And yet. The Australian government continues to read from the washi-paper-thin Japanese industry song sheet. It'd be embarrassing if it didn't have planet-wrecking implications. Impending decisions like the North West Shelf approval make this essential reading. So please do give it your time.

What's new is those big, fat, policy wonk numbers. So we have Japanese industry and government agencies openly boasting about their plan. And we have the numbers confirming they're acting on it. All this evidence would make for a very short, clear-cut true crime doco.

Of course, we kind of knew that Australian gas was in the mix of this get-rich-quick scheme - because Japanese industry loves to chat (and post) about it. Bit more on that in the thread here: bsky.app/profile/erin...

Today's release is especially timely with Madeleine King absolutely dripping with saccharine altruism last week as she opined that poor, dark, windless Japan needs our help for energy security (hey, no, don't look to the horizon and all that offshore wind capacity) podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/d...

Def, Türkiye still pushing hard but they knew our diplomacy was hamstrung by the election. So it should be proper game on from here. It’s ‘urged’ (standard UN language) to be agreed by the western Euro group in June, with a consensus recommendation going to Belem for formal agreement

Love to hear this thinking! NY climate week is a really significant space for Pacific climate diplomacy, it would be a huge blow to lose it entirely just months ahead of a likely COP in our region next year.

HMU if you want to know where the actual best wineries are though 👀🍷

I critique as likely the most pro-Adelaide person in the climate sector. SA leaning in on an RE-driven rebrand is a smart move to court the investment it's long needed. But it makes the work harder for people I care about, and creates physical distance from fossil fuels as the key issue. Convenient.

In an election where gas fields are a frontline, it's time to get critical about this. There's no gas supply problem, anywhere. There's a huge export issue, all across our region. And of course, there's a climate crisis - absolutely everywhere.

Previous official lines on Japan's on-selling of Australian gas have been repeated, uncritically, by Australian ministers and backbenchers. But here it is, the quiet part being said out loud and no one batting an eye.

(Side note that the development bit pops up here too. It tracks with what I heard from MPs at the Diet back in Feb; they've been briefed that lower-income countries are asking Japan for gas as part of their self-determined development trajectories. Which is, in diplomatic terms, absolute bullshit.)

But it marks a shift in how it's framed to media, particularly Australian media. Before now, it's been 'oops we accidentally got surplus gas because who knows how much energy AI and data processing really use???', and 'guess we'd better sell it to South and South East Asia for… development reasons'.

And let's not forget, the strategy was on METI's website - in English - for the general public to see as early as 2020: www.enecho.meti.go.jp/en/category/...

This isn't new to anyone who has been tracking the Japanese gas on-selling story. Just last week (pre-tariff chaos), Tokyo Gas were in the US openly spruiking their interest in acquiring more shale gas for the explicit purpose of selling it throughout Asia.

Having heard whispers of the Coalition's proposed gas reservation policy, Terazawa has done what he does; summon the foreign journos to proclaim his grievances. Standard stuff. So what's different here? This bit.

He's weighed in before on things like the Safeguard Mechanism (Australia is unreliable, 'changing the rules of the game'); carbon dumping and blue hydrogen (the green stuff 'does not meet the needs of Asia') and small modular reactors (which are, despite abundant evidence, 'not about imagination').

Some background: Terazawa is ex-vice-minister of the Japanese Ministry of Making My Job Difficult (Energy, Trade and Industry) and now heads up thinktank the IEEJ. They tend to produce a lot of resources helpful to METI, like 'evidence' that co-firing coal with ammonia is good actually.