The most important message from Arnie, who made part of his fortune as a sci-fi creation known as the Terminator, is that doing business in the US remains damnably difficult.
Stretch that just a little further and you arrive at a natural extension of the lesson – why bother!
Before anyone dashes off a letter and says they bother because the US is the world’s biggest economy and desperately short of future energy sources, consider the real price of doing business “over there”.
For starters, the US is a long way from Australia. Shipping costs, even if a liquefied natural gas ship runs off its own cargo, is much higher than the haul up to Asia.
Then there’s the question of demand in the many markets to be found in Asia, which are more than happy to pay a world market price for LNG.
And finally there’s the question of battling US bureaucracy, environmental protestors, and the simply awful, multi-layered legal and regulatory system that can not only tie you in knots, but cost a fortune in the process.
Boil all this down and you can see why The Slug believes Arnie might have done everyone a favour by pulling the plug on Cabrillo.
He might also have sent a signal to other potential Australian LNG exporters about why they would be better off looking due north to markets in China, India, Japan and South Korea before contemplating the expense and nuisance of trying to do business with a country that has got itself tied up in red and green tape.
The Cabrillo experience, looking from the other side of the world, has been a nonsense from the day a handful of movie stars got into the picture.
Their arguments against the BHP Billiton project were farcical, such as claims that it would be an eyesore, a danger and a polluter.
Give the dear old Slug a break.
Let’s test the eyesore claim. Cabrillo, from what’s been published would be located 22.5km off the coast of Malibu. According to The Slug’s calculator, that would make the top of the structure invisible from the coast.
As for being a polluter – a polluter of what?
The ships delivering the stuff run on LNG. If the LNG escapes it vaporises and disperses.
As for being a target for terrorists – for heaven’s sake, the whole damned US is a target for terrorists, or have the movie stars forgotten it was tall buildings which attracted the worst terrorist attack the world has seen.
No, dear reader, what we have at Cabrillo is a classic case of Nimbyitis – a disease also known as Not In My Backyard.
Refusing Cabrillo on spurious grounds was a warning shot to anyone wanting to do business in a country which is (a) too far away, (b) too difficult to deal with, and (c) nothing but future trouble.
Asia, however, doesn’t have the same hang-ups. It is a region of the world which has even adopted a slogan invented by a former US president, Calvin Coolidge, who once famously said: “The business of America is business.”
Perhaps Coolidge was right, once upon a time. He’s not right now. It’s Asia which is picking up where the US left off to become bogged down in campaigns and crusades of dubious value.
