani mine will open the way to several other coal mining projects in the region. Slattery added: “If constructed, the infrastructure for Adani’s mine will open the Galilee Basin to one of the largest expansions of thermal coal mining on the planet. “Siemens claims to support the Paris Agreement, but now it is committed to work on one of the world’s biggest carbon bombs.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/13/adani-coalmine-siemens-ceo-has-empathy-for-environment-but-will-honour-contract
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