The climate ultimatums BHP has delivered to four of its membership organisations are an attempt to repeat recent history that saw the miner drag a level of alignment from the two most obviously problematic of its Australian lobbies.

For reasons once justified but no longer wholly apparent to those who have tracked its contemporary progress, the Minerals Council of Australia has somehow been tagged as home of anti-Paris Agreement activism by the most august and authentic of BHP’s climate-concerned owners in the northern hemisphere.