While many of us have enjoyed down time between semesters, one staple of life at Monash University hasn’t stopped: the greenwashing of the climate emergency by Woodside Energy.
Heralding its name from the small town of Woodside in Victoria, this is not the only thing the Gas company has adopted to portray a clean image. Most known to Monash University students is the Woodside Building for Technology and Design.
For most, this building serves as a shiny, eco-friendly building which you might enter for an engineering unit. The inside boasts glassy panels, elevators and beautiful interiors and classrooms. And for most, seeing the silver letters WOODSIDE emblazoned on the front is of no worry.
But this should be a grave concern to us all.
If last Edition’s article wasn’t enough to convince you, or you simply missed it, here’s a hard and fast summary of Monash’s favourite corporation and its partnership with the university.
The partnership can be traced all the way back to 2016, with the ‘Future Lab’ on campus, supposedly to propel innovation and research. However, the partnership in its current form took off in 2019. According to the Woodside Futurelab and Energy Partnership at Monash University Annual Report 2019, “The Woodside Monash Energy Partnership is a natural extension of the successful relationship that began with FutureLab in 2016.”
In 2019, the Woodside Monash Energy Partnership (WMEP) was renewed alongside the Future Lab, and they represent a joint investment of more than $40 million.1 This lead to the construction of the building now located on the northern side of campus.
While the reports and PR will have you believe that the investment and partnership is to encourage the ‘…energy transition over the next seven years’,1 this is hard to believe. Woodside has a proud history of climate destruction. In 2022-2023 they amassed a profit of $10 billion, of which less than 1% goes to the carbon capture technology they claim is leading to their transition to clean energy.
The company is one of the world’s ten largest hydrocarbon extractors, and since its inception has stopped at nothing to maintain its greasy hold on power. This has included intimidating young activists via gag orders and bail conditions, destroying sacred Indigenous rock art for its Burrup-Hub offshore gas drilling project (in spite of protests from Greenpeace and Conservation Council in Western Australia) and bribery and corruption with the Mauritian Government.
According to the 2021 Monash Annual Report, the Woodside Monash Partnership is the largest single industry-academia partnership, totalling $66.5 million dollars at the time.
Woodside has seeped its oily reaches into the very depths of our university – a university that should be public and for academic freedom.
Monash has yet to show signs of ditching its obsolete partnership despite growing concern. The Monash-Woodside conference is an annual conference set to be held in Prato, 28-30 June.
Having been renamed, now adopting the acronym WMEP (Woodside-Monash Energy Partnership) conference we can only assume this is the result of growing unrest over the university’s ties to the company. This is made evident by the ‘code of conduct’ for the conference which asks attendees to “...ensure that they do not support, condone or encourage in any way any protest or potential protest against the Event or its subject matter.”
It doesn’t take more than a quick skim of the website to realise the true intentions of the conference, boasting speakers like Tim Wilson, former Liberal member for Goldstein.
Additionally, the conference proudly displays key topics including: “How do social media, ‘cancel culture’ and lawfare interface with the pace and scale of investment (and regulatory approval) needed for the energy transition,” and, “What is the role of climate activism/nimbyism and climate solution denialism activism/nimbyism in thwarting emissions reduction?”
If this isn’t enough to make your blood boil, or in the least elict a wry chuckle, we can only add that the blatant greenwashing gets worse.
An important distinction must be made here the issue with the W.M.E.P. lies in not the researchers or the research itself, but the sheer reputational damage, greenwashing and social licence buying exhibited by the shareholders.
Claims that the W.M.E.P. might make Woodside more sustainable, or that Woodside is investing in us are easily refutable. What does a university amassing $300 million in profits each year and that has a research income of $593.3 million or an oil and gas giant raking in near $14 billion in annual revenues stand to gain from this partnership? The answer is clearly more money, and little else. The oil and gas giant aims to piggyback off a university built on the foundations of hardworking staff and students for its own gain.
This is not all, in the weeks following the previous publication a world record shareholder vote was held. This vote involved shareholders of Woodside Energy voting against the gas giants so-called ‘Climate Plan’.
If shareholders can see the sinister reality behind Woodside’s climate ‘plan’, then why can’t a university supposedly committed to achieving Net Zero?
Monash claims its net zero policies are based on:
- Energy efficiency measures;
- Campus electrification;
- High performance, all-electric buildings;
- Deployment of on-site and off-site renewable energy;
- Intelligent energy networks;
- Net-zero transport opportunities; and
- Addressing our residual emissions through offsetting.
Yet this all falls apart when you merely glance at this duplicitous partnership.
Further investigation also notes that Monash is signatory to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and claims that it will, “continue to transition its investment portfolio towards carbon neutrality.” Additionally the first Environment and Social Governance (E.S.G.) statement launched in December 2016 declared that the University has a policy to divest from fossil fuels. The latest 2021 E.S.G. statement reaffirms this commitment.
If this is the case, then why has Monash chosen to partner with a company that is so clearly against this? Careful reading notes that Monash has only committed to coal investment and fossil fuels, as, “the University will actively work with fund managers to exclude companies whose primary activity is coal production from its indirect investment portfolio.” (Emphasis added.)
It’s not all climate doom however, Stop Woodside Monash (SWM) has made active efforts to counter the blatant green-washing encouraged by the University.
Further, SWM ntends to be transparent and clear about our actions and principles:
- SWM has met and spoken with the Dean of Engineering: which has resulted in clear aims to find information regarding the partnership.
- Received endorsement from the:
- National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU)
- Monash Student Association (MSA)
- Campus Climate Network (CCN)
- Attended the Rising Tide Screening hosted by MSA
- Banner drops (including one above the Monash Freeway)
- Co-ordinating with Greenpeace
- Co-ordinating with the Australian Instutue
It is of utmost importance that we don’t allow a private oil and gas company, which has output 187.2 million barrels of oil equivalent in a year, to compromise this institution. Universities should be built on the principles of honesty, academic freedom, and integrity, and no company’s profits should prevail above those principles.
For that reason, I encourage any interested to join our group at: stopwoodsidemonash. org or @stopwoodsidemonash on Instagram.
