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An Australian lobbyist now leading the world’s key coal body addressed the National Press Club this week, demonstrating a sophisticated pivot in global fossil fuel messaging. By Chris Wallace.
How an Australian coal lobbyist honed fossil fuel messaging
Michelle Manook carried the torch for carbon-based energy into the National Press Club in Canberra this week, with an impassioned call for people to think differently about coal.
“Narratives,” the chief executive of the FutureCoal lobby group said, “have been controlled.”
Manook, who grew up in Perth but is now based in London, is a super lobbyist. On Tuesday, she implied that coal lovers have been cruelly silenced by renewable energy advocates applying what she calls a public policy “purity test”.
No purity test was evident, however, as she mounted what was effectively a “coal pride” presentation, positioning the fossil fuel as a significant part of governments’ ongoing energy policy mix and the saviour of developing economies.
Marketing industries climate group Comms Declare had unsuccessfully lobbied the National Press Club to cancel the avowedly pro-coal speech.
After passing a small, good-natured group of skeleton-suited protesters dancing outside to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”, guests walked through a metal detector to access the event.
National Press Club chief executive Maurice Reilly warned from the stage that there would be no mischief “on his watch”. Private security guards stood at the back of the room full of sedate business, media and diplomatic diners.
The speech was titled “Thank You for Not Coaling – when the world insists coal has no future, what would you do?” In describing it, the press club said: “Michelle Manook took the job no-one wanted: as Chief Executive of the only global coal industry body.”
Manook is the public face of a sophisticated pivot in global fossil fuel lobbying, a move away from direct climate denialism. This new approach appropriates concepts and terms central to progressive rhetoric, such as “equity” and “inclusion”, and incorporates them into the notion of “sustainable coal stewardship”, in a bid to disarm resistance.
FutureCoal uses the 2015 Paris Agreement as a diffuse canvas on which to project arguments for the use of unproven “sustainable coal” technologies as part of “balanced” government responses to climate change.
This is despite the fact the proposed technologies would at best only incrementally improve existing coal emissions levels and are uneconomic compared with proven cheap, clean and efficient solar and wind energy.
FutureCoal’s rhetoric also ignores market realities – that consumers are rushing to take up battery-backed renewable energy and the cheaper power bills it delivers, and that Australian industry is in the process of retiring old coal-fired power stations and has no interest in starting new ones.
Questioned on this at the Press Club, Manook disavowed any knowledge of these facts, rather than denying the reality of them – a subtle but definite shift on the coal lobby’s previous stance.
FutureCoal, formerly the World Coal Association, is the vehicle for this pivot – one that is perhaps more tealwash than greenwash in design.
The reassuring centrist wrap around a nakedly pro-coal message would not fool progressives knowledgeable about the energy transition. However, it may work on less-knowledgeable voters vulnerable to its “reasonable person” appeal.
The rhetoric FutureCoal is hanging off the Paris Agreement is a cover for supporting a slow or no-energy transition while trying to maintain a veneer of credibility with voters who want climate action.
It’s likely no accident that the Paris Agreement emerged in the statements of Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and shadow energy minister Dan Tehan in the federal Liberals’ net zero backdown last week. Conservative networks are eager consumers and also producers of these political ploys, and Australians are central to them.
Manook worked in policy and public affairs for the Western Australian government for nine years, then worked for a series of resource and resource-related companies including Roc Oil, Woodside Energy, Brockman Mining, Archer Energy and Orica.
In 2019 she was appointed chief executive of the World Coal Association. Its then chairman was Australian Glenn Kellow, who at the time was chief executive of the United States coal company Peabody Energy. Kellow’s working career began as a BHP steelworks cadet in Newcastle. He rose through the ranks at BHP until joining Peabody in 2013.
Manook is billed in the financial press as the “Aussie trying to give coal its mojo back”. When her appointment as World Coal Association chief executive was announced in 2019, it was clear she and Kellow were already focused on the Paris Agreement and the theme of “energy diversity and the use of all low emission technologies” as the way to rehabilitate coal.
Within three years, Manook appeared in the Mining Journal’s list of “Mining’s most influential”, at number 37, one spot behind Gina Rinehart. Xi Jinping was number 11.
Manook’s masterstroke was rebranding the World Coal Association the following year as “FutureCoal – the Global Alliance for Sustainable Coal”. Indian branding agency chlorophyll created the new brand identity on the basis that “Yes, coal can contribute to green”.
The newly dubbed FutureCoal backed in its fresh branding by bringing Manook’s profile to the fore – for example, in a 2024 profile on the “global business media and marketing solution platform” EliteX, headlined “Transforming the Future of Mining with Vision and Leadership”.
The “rebrand marked a critical moment in the coal industry”, the EliteX piece said, signifying “a commitment to position coal as an innovative and sustainable resource”.
The FutureCoal message is diffusing through the conservative side of politics with the help of the usual outlets. Manook was interviewed on Sky News ahead of her National Press Club speech and received favourable coverage in The Spectator Australia after it.
While she was in Canberra, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in Western Australia talking critical minerals at the Alcoa-Sojitz Gallium Recovery Project in Wagerup. Albanese could barely conceal his incredulity at the federal opposition’s abandonment of its net zero emissions policy.
“Net zero was established by Scott Morrison as prime minister and by Angus Taylor as the energy minister,” Albanese said. “We signed up to the Paris Agreement under Tony Abbott.
“I mean ... you couldn’t make this up if you tried. It is very, it is just extraordinary. And the Australian people deserve better than this mess ...”
That might be true, but the nature of lobbying in Canberra, and the asymmetrical resources devoted to pushing industry’s side of the case, are a huge influence on policy outcomes.
“Lobbying and advocacy is a numbers game and a resources game,” says veteran energy policy specialist and Smart Energy Council secretary Steve Blume.
“Incumbents with huge profits, strong cashflow and perpetual revenues can fund various campaigns, groups and individuals to prosecute their views.
“New players, in this case renewables, are cash constrained, are not well funded in their organisations, which tend to be voluntary, and are too often technology siloed, with segmentation by technology rather than outcomes or services. They’re suboptimal in scale and way under-resourced.”
The ratio of fossil fuel to renewables lobbyists in and around Parliament House in Canberra would be at least 10:1, Blume says. The capability to respond to consultations, parliamentary committees and the like sees large, dedicated teams from the well-resourced fossil fuels sector up against the tiny capacity on the renewables side.
“And of course the lobbying rules mean that lobbyists directly employed by companies do not have to register,” Blume adds. “They can advocate directly.”
Fossil fuel companies also engage directly with public servants and regulators to influence policy advice at mass scale. “There’s a massive financial resources and information asymmetry between those seeking change and those protecting the status quo,” he says, “while the most powerful force in the world is inertia.”
In WA this week Albanese hammered the price Australia is paying “for the decade of incoherent ... policy” from the Coalition on energy transition.
“And that’s why we are having to deal with the challenges which are there, but we’re dealing with them constructively,” he said. “And all of the energy operators say very clearly that the cheapest form of new energy is to have renewables, backed by gas, backed by hydro and backed by battery storage. That is what all of the experts say.”
FutureCoal is already influencing the Australian debate in a way that amounts to putting lipstick on a pig.
If the Coalition is ever to aspire to office again, it has to wake up to the fact that a majority of voters, according to current polling, know a pig when they see one.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "Coal comfort".
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