As ministers gather in Warsaw this week for the UN's latest round of intergovernmental negotiations on climate change, and the Philippines reels from the strongest storm ever recorded, officials at BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company, is preparing for their AGM on 21 November in Perth.
It's a global company with 128,800 employees. Last year it made $11.8bn dollars in profits and paid $11.6bn in taxes and royalties. For countries such as Australia, South Africa and Chile, its taxes make an important economic impact.
As with its corporate peers, BHP defines its purpose as creating long-term shareholder value. Its executives will tell you that its growth strategy is to invest in large-scale, long-life, diversified assets. But BHP also has a steady line in fossil fuels. It is proud of its US shale gas acquisitions of recent years and at its London AGM in October, highlighted coal and petroleum as two of its four core pillars.
The company is no corporate climate sceptic. BHP has long accepted the mainstream science on climate change. It has been reporting voluntarily on GGH emissions since 1996, was an early pioneer in energy efficiency measures, and is now focusing on its water footprint.
In September 2010, the company embarked on a step-change when the former chief executive, Marius Kloppers, publicly called for a carbon price in Australia. Timed just ahead of the Gillard government acceding to office, this started a debate that was long overdue in a usually defensive domestic mining sector.
Now times are different. Australia's political context has changed dramatically with the new government claiming an electoral mandate for its anti-climate agenda. In the past few weeks, BHP has supported Australia's Abbot government on its legislation rescinding the country's commitment to a carbon price.
What happened? In the intervening three years since Marius Kloppers' famous speech, we know far more about climate risk. The work of HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Carbon Tracker Initiative has galvanised institutional investors and pension funds on the economic risks of unburnable carbon.
In recent months, the heads of the IMF and the World Bank have reiterated their priorities of removing fossil fuel subsidies and putting a price on carbon. As we are seeing in the Philippines, climate inaction can mean decades of development progress is wiped out in a single extreme weather event, predicted to become more frequent as climatic changes become more severe.
When asked about unburnable carbon at BHP's London AGM, company leaders sought to reassure saying the company had considerable capacity to address risk to its portfolios and that the issue of climate change was under regular review.
Why then critics charge, the back-tracking on the carbon tax – widely seen as a cornerstone of international policy efforts to tackle climate change? According to BHP's submission to the Carbon Price Repeal Taskforce, in essence, the company is objecting to what it sees as a tax on its competitiveness with other jurisdictions and unfair coverage of fugitive emissions.
Is a carbon price really at risk of undermining a company such as BHP's global competitiveness? UBS analysts have suggested that for the big miners such as BHP in the USA, the carbon tax accounts for barely 1% of revenues.
As with many in the private sector, BHP puts its faith in the need for a global solution to climate change. But has their intervention helped or hindered the global consensus needed for effective climate policy? Is their seeming support for a renegade government consistent with their business interests in avoiding a four degree world? It may well be that BHP's leaders are unaware of the consternation that their public policy engagement has caused among climate negotiators in Warsaw and activists on the ground.
Like many of its peers, BHP produces an annual sustainability report. Unusually, it gives away 1% of pre-tax profits to community programmes every year – in 2013 this came to $245.8m supporting initiatives such community enterprise in Colombia.
In a world increasingly distrustful of corporate tax-avoidance and greenwash, these are dangerous times for companies such as BHP. Critics can legitimately question the companies decision not to pay 1% of revenues in carbon tax, in favour of spending 1% of pre-tax profits in corporate largesse to a community fund to gain kudos?
From its own crisis in the OK Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea in the 1990s, BHP has learned the hard way of the need to gain social licence to operate. At a time when the global divestment movement is taking hold on campuses, with institutional investors, and in grassroots communities opposed to resource exploitation and fossil fuel pollution, BHP's size and visibility makes it more vulnerable than most.
To affected communities and those at the climate talks in Warsaw the fear and urgency is real. They know we are in an era of climate consequences.
Looking to the future, the company has a choice to make. BHP can join the small but growing leadership group of companies which realise there will be no global consensus on climate action unless they play an active role in forging it. Or BHP can side with the fossil fuel dinosaurs and delay the inevitable leaving disaster and damage in their wake.
The good news is that the company's diversified strategy is a core strength. The shift needed for the post-carbon age is one that the company can make better than most. With vast holdings in copper – its Escondida mine in Chile is the world's largest copper mine – and also nickel, uranium and other elements of the new economy, the company can indeed help resource the low-carbon future.
Climate change is already on the agenda at the Perth AGM this week with the nomination to the BHP Board of Ian Dunlop, former senior oil, coal and gas executive, and now advocate for climate action. Dunlop, an external shareholder nominee, is not endorsed by the BHP Board, but is endorsed by influential pension funds such as CalPERS – and others are taking note.
This AGM must be a watershed drawing a line in the sand on BHP's commitment to the climate challenge. With power and responsibility comes an expectation of leadership. BHP can stake its moral vision for the future and how it will build a credible long-term strategy for climate resilience for the company and the communities it serves. This is the best time for climate leadership, and the worst time to lose one's nerve.
Malini Mehra has served as adviser to three CEOs at BHP Billiton as member of the company's Forum on Corporate Reaponsibility and is on the board of GRI