Fortescue Metals Group chairman and founder, Andrew Forrest, used the honour of giving the first ABC Boyer Lecture for 2021 to have a great pop at Elon Musk and his disdain for cars that run on hydrogen.

It was titled “Oil vs Water: Confessions of a Carbon Emitter”. And it was something of a landmark moment for both FMG and Australia’s renewables future.

You can read it in full here, but in a nutshell, Twiggy is out loud and proud announcing that from here on, FMG will strive to be helping to save the planet.

“If we don’t stop warming our planet, it will be geological history’s shortest era,” Forrest notes.

Apparently, Fortescue and his exec team spent a large part of last year touring the world, spending a lot of it in isolation, looking at ways other countries and companies are working to lower their emissions.

“The solution,” he says, “is hydrogen.”

Hydrogen. Not “lithium”, or “batteries”. At the end of his lecture, Twiggy made that point with a very thinly-veiled shot at the world’s richest person, Tesla chairman Elon Musk.

“It’s not just the oil companies we need to be wary of,” Forrest said. “Self-interest will be everywhere.

“Elon Musk recently called hydrogen fuel cell cars – despite the 8 million that will soon be on the roads – ‘mind-bogglingly stupid’.

“He has every reason to fear them.”

Okay. Then:

“His description is perhaps better suited to someone who peddles a battery technology as green – when it runs on fossil fuel.”

So Musk’s description (“mind-bogglingly stupid”) is better suited to someone who peddles a battery technology as green (“Elon Musk”)?

Shots. Fired.

The whole lecture will be broadcast on ABC television on Saturday, January 23 at 2.30pm AEDT.

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