Imagine you’re toiling away in Rio Tinto’s PR department on St James’s Square, London. Mystifyingly, your chairman, Simon Thompson, just called for a carbon price of $US100 ($151.33) per tonne of CO2 (and Rio emitted 26.4 million of those last year, so kiss goodbye to $4.1 billion of last year’s underlying earnings) and the removal of the Fuel Tax Credit for Heavy Diesel Vehicles in Australia, under which Rio receives around $400 million annually. These are blatantly untenable positions from which you have been delicately retreating (while praying he won’t notice) for the past three weeks.