Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

The big gas companies — Woodside, Santos, Origin — and other fossil fuel giants like Chevron might have been forgiven for thinking they’d had an impressive victory on carbon capture and storage (CSS).

Even as the evidence continued to mount that it is a near-total failure, the gas companies — aided by their millions in donations, former politicians and political staffers in their ranks and their creatures within government — succeeded in opening the spigots of taxpayer funding for more CCS, not merely putting ordinary Australians on the hook for a failed technology but enabling massive new fossil fuel projects to be continued under the pretence that emissions will be geosequestered.

The failure of CCS is well-established, but for the mainstream media in Australia it’s a fringe view of environmentalist radicals and “government critics” who can be readily dismissed. The most a lot of press gallery journalists will admit to is that CCS is “divisive”, which calls to mind that Blackadder line about “opinion being divided” on whether you need a crew to sail a ship.

Enter Andrew Forrest, who inconveniently can’t be dismissed as a mad leftie or environmental radical. Forrest has very definite views on CCS: “Generally the world population has every reason to be sceptical that carbon sequestration … works because in 19 out of 20 times it’s failed.” He noted it had failed in Western Australia — an obvious reference to Chevron’s failed Gorgon CCS project, where even the relatively simple process of injecting carbon already captured underground hasn’t delivered.

Back in June, Forrest delivered a kicking to Santos’ Barossa gas project, north of Darwin, which he called “atrocious” and one of the “most polluting projects in the world”. That turned out to be right on the money.

Forrest described CCS as “good in a soundbite, but it doesn’t work in reality”. And that’s literally the government’s policy: announce CCS as a plausible part of Australia’s climate action, have that repeated by a compliant press gallery, and use it as a cover for inaction while more polluting fossil fuel projects proliferate.

The media, used to representing Forrest as a brilliant mining billionaire whose every utterance is worth coverage, finds itself in a difficult position as he sets about discrediting a policy that has been subjected to virtually no serious scrutiny even as hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been set aside for the gas giants to waste.

It also embarrasses Labor, whose only objection to CCS is the use of renewable funding from bodies like the Australian Renewable Energy Agency for it.

CCS is a handy bob-each-way policy for Labor to address its challenge of reconciling the climate action and fossil fuel diehards in its ranks. The fact that it doesn’t work in a practical sense is less relevant than how it works in a political sense.

As for the government, it’s unembarrassable on climate — what its donors want, its donors get.

Forrest might have a lot more to complain about by the time Scott Morrison does his deal with the Nationals on 2050.