It does not take long at lunch with Andrew Forrest for him to start seeming less like an Australian mining billionaire and more like a climate activist–meets–zealous prosecutor. His rugged features quickly appear not to reflect the arid expanse of Western Australia’s Pilbara region, home to the core operations of his $38 billion Fortescue iron-ore business. Rather, they appear the result of a succession of high-stakes court battles. When we meet at a luxurious Paris brasserie, he speaks passionately about a client that he’s been representing for several years: the planet. His case? Corporate bosses must act now—and act fast—to tackle climate change, an argument he delivers with force and the unrivaled credibility that comes from decades in the carbon-spewing industry. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Then, his soup turning cold, he grabs me by my lapels and rattles off the facts as he sees them: fossil-fuel industry executives are “culprits,” doing all they can to resist a transition to a cleaner economy. In other heavy industries, bosses have been “lazy” and shortsighted, focused on quarterly returns while the world burns. It’s time for businesses to stop talking about long-term targets, he tells me, and completely ditch fossil fuels in the coming years rather than in the coming decades. “If you think you can’t go green, then you’re right,” he says of his industry colleagues. “It’s time for you to get off the stage and learn from someone with more talent, more conviction, or initiative than you who can lead your company.”Critically, this isn’t simply talk. At Fortescue, the mining behemoth he founded in 2003, Forrest has begun just such a transformation: he’s building renewable-energy projects, purchasing a fleet of electric mining trucks, and trying to catapult green hydrogen to market. “It’s about character. It’s about leadership,” he says. Central to Forrest’s pitch is a cutting dismissal of the corporate fixation on quarterly returns. His preferred yardstick is the medium term—a long enough time period to make meaningful change but soon enough so that he will actually be around to judge the results. Fortescue’s $6 billion green investment, for example, is meant to transform his company into an environmentally friendly powerhouse by 2030. “We’re taking long-term bets, which accrete value on the way,” he says. “I make it sound simple, but it is actually pretty simple.” And then, just as quickly as he had begun, our lunch still unfinished, he stops himself almost midthought: “Is this enough to start?” With his opening argument delivered and a slap on the back, he’s gone in a flash—off to his plane, which was waiting to whisk him to Munich for an engagement with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.That was last February. In the year since, I’ve watched Forrest take his argument global, traveling with him to Las Vegas, where he announced a $3 billion investment in electric mining trucks, and catching him at conferences in New York and Switzerland where he cajoled other executives to come aboard his climate quest. The image that emerged is of a rare private-sector voice literate in both climate science and financial markets—and one willing to make the business case for climate to any audience. “If we want to solve the climate crisis, we need more leaders in business to act with the same dogged determination and sense of purpose as Andrew,” says Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his climate work. The biggest challenge for Forrest isn’t one of technical feasibility. If all goes according to plan, actually decarbonizing Fortescue will be the easy part. To succeed, he must convince investors, employees, and, perhaps most importantly, other CEOs that going green is worth the risks—financial, reputational, and otherwise.The task couldn’t come at a more important time. A wave of populist sentiment has led political leaders to take a step back on climate action even as the effects of a warming planet become ever more apparent—and grow ever more dire. It is a complex needle to thread: companies can act on their own, of course, but to do so they need to be sure they will make money. If he succeeds, Forrest and his project to transform Fortescue, where he serves as chairman, would become more than a forceful case for saving the planet—they would become a powerful case study for generating financial dividends by decarbonizing. Failure, on the other hand, would discourage other business leaders already nervous about the current political climate. “The dangerous part about what we’re doing is that if we’re not successful, the inspiration for thousands of other companies won’t be there,” he says. “And if we lose money on this in the long term, people say, well, that’s philanthropy.” Forrest’s tale begins with a warning: “It’s not a pretty story.” We’re sitting at the dining table of his company jet en route to Las Vegas from New York last September, and I’ve just asked him to recount the story of how he became a climate advocate. Between bites of chicken wings, he rewinds the clock to 2016. He was hiking in a remote part of Australia known as the Kimberley when he fell off a cliff into a gorge. In gory detail, he described how his leg was reversed, stuck pointing in the opposite direction, when someone pulled him out of the water. He survived, but it would take years to recover. Forced to take a break from his hectic day-to-day CEO life, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in marine ecology. That opened his eyes to the alarming realities of how climate change is harming the oceans: the acidification that is killing marine ecosystems and the looming risk that oceans will not continue absorbing carbon at the same rates, meaning faster growth of carbon in the atmosphere. He says that the deeper understanding steered him to “do everything we can to stop global warming.” It was, in short, a sort of Damascene conversion, transforming a mining industry veteran into a climate campaigner.Since then it’s been a whirlwind. The Minderoo Foundation, founded in 2001 and co-led by Forrest and his wife from whom he is separated, has come to fund everything from efforts to address lethal humidity to climate migration. And he has committed deeply to the cause of protecting the oceans. While many of his billionaire counterparts buy yachts to party, Forrest bought one and turned it into a research vessel for ocean scientists. M. Sanjayan, the CEO of Conservation International, talked to Forrest as he fundraised for a new initiative aimed at protecting 5% of the world’s oceans. In their phone conversation, Forrest realized that he was soon going to fly over Sanjayan’s office in Washington, D.C., so he directed the plane to land. A few hours later they had dinner near the airport, and Forrest became a top contributor to the $125 million initiative. “He’s just larger than life,” says Sanjayan, reflecting on that first meeting. Forrest’s biggest climate initiative, though, is what he’s doing with his own company. Under the mantra of Real Zero, a play on the increasingly controversial phrase net zero, Forrest has said his company will ditch fossil fuels in its land-based operations entirely by 2030. To make it happen, in 2022 the company launched a $6.2 billion capital investment plan to decarbonize its primary mining operations in Australia’s Pilbara region. That money has funded everything from efficiency to renewable energy generation. When we arrived in Vegas, I saw the unveiling of the effort’s crown jewel. Shortly after entering the Las Vegas convention center, the exhibition area turned dark. Triumphant music blared as drummers and dancers performed. The curtain dropped to reveal a massive electric mining truck capable of hauling 240 metric tons of material. In Forrest’s phrasing, his plane could fit inside the truck’s bed. It wasn’t hyperbole: even at my height of 6 ft. 3 in., I had to look up to see the top of one of the truck’s tires. Forrest said Fortescue, which partnered with a Swiss manufacturer called Liebherr to develop the trucks, had already placed an order for 360 vehicles. The deal, valued at nearly $3 billion, sent shock waves across the industry. “It’s metamorphic for Fortescue, and it’s a turning point for the world mining industry,” Forrest tells me. “Shareholders are going to say this company’s going green and saving us money.” The cost savings switching from diesel fuel to electric mobility is expected to total in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The work has garnered the praise of big wigs in the climate community. In New York, I watched as Forrest traded compliments with leading climate scientists; in Davos, I sat in as he convened the likes of Gore and former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. “This guy is willing to make really big bets, and sometimes they pay off, and probably more often than not, they pay off,” says Sanjayan. “I’m glad he’s making it on something that could be transformative for the planet.” Yet many remain skeptical—and it’s easy to understand why. Mining is one of the dirtiest industries, contributing upwards of 5% of global carbon emissions. And then there are the local effects, including air pollution that harms nearby communities and concerns about land-use rights given mining often happens on Indigenous land. Forrest’s penchant for spectacle and disarming warmth can be helpful in making the climate case—but it has also raised some eyebrows in the wider environmental community. He’s the type of person who will greet you cheerfully, no matter who you are. In January, at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a right-wing provocateur chased him down to press him for an interview. Forrest gracefully put his arm around him and disarmed him, saying, “Get rid of that mic, and I’ll talk to you. I quite like what you’re doing.” He jumps on Fox News, keen to make his case even to the most incredulous of audiences. When we arrived in Vegas, Gene Simmons, the rock star and KISS front man, was there to greet him. From Vegas, Simmons joined Forrest on some TV hits to Australia. At the 2023 U.N. climate conference in Dubai, where companies rented out hotel ballrooms and event spaces to promote their climate programs, Forrest brought Fortescue’s 246-ft. ammonia-powered ship to the harbor and invited dignitaries on board for cocktails. Indeed, the man is so amiable, so good at making a splash, that it forces you to pause and ask, “What’s the catch?” When Forrest wanted to endorse an organization pushing for a “fossil-fuel nonproliferation treaty,” the organization’s leaders were unsure how the backing of a mining boss would be received. So they commissioned a study of Fortescue’s climate and environmental practices, assessing its plans and performance against 63 criteria, including its impact to local communities, laid out by the U.N. The report found the company to be exceptional, with quibbles so minor that explaining them here would require a crash course in the dense lexicon of climate reporting. “He’s the real deal,” says Tzeporah Berman, who runs the treaty initiative.If you follow Forrest around long enough, you’ll notice he returns to some of the same arguments and language. In settings with other business leaders, he likes to cite his company’s financial returns. “For those who don’t know me, my name is Andrew Forrest,” he said at a September climate forum. “I founded a company which has Australia’s highest shareholder return in history.” For climate advocates, Forrest citing his mining company’s financial performance might sound a bit crass coming from a billionaire who hops around the world on a private plane. But the message is a critical one: Forrest’s financial credentials signal credibility to the private sector. And it is precisely what makes Forrest so unique among his peers. Not only does he articulate a financial case for decarbonizing an industrial company, but he also emphasizes it will happen in the next five years. That’s not a goal, he says, but a hard deadline. He has told facilities managers that if they haven’t figured out how to ditch fossil fuels on-site by 2030, he will shut down their plants. And he has parted ways with many senior executives who paid lip service to his climate ambition but didn’t feel committed to executing it. “We had people that said they were for going green,” he tells me, “but actually thought it was the dumbest idea ever.”Let’s just be clear here. The 2030 deadline puts Fortescue in a class of its own. Apart from big technology firms (which are easier to decarbonize), large industrial companies that have engaged in the climate conversation have set mid-century targets. And it’s assumed these targets will be met with some reliance on offsets, where companies pay others to cut emissions rather than doing it themselves. Fortescue will not use offsets, Forrest says. And when I ask him what Fortescue will look like in 20 years, he rejects the question out of hand. “Twenty years, it’s really someone else’s problem,” he says, so brusquely that he later apologetically acknowledges his harsh tone. Making such a bold commitment to climate at a publicly traded company requires a bullish financial case, and there are several components to his argument. For his electrification drive—think of the mining trucks or mining-site operations—the promise is savings as the up-front cost reduces fuel usage over the long term. It also brings with it a knock-on financial benefit: creating “green iron ore” and “green steel” will give Fortescue a leg up selling its product, as its customers look to decarbonize their own products. And doing the legwork now in developing this technology will create a new revenue stream for the company as it sells it to others. The most significant of those technologies is green hydrogen, a fuel created by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using an electric current powered by renewable energy; this green fuel can replace fossil fuels in heavy industry and transportation. The company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to build out green-hydrogen production facilities in Australia, the U.S., Norway, and Brazil. More than any of his other green ambitions, its Fortescue’s hydrogen goals that attract the most attention of investors. Over the past five years, the hydrogen sector has been on a rollercoaster ride as companies committed billions to mega projects designed to bring green hydrogen to market. But a series of hiccups—from a lack of infrastructure to support it to policy challenges—have led companies to rethink their investments. Fortescue is not immune. Last year, the company laid off 700 workers as it downscaled its hydrogen ambitions. Many climate activists interpreted the hydrogen pullback as evidence that Forrest lacks sincerity. And yet, for better or worse, there is perhaps no better way to convince the financial community of a commitment to delivering a return than layoffs and reorganization. So how does the market assess Fortescue’s climate goals? In finance lingo, Fortescue has a price-to-earnings ratio similar to, if slightly below, those of its mining peers. That’s a standard metric that financial analysts use as a shorthand to assess the growth prospects of a publicly listed business. Fortescue does a little better than its peers on the price-to-net-asset-value ratio, a key mining-industry metric because it shows how much investors are valuing the core assets of a company, in this case mines. But there’s little to show that the company’s climate commitment is responsible for its financial performance. On earnings calls, analysts probe Fortescue executives about various green initiatives, but the traders whose actions determine the stock price are more concerned that they will make a profit in the short term.“The main thing driving share prices of mining stocks at the moment is their payouts,” says James Whiteside, head of corporate, metals and mining at Woods Mackenzie. And therein lies what is perhaps Forrest’s biggest challenge—more than the state of the hydrogen business, more than the staff turnover. To persuade executives to spend billions on bold bets to take their companies green, they will want to know that their valuations will be rewarded. And, right now, the market seems unsure, to put it mildly. You might even say it seems uninterested. When I last caught up with Forrest in January, the global mood around climate had shifted dramatically since we first met a year prior. Donald Trump was back in the White House, and the private-sector enthusiasm around all things climate—already tapering last year—had become even more muted. Driving down the promenade in Davos, Forrest betrayed some frustration with his counterparts who have used the zeitgeist shift as cover to change course. At many firms, climate and ESG—short for environment, social, and governance—strategies were being rebranded using more palatable terms like resilience or energy security, even as the core of the work continues. At others, those commitments have been walked back entirely to save money and face. “It’s letting the wolves out of the cages who never wanted to do anything for the climate anyway, and they’re saying that they now don’t have to,” he says. “Well, all right, let’s just see how that works out for you.”Forrest remains defiant. If the Republican-controlled government in Washington nixes clean-technology tax incentives, “you’ll see hundreds of billions of dollars extracted out of the U.S. economy, including ours,” he tells me. And he has the backing of political leaders in Australia, where Fortescue is headquartered. “It’s absolutely critical,” says Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Forrest’s climate efforts. But, while policy shifts may change the dynamics of specific projects, the direction of travel won’t change. Fortescue’s plan is rooted in sound economics, he says, and that’s not changing. “We’re staying the course,” he tells me. “Real zero is completely bankable.”No matter what President Trump does, global markets are changing, increasingly favoring products that are cleaner and resilient to climate risks—whether they are created by the physical world or by our response to them. But assessing the speed of those changes—and then shifting your business to reflect that speed—is a very challenging task even for the most climate-savvy executive. Forrest’s bet is that being first will pay huge dividends. It’s a simple concept, but few have been bold enough to spend billions to test it. For the sake of the planet and everyone who lives on it, let’s hope he’s right. —With reporting by Charlie Campbell/CanberraTIME receives support for climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation