McKinsey paid $1.6m to ‘guide’ Australian climate policy despite working for fossil fuel companies

Work on Australian energy and climate policy was outsourced to consultancy firm McKinsey as the government department said it did not have the ‘technical capacity’. Photograph: Benoît Tessier/Reuters

The consultancy firm McKinsey was paid $1.6m over 11 weeks to “inform” and “guide” Australian energy and climate policy, despite its work for the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.

The firm, whose links to oil and gas giants are well known, conducted “detailed market, economic and policy analysis” and produced modelling that underpinned “internal energy and climate policy work”.