A green group will next month ask Whitehaven Coal investors to force the company to plan to wind up their coal business. Market Forces Campaigner Will van de Pol said the coal company had a business model "reliant on the failure of the Paris Agreement". Read the full article published in the Daily Leader 22nd Sept 2020Something which Whitehaven said was "a misrepresentation".
The group will ask investors to order the company to plan an exit from thermal coal.
Mr van de Pol said their two resolutions, if the unlikely occurs and they were approved by shareholders, would require the company to cancel the new Vickery mine.
"Coal use must decline if we're to meet the globally-agreed climate goals," he said.
"The idea that expanding and using shareholder capital to expand production at a time when we know use must decline is just an unacceptable risk for shareholders and more broadly a risk to Whitehaven's current staff.
"The major risk there is that the company goes ahead with its expansion plans without consideration of managed decline.
"When the economics and politics change and those projects are no longer viable abrupt assets closures and project closures are the things that are going to leave workers and communities in the lurch."
Whitehaven recently received regulatory approval for an expansion of the mine, which was yet to be built outside Gunnedah.
The company recently told the ASX it was considering selling part of the Vickery mine.