Albanese’s resources minister celebrating the Beetaloo carbon bomb is a hell of a choice. Labor can’t say it wasn’t warned | Clear Air — SkimNews
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- Madeleine King posed for photos with NT chief minister Lia Finocchiaro (Country Liberal Party) this week as they jointly opened the first gas production from the Beetaloo basin, drawing only passing national attention at the time.
- Tamboran Resources CEO Todd Abbott said the Beetaloo sub-basin contains roughly 200 trillion cubic feet of gas — enough, he claimed, to power every Sydney home 20 times over for more than a century.
- The Beetaloo basin spans about 28,000 square kilometres between Katherine and Tennant Creek, with gas locked in sedimentary rock and extracted through fracking.
- A 2018 NT government inquiry recommended shale gas development not increase Australia's net emissions, but the then NT Labor administration abandoned the recommendation after gas industry lobbying and signed a contract to buy gas from Tamboran's project.
- The Country Liberal Party scrapped a 50% renewable energy target by 2030 it had backed in opposition and, after the NT suffered five overlapping natural disasters last wet season, made accelerating Beetaloo gas production the first action of its climate resilience plan.
- Beetaloo projects are not required to limit emissions under NT law, and analysis cited in the piece suggests the federal safeguard mechanism will have little effect on Beetaloo emissions in the coming years.
- A UN Environment Programme report released this week concluded the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5C will inevitably be passed, with a peak of 1.8C now the most optimistic available forecast.
Why it matters: The Beetaloo basin's pilot launch arrived the same week UN science confirmed the 1.5C target is already lost, and reporting shows taxpayer money and weakened emissions rules have underwritten the project across both Labor and CLP governments — meaning Australia's political class chose gas expansion despite explicit warnings of the consequences for glaciers, island nations, and ecosystems already being devastated.
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