However, the volume of gas needed in Australia’s power grid shrinks with every assessment.

And the future of minerals processing is renewable energy, not gas.

In King’s home state of WA the biggest gas user and minerals processor, Alcoa, is working to eliminate fossil fuel use and BHP has signed up wind energy to make its nickel more acceptable to battery manufacturers like Tesla.

In August the WA government launched a fast-tracked assessment of the industry’s need for renewable energy, playing catch up after years of promoting cheap gas as the engine of economic growth.

A twenty-year-old seeking work now will only be 48 years old in 2050 by which time, if corporate spin is to be believed, all their potential employers will have gradually reduced their net emissions to zero.

Why join a Woodside, a Santos or a Yancoal to gain experience that will be increasingly less needed in shrinking industries? Yes, some of the skills gained could be transferred to hard-rock mining and renewable energy where there is a long-term future, but if that is your eventual destination, why not start there?

And it is not just economics driving young people’s aversion to fossil fuels: there is a wish to be part of the solution, not the problem.

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A global survey of 25,000 people in 19 advanced economies revealed Australians and many others identified climate change as the major threat to their countries.

The 2022 study by the Pew Research Centre showed that climate concern in Australia was highest among the young, the highly educated and women: exactly the type of people Australian mining needs more of.

The social disruption of fly-in fly-out life and the well-reported high level of sexual harassment already make a mining career a hard sell.

Australia’s non-coal miners need to unambiguously promote that they have a growing future essential to the global fight against climate change, and they cannot do that while holding the umbrella named resources over their fossil fuel friends.

It is time for Australia’s non-coal miners to embrace product differentiation in the labour market, and it needs to be real.

The equal second biggest concern of Australians in the Pew survey was the spread of false information online. Endless pretty pictures of wind farms will not suffice.

Mining will be judged by the friends it keeps, not just the tales it tells.

For the past decade, the Minerals Council of Australia fought ferociously to defend coal while paying little attention to the promise of lithium and nickel.

In WA the Chamber of Minerals and Energy promoted gas export at every opportunity and now the greenhouse gases from new LNG plants have added enormously to the 2030 emissions reduction task. The gas sector’s lobbying for “tailored treatment” in the federal government’s review of how to cut industrial emissions makes clear they want others to share the burden they created, and that will include CME members.

It is time for non-coal mining (and yes, they will need a better name) to separate from the fossil fuel producers: it is a dysfunctional relationship that has given mining poor policy and a tarnished reputation among potential employees.

Fossil fuel producers will argue that resources lobby groups like the MRC and the CME are best suited to tackle common issues like taxation and labour policy, but they could be dealt with by cooperation.

The resources tag combines the businesses with the most to gain from a well-managed brisk energy transition in Australia with the companies most invested in delaying change.

It is a fundamental and permanent disconnect that should doom the relationship.

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