In May 2025, Australia arrived at a critical juncture in its long and complicated battle with climate change. After years of environmental inaction shadowed by fossil fuel influence, voters delivered a clear and resounding message at the ballot box: they want a cleaner, greener future — and they want it fast.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government emerged from the 2025 federal election with an expanded mandate and a sharpened climate agenda.
The platform? Rapid decarbonisation, 82% renewable energy by 2030, and net-zero emissions by 2050. In the eyes of many, this election wasn’t just about politics — it was a referendum on climate action.
The Coalition opposition, led by Peter Dutton, had campaigned for a return to coal and gas, with a dash of nuclear. It failed to resonate.
Australians, now regularly living through heatwaves, floods, and coastal erosion, showed little appetite for half-measures or nostalgic energy policy.
Instead, climate-conscious voters turned out in force, with younger demographics particularly energised by the prospect of green innovation and environmental security.
“This was the climate election we were waiting for,” says Dr. Emily Hughes, a political ecologist at the University of Sydney. “Not just because of the promises made — but because of the public’s overwhelming rejection of delay.”
Backing up the public urgency is nature’s own relentless testimony. The past year was officially Australia’s hottest 12-month period on record, with the average temperature soaring to 1.61°C above the historical norm.
The impacts have been devastating and unmistakable.
Mass coral bleaching events continue to ravage the Great Barrier Reef.
Cyclones, once seasonal threats, are now creeping deeper into the calendar year.
Inland, extreme heat has become routine, especially in vulnerable rural areas.
And in urban centres like Sydney, which faces rapidly intensifying bushfire seasons and climate-driven housing stress, scientists warn that planning must evolve — or fail disastrously.
The renewable energy sector is now urging the Albanese government to seize the political moment.
Industry leaders are pushing for a formal 2035 emissions reduction target and a faster deployment of solar, wind, and storage infrastructure.
They warn that without bold new policy tools — including carbon pricing, investment in green hydrogen, and grid modernisation — the 2030 and 2050 targets could become aspirational rather than achievable.
Amidst all this, a haunting symbol of global accountability is taking shape on Tasmania’s remote west coast: “Earth’s Black Box.”
This massive data vault, encased in steel and solar-powered, is being built to document the downfall — or survival — of human civilisation in the face of climate change.
It will record scientific data, political decisions, and public discourse, capturing every milestone in the climate crisis for future generations, or potentially, post-collapse societies.
Australia, long a global climate laggard, now has both the political power and moral obligation to lead.
Whether this latest election marks the beginning of a lasting transformation or another missed opportunity will depend on what the Albanese government does next — and how hard civil society pushes it to act.
In the eerie stillness of a snowless winter or the silence where ice skates once scraped across a frozen lake, a dangerous kind of numbness is setting in. It's not just the planet that’s warming—our sense of urgency is cooling.
Climate change, once a firebrand issue that stirred protest and pledges, is now slipping into the background noise for many. And according to a sobering new study published in Nature Human Behaviour, we may be adapting psychologically to the climate crisis just as quickly as the climate itself is deteriorating.
“People are adjusting to worsening environmental conditions, like multiple fire seasons per year, disturbingly fast,” says Rachit Dubey, lead researcher and an incoming UCLA communications professor.UCLA Newsroom
The Boiling Frog Phenomenon
Dubey likens this to the infamous “boiling frog” metaphor: throw a frog into boiling water and it jumps out; slowly heat the water and it stays put, unaware of its doom. Humans, it turns out, are the same. We normalize incremental shifts—a little more heat, a little less ice—until the climate we remember no longer exists.
The study’s solution? Ditch the temperature charts. Replace them with emotional, binary snapshots of what’s been lost. Instead of displaying rising temperatures, the researchers showed people whether local lakes froze in winter each year from 1940 to 2020. Participants rated the climate impact as 12% more severe with freeze/no-freeze data.
“It’s not just warmer winters; it’s the loss of ice hockey and white Christmases,” says co-author Grace Liu. “It’s not just hotter summers; it’s the dried-up swimming hole or cancelled soccer practice due to extreme heat.” Nature Human Behaviour study
When Personal Becomes Political
The experiment spanned both fictional towns and real-world locations like Lake George, NY and Grand Traverse Bay, MI—places where seasonal traditions define community identity. Participants shown the loss of these traditions responded with greater alarm than those fed scientific metrics.
And that’s the key: personal stories, not polar bears, drive public concern. As climate scientists and communicators scramble to break through the noise, the power of human-scale storytelling is becoming undeniable.
A New Tool for Urgency
Dubey points to the viral “Show Your Stripes” graphic, which compresses decades of temperature data into colourful bars that morph from cool blues to alarming reds. It’s not binary, but it’s visceral—and that makes all the difference.
The danger now is not disbelief—it’s detachment. And the antidote may lie not in more data, but better stories. “We thought worsening climate would naturally motivate people to act,” Dubey reflects. “Instead, we’re watching them emotionally adapt.”
As policymakers prepare for hotter summers and vanishing winters, this research offers a new frontier in climate communication.
Forget the boiling frog. It’s time to show people the empty pond, the unplayed game, the quiet snowfall that never came.
“It is abundantly clear, after only three months and one day, that the new Trump administration is attempting to do everything it possibly can to try to halt the transition to a clean energy future and a deep reduction in the burning of fossil fuels.
The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, basically 80% of it.
Many of you here today have likely felt the chilling effect of the policies and the rhetoric coming from Washington, DC, and what the effect has been on businesses and investors and far beyond.
The Dow Jones, of course, today fell another thousand points, and since Donald Trump’s inauguration it’s gone down 6000 points.
But while the most visible impacts of what the new administration is doing may be in the market for stocks and bonds, that’s not the only thing that he has caused to crash.
The trust market has crashed.
The market for democracy has taken a major hit.
Hope is being arbitraged in the growing market for fear.
Truth has been devalued and confidence in US leadership around the world has plummeted.
We are facing a national emergency for our democracy and a global emergency for our climate system.
We have to deal with the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis.
The scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented. With that in mind, I want to note before I use what is not a precedent, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it.
But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, and here is one that I regard as essential.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler’s murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich.
The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jurgen Habermas – best known, I would say.
But it was Habermas’ mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step of that nation’s descent into Hell was, and I quote, “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power".
He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false".
The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it! At home, they attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyberattacks as traitors.
They say the climate crisis is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing.
They say coal is clean.
They say wind turbines cause cancer.
They say sea level rises just create more beachfront property.
Their allies in the oligarchic backlash to climate action argue that those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer, for God’s sake, need to be more “realistic” and acquiesce to the huge increases in the burning of more and more fossil fuels (which is what they’re pushing), even though that is the principal cause of the climate crisis.
You may not be surprised to learn that this propagandistic notion of “climate realism” is one that the fossil fuel industry has peddled for years.
The CEO of the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco, has said, “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”
His colleague, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, has claimed that “the world needs to get real. … The problem is not oil and gas. It’s emissions".
The American Petroleum Institute says that we need “a more realistic energy approach” – one that, you guessed it, includes buying and burning even more oil and gas.
So, allow me to put this question to all of you: What exactly is it that they want us to be realistic about?
Their twisted version of “realism” is colliding with the reality that humanity is now confronting.
The accumulated global warming pollution (because these molecules linger there on average about 100 years and it builds up over time), is trapping as much extra heat now every single day as would be released by the explosion of 750,000 first generation atomic bombs blowing up on the Earth every single day!
Is it realistic to let that continue?
Is it realistic to think that if we opt out of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, we’ll be able to just wish it away and continue with business as usual? Well, Mother Nature makes a pretty good case against that argument. Every night the TV news is like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation.
Is it realistic, for example, to continue stoking the risk of wildfire in California, after what has already happened to so many communities in Northern California? And just look at the devastation caused by the Los Angeles wildfires in January.
Is it realistic to tell homeowners around the world that the global housing market is expected to suffer a US$25 trillion loss in the next 25 years? Fifteen percent of all the residential housing stock in the world if we do not change what we’re doing? Is that realistic in their view?
Is it realistic to continue quietly accepting 8.7 million deaths every single year from breathing in the particulate co-pollution that also comes from the burning of fossil fuels? That is the number of people who are already being killed.
According to health experts, it is, and I quote, “the leading contributor to the global disease burden". When you’re burning coal, oil and gas, it puts the heat trapping pollution up there and it puts the particulate and PM 2.5 pollution into the lungs of people downwind from where the facilities are burning the fossil fuels.
Is it realistic, in their view, for governments to manage a billion climate migrants crossing international borders in the remainder of this century?
That’s how many the Lancet Commission estimates will be crossing borders in the decades to come, if we continue driving temperatures and humidity higher and making the physiologically unliveable regions of the world vastly larger by continuing to put 175 million tonnes of man-made heat-trapping pollution into that thin shell of the troposphere surrounding the planet.
You know what that blue line looks like, that thin blue shell is blue because that’s where the oxygen is. And it’s so thin, if you could drive a car straight up in the air at highway speeds, you’d get to the top of that blue line in five to seven minutes.
That’s what we’re using as an open sewer. Is that realistic? I don’t think it is.
We’ve already seen, by the way, how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power. And power-seeking is what this is all about. Our Constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Trump: someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power.
Imagine what the demagogues would do as we continued toward a billion migrants crossing international borders. We could face a grave threat to our capacity for self-governance.
Is it “realistic” to continue inflicting the financial toll that the climate crisis is taking on the global economy? According to Deloitte, climate inaction will cost the economy US$178 trillion over the next half-century. And is it realistic to miss out on the economic opportunity that we could seize by going toward net zero? Over that same period, climate action would increase the size of the global economy by US$43 trillion.
A question with particular relevance in nearby Silicon Valley: is it realistic for the semiconductor industry to experience losses of up to 35% of annual revenues due to supply chain disruptions caused by the stronger and more severe cyclonic storms and supercell storms?
Is it realistic to continue with a system of financing that leaves the entire continent of Africa completely out? Right now, the entire continent of Africa, fastest-growing population in the world, has fewer solar panels installed than the single state of Florida in the US.
That’s a disgrace in the make-up of our financial system. But Africa has three times as many oil and gas pipelines under construction, and preparing for construction to begin, than all of North America. It is ridiculous to allow this system to continue as it is. How is that realistic? Or fair? Or just?
Is it realistic for us, all of us here, to consign our children and grandchildren to what scientists warn us would be Hell on Earth in order to conserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry? The predictions of the scientists 50 years ago have turned out to be spot-on.
Their predictions just a few decades ago have turned out to be exactly right. Should not that cause us to listen more carefully to what they’re warning us will happen if we do not sharply and quickly reduce the emissions from burning fossil fuels?
Is that unrealistic to listen to a proven source of advice?
This newfound so-called climate realism is nothing more than climate denial in disguise. It is an attempt to pretend there is no problem and to ignore the reality that is right in front of our faces.
What’s never present in any of this so-called “realism” is any credible challenge whatsoever to the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They never address that. They just wish it away and say, “Oh it’s unrealistic to actually do anything about it.”
I wish we could wish it away, but we cannot.
The harsh reality is that the fossil fuel industry has grown desperate for more capital. They’re seeing their two largest markets wither away: electricity generation, number one and transportation, number two. They’ve been losing their share of investment in the energy market to renewables and so they’re panicked.
That explains why they are so aggressively using their captive policymakers to block meaningful solutions. Of course, as you know, they’re much better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions. They’ve grown very skillful at that.
They are the wealthiest and most powerful industry lobby in the history of the world. They make the East India Company look like a popcorn vendor. They are the effective global hegemon.
They have used their war chests and their legacy network of political and economic power to block any reductions of fossil fuel emissions – whether at the international conferences that we call the COPs, the Conference of Parties in the UN process, or at the global negotiations for a plastic treaty. They blocked anything there, too.
Why? They’re losing the first market of electricity generation because 93% of all the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year was solar and wind. They’re losing that market steadily. Use of EVs is rising dramatically. They say they’ve slowed down. Well, we just got the new figures – an 18% increase year-on-year here in the US. In many countries, it is much faster than that.
And so, their third market – they’re telling Wall Street that they’re going to make up all of the expected lost revenue in their first two markets by tripling the production of plastics over the next 35 years.
Well, we might have a word to say about that. Is that realistic? Because we’ve already found — the scientists say — that some seabirds are manifesting symptoms like Alzheimer’s disease from the plastic particles in their brains and they found that it crosses the blood-brain barrier in humans, and the amount has doubled just in the last decade.
Do we really want to continue that?
It’s crazy, but they are blocking action at both of these international forums and they’re blocking action in the deliberations of nation-states, even in states and provinces, and even at the local level. Anywhere in the world where there is an effort to pass legislation or regulations that reduces the burning of fossil fuels, they are there with their money, with their lobbyists, with their captive politicians, blocking it as best they can.
And the solution is what you’re doing here at Climate Week here in San Francisco. We have got to rise up and change this situation.
That’s also why they are ballyhooing ridiculously expensive and hilariously impractical technologies like building giant mechanical vacuuming machines to suck it back out of the atmosphere after they put it up there. Could that someday be a realistic part of the solution?
Perhaps, perhaps. But not now! Not even close.
They use it as a bright, shiny object to distract attention and say, “see this, see this, this could be so miraculous, we don’t have to stop burning fossil fuels at all! We can actually continue to increase the burning of fossil fuels because look at this bright, shiny object. We’ve got this vacuuming machine”.
Well, CO2 is 0.035% of the molecules in the air. You’re going to use an energy-intensive, ridiculous, expensive process to filter through the other 99.965% of the molecules? It’s absolutely preposterous.
In reality, the Sustainability Revolution is powering more and more of our global economy. It has the scale and impact of the Industrial Revolution and is moving at the pace of the Digital Revolution.
By the way, in Texas, which used to have a free market for energy, more than 90% of all their new electricity generation last year was solar and wind. And, you know, they’ve got captured politicians there.
They’re pushing legislation in Texas to legally require any developers of solar and wind to spend time and money developing more oil and gas before they’re given permission to develop renewables.
That’s not realism, that’s pathetic.
That is a sign of desperation.
They don’t trust the free market. They’re just relying more and more on the politicians who will jump when they tell them to jump and ask how high when they tell them to jump again.
So, around the world, the market is transforming. Since the Paris Agreement, the cost of solar has dropped 76%. The cost of wind is down 66%. The cost of utility-scale batteries is down 87%.
In 2004, when Generation was founded, it took a full year for the world to install one gigawatt of solar power. Now it takes one day to install that.
And it’s not just renewables. We’re seeing the Sustainability Revolution rapidly take hold across the rest of the global economy from transportation, to regenerative agriculture, to circular manufacturing, and so much more.
So, as we gather here to kick off Climate Week and as we gather on the eve of Earth Day, we have to treat this moment as a call to action. So, I’m here not only to respond to the invitation for which I’m grateful… I’m here to recruit you.
Many of you are already working on this, but those of you who are not, I’m here to recruit you. We need you. This is the time and this is a break glass moment. This is an all hands on deck moment.
Now is the time to look at every aspect of your businesses, your investments, and your civic engagement to determine whether or not you can contribute even more to solving the climate crisis.
It’s easy to adopt our own versions of climate realism to say the challenge is too great. Some people worry about that. To say that our individual role is too small to have an impact. Some use that as an excuse: if the government won’t act, what can any of us do about it?
Well, just as the climate crisis does not recognise borders, it does not either recognise delineations between the duty of government and businesses and all significant participants in the global economy.
Climate change is already affecting your life and work and will more so through disrupted supply chains, increased liability, changes in consumer demand, and more.
This is a moment when we all have to mobilise to defend our country. And remember, the antidote to climate despair is climate action. It was in this city in the 1960s that Joan Baez first said that the antidote to despair is action. And we need to remember that now.
And during a time when people were tempted to despair in the struggle for civil rights in this country, Martin Luther King said something about overcoming the forces that try to discourage you and halt progress. He said this: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”
And that’s where we are.
Every one of the morally based movements in the past had periods when advocates felt despair. But when the central choice was revealed as a choice between right and wrong, then the outcome at a very deep level became foreordained.
Because of the way Pope Francis reminded us we have been created as God’s children.
We love our families.
We are devoted to our communities.
We have to protect our future.
And if you doubt for one moment ever that we as human beings have the capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.”
Climate and nature crises won’t pause while politics plays out.
The environment doesn’t care
who’s in government — but Australians should. If we want to avoid
catastrophic climate and biodiversity collapse, the next parliament has a
clear path forward.
Here are five urgent, evidence-based actions ready to go.
1. No new fossil fuel projects
Australia’s fossil fuel projects are already contributing to climate change. New projects will add to the impact.
Every new fossil fuel project locks in emissions for decades. Every
year we delay deeper cuts, we shrink our chances of a liveable future.
Australian governments continue to approve coal and gas developments, and there are around 100 more ‘under development’ according to government sources.
To put it simply, the fossil fuel industry’s political influence in Australia is far greater than its economic significance.
New fossil fuel projects exist only on paper. Ending approvals now
would be no different to past decisions Australia has made to ban
harmful industries like asbestos, whaling, and engineered stone — clear
steps to stop known damage before it grows worse.
2. Treat environmental protection as national security issue – because it is
Biodiversity loss is a global crisis comparable to climate change in its severity.
Australia has a particularly poor track record of safeguarding
biodiversity. Invasive species, land clearing and climate change have
resulted in substantial habitat loss.
The cost of restoring and protecting the environment has been estimated at $1–2 billion a year, with one estimate placing it as high as $16 billion a year for extensive restoration of bushfire-damaged areas.
To be clear, this is not a lot. The Australian Government arbitrarily allocates over 2% of Australia’s GDP to defence
spending as a ‘policy target’, receiving record funding of AU$55.7
billion in 2024–25. This is an arbitrary spending choice driven by
political preference, not need.
A safe environment is critical to human health. It is a national
security issue — there is a far stronger argument for spending billions
of dollars on it than war toys. As former Australian Treasurer Josh
Frydenberg noted, “Everything is affordable if it’s a priority.”
Other countries, such as Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Germany, have
shown that direct investment models work. Australia has had successes in
Landcare, Indigenous ranger programs, and targeted bushfire recovery
funding, demonstrating that when public investment is sufficient and sustained at a national scale, the environmental returns are real and lasting.
3. End native forest logging
Despite widespread public opposition and a collapsing economic case, native forest logging still continues
across parts of Australia. Each year, tens of thousands of hectares of
native forest are logged, with operations still active in New South
Wales, Tasmania, and on private land in Victoria — often under outdated
agreements that prioritise extraction over conservation.
Protecting our native forests can play a very significant role in
reducing greenhouse gas emissions and protecting critically endangered
species like the Leadbeater’s Possum, Greater Glider, Swift Parrot and
koalas.
The native forest logging industry has collapsed in most Australian
states. Where it survives, it is kept afloat by government subsidies. It
now costs more to keep the native forest logging industry alive than it
would to end it — despite the benefits that ending it would deliver.
The federal government has the power to intervene by applying
national environment laws, removing exemptions under the EPBC Act, or
refusing export approvals for native forest products. The tools are already there — it’s a choice not to use them.
4. End the free ride for polluters
Polluters — particularly fossil fuel companies and industries driving
deforestation, industrial agriculture, and mining — are directly
responsible for climate change, biodiversity loss, and negative health
impacts.
At present, the cost of this damage is overwhelmingly paid by the public, not the industries responsible
The Australia Institute’s Climate of the Nation 2024
shows that Australians want greater accountability from the private
sector, particularly when it comes to taking responsibility for
environmental damage and making a fair economic contribution to
Australia.
The “polluter-pays principle” is a concept of environmental law that
requires the party responsible for producing pollution to bear the costs
of the damage they cause. When properly implemented, it reduces
pollution, incentivises cleaner practices, and raises public revenue to
fund environmental and social programs. A vast majority of Australians (70%) support the implementation of a polluter-pays mechanism in Australia.
Australia’s own carbon price, introduced in 2012, raised around $6.6 billion in its first year and was projected to generate $24 billion over four years.
The revenue was almost entirely recycled: over half funded direct
payments and tax cuts for households, with additional support for
business transition and clean energy investment.
Australian experts, including organisations like the Superpower Institute,
have developed detailed models for updated carbon pricing that the next
parliament could adopt. These proposals are designed to drive down
emissions, raise revenue, and ensure that industries causing
environmental harm contribute fairly to Australia’s future resilience.
5. Plan and build for a different Australia
Climate adaptation — preparing for and managing the unavoidable
impacts of climate change — is no longer optional. Even if emissions
were cut to zero tomorrow, decades of accumulated global warming are
already locked into the system, driving more extreme weather, biodiversity loss, inequality and public health threats.
Adaptation funding is a core responsibility of good governance, and
essential if communities, economies, and ecosystems are to be protected
in a warming world.
Fifty per cent of Australians think the Australian Government is not doing enough to prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
A basic first step would be to release the 2023 Office of National
Intelligence Climate Risk Assessment report — Australia’s own classified
advice on the external risks of climate change.
It’s been two years.
Australians deserve to know the facts and understand the scale of the
threat to their security.
Other countries offer clear models Australia could follow.
The
Netherlands has built world-leading flood defences and long-term
adaptive water management strategies.
New Zealand’s National Adaptation
Plan sets clear risk priorities and actions across sectors.
Denmark has
integrated climate adaptation into urban planning with green
infrastructure to reduce flood risk.
These examples show that serious,
coordinated investment in resilience is possible — and that it pays off
economically and socially.
Pope
Francis was entombed on Saturday in a simple wooden coffin in
accordance with his wishes. He is remembered by millions as the
“people’s Pope” after a lifetime of advocacy for the poor and
disenfranchised.
In climate circles, Francis is remembered for Laudato Si,
his second encyclical letter to the faithful, subtitled “On Care for
Our Common Home”. It is a 184-page treatise lamenting climate change and
the destruction of the earth and its environmental systems in support
of reckless consumerism.
Illustration by Joe Benke
Its
publication in 2015 helped secure the 2016 Paris Accord, signed by
almost every nation on earth, which pledged to hold global warming to
less than two degrees and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees.
But it
had other political impacts. It drove what is sometimes referred to as
the “Francis effect” in the US, hardening the views of right-wing
Catholics against his papacy, including his calls for climate action.
Their support helped Donald Trump secure his second term, which he is
using to dismantle climate action domestically and to disrupt it
internationally.
An anti-Francis faction is now seeking to make
the Vatican great again with a right-wing pope.
“The hope is to have a
pontificate that concentrates more on Catholic issues, such as pro-life
and family, rather than climate change and immigration,” Princess Gloria
von Thurn und Taxis, a German aristocrat and a prominent member of a
right-wing push Europe and the US, told Politico this week.
Born
in Argentina, Francis never returned to his country of origin
throughout his papacy.
Despite Francis’s climate advocacy, Argentina is
now led by Javier Milei, a right-wing populist and climate sceptic who
flirts with abandoning the Paris Accord.
On Monday, Canada
reinstalled Mark Carney as prime minister. Carney is a former governor
of the central banks of Canada and England, but in climate circles he is
known for an address made at Lloyds of London in 2015, often referred
to as his “tragedy of the horizon” speech.
The first action of the reinstalled Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was to ditch the country’s carbon tax. Credit: AP
He
warned global financial institutions that climate change presented a
real and overwhelming economic threat.
Though its impacts would be most
devastating to future generations, it could be addressed only by our
own. This was the tragedy.
The speech is credited with catalysing a
tectonic shift in the view of the financial sector to climate risk.
Carney’s advocacy would later help secure the Glasgow Climate Pact at
2021 world climate talks, accelerating actions to achieve the Paris
goals.
Optimists believed that the financial sector’s engagement would
serve as a bulwark against backsliding politicians. Banks, insurance
companies and even the fossil fuel giants came on board with ambitious
investment and emission reduction targets of their own.
But
on becoming prime minister, Carney’s first act was to dump Canada’s
unpopular carbon tax.
“This will make a difference to hard-pressed
Canadians, but it is part of a much bigger set of measures that this
government is taking to ensure that we fight against climate change,
that our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward,” he
said.
Even for Carney, the political reality trumped the climatic one.
So what happened?
Climate change was a preoccupation of the late Pope Francis. Credit: AP
In
the years between Glasgow and Carney’s election, the world had taken a
dark turn.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused an energy crisis. Europe,
threatened with shortages, turned back to gas and coal. Global recovery
from the economic crisis caused by COVID-19 supercharged emissions.
Writing in these pages earlier this year, Christopher Pyne praised Dutton’s nuclear gambit
as ingenious, not because he believed that a nuclear power plant would
ever be built in Australia – he doesn’t – and not because it will cut
any emissions – it won’t – but because he had “united the Liberal party
room” in support of it.
It is a “gem” of a policy, wrote Pyne,
perhaps inadvertently highlighting the psychic difference between those
who would govern, and those who are governed.
Labor has plans to
replace coal power faster by accelerating the deployment of gas-backed
renewables, batteries and hydro. But it, too, backs the expansion of
Australian exports of fossil fuels.
Like Carney’s Liberals, it is
determined not to provide its opposition with an angle of attack. It has
addressed the politics and fudged the physics.
Meanwhile,
the terrible costs of climate change mount rapidly.
The past 10 years
are the hottest on record and the past two are the hottest of those.
In
Australia, the average temperature is already 1.5 degrees higher than it
was in 1910.
According to a study published by Nature, the economic impact of climate change between 2000 and 2019 totalled $US2.86 trillion, averaging $US143 billion annually.
But
the Australian election campaign, like the Canadian before it, and the
US before that, shows that politicians understand that even if people
want climate action, what they want first is relief to their immediate
financial circumstances.
Even though they can see that the tragedy is deepening, and the horizon is shrinking.
Around the world, major cities
are hurtling toward a future where soaring temperatures, rising seas,
collapsing infrastructure, food shortages, and civil unrest could make
daily life unrecognisable — or impossible.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned the Earth is heading towards increased temperatures of more than 3C. This will have catastrophic effects for life on Earth. The areas shown in red on the globe will become uninhabitable by 2100, because of extreme heat, rising seas or tropical cyclones. The height of the red bars on the map show the current population now living in each of these future uninhabitable locations.
Cities Most at Risk Some cities face extreme risks from rising seas, intense heat, flooding, and
economic collapse.
Risk Level
Cities
🔴 Critical Risk
Miami, New Orleans, Venice, Jakarta, Dhaka, Basra
🟠High Risk
New York, Cairo, Lagos, Phoenix, Delhi, Houston
🟡 Moderate Risk
Los Angeles, Bangkok, Karachi, Manila, Buenos Aires
Legend
🔴 Critical Risk: Severe threats from rising seas, extreme heat, frequent flooding, civil unrest, or economic collapse.
🟠High Risk: Major impacts highly likely without significant interventions.
🟡 Moderate Risk: Noticeable impacts increasing but still somewhat manageable in the short term.
Note: Climate risks are evolving rapidly, and city-specific vulnerabilities may increase with time if global emissions are not significantly reduced.
Coastal Cities Facing Rising Seas
In Miami, Florida, the threat isn’t a distant forecast. "Sunny day flooding," where tides swamp streets even without rain, is already a regular occurrence (Washington Post). Sea level rise, compounded by stronger hurricanes and a collapsing insurance market, could force an exodus from one of America's fastest-growing metro areas.
Across the Atlantic, Venice, Italy is fighting a losing battle against the water that made it famous. Despite the installation of a $6 billion flood barrier system known as MOSE, frequent high tides continue to inundate the city (Reuters).
Jakarta, Indonesia faces a twofold disaster: rising seas and a sinking city. Over-extraction of groundwater has caused Jakarta to subside by up to 10 centimeters a year (National Geographic).
Heatwaves, Water Shortages, and Economic Collapse
Inland, extreme heat is turning modern life into a survival challenge. In Phoenix, Arizona, 2023 set records with 31 consecutive days over 110°F (43°C) (New York Times).
Delhi, India is grappling with life-threatening temperatures that could soon reach "wet-bulb" conditions — combinations of heat and humidity fatal to humans without cooling (Smithsonian Magazine).
Water scarcity threatens political stability too. Cairo, Egypt is feeling the effects of a shrinking Nile River (Al-Monitor).
In Basra, Iraq, summers regularly top 120°F (49°C), while saltwater intrusion into the Shatt al-Arab River has poisoned farms and drinking water (Middle East Institute).
Flooding, Food Insecurity, and Civil Unrest
Dhaka, Bangladesh faces chronic flooding and dangerous heatwaves, making it one of the world’s most vulnerable megacities (Al Jazeera).
In Lagos, Nigeria, repeated flooding threatens homes, transportation, and food supply chains (The Conversation).
Even cities accustomed to rebuilding are stretched thin. Houston, Texas is facing climate-fueled hurricanes and rising insurance costs (Bloomberg).
Conclusion: Early Warnings for the World
These cities are early warning systems. Climate change is not a slow, linear problem — it’s a force multiplier, accelerating financial collapse, humanitarian crises, and migration pressures.
Without drastic global action to cut emissions and invest in adaptation, a future where millions are displaced by the collapse of once-great cities is not just likely.
Where do the major parties stand on climate change?
As the election campaign draws to a close, it's safe to say both major parties have been quiet on climate change.
Energy
policies have featured prominently, which of course carry consequences
for climate change, but beyond generalities, climate has been
under-represented.
The last
election was dubbed by many "the climate election", which saw the teal
independents ride a wave of climate frustration into parliament, and a
promise from Anthony Albanese to "end the climate wars".
Once
again, the independents and Greens have been advocating for stronger
climate action, and in the event that Australia has a minority
government after May 3, climate change would be a key focus of any
negotiations.
During its last
term, Labor passed a number of significant reforms, especially focusing
on speeding up the transition to renewables.
Many
of these policies are under threat if the Coalition wins the next
election, promising to scrap or weaken them significantly.
"They
have rejected every single policy that's gone through the parliament
that would improve tackling climate change. They've just rejected it,"
Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie said.
"There
is not a single policy there to cut climate pollution. So what that
says to me is they are hell bent on continuing the climate crisis
getting worse and worse."
Tony
Wood, the Grattan Institute's energy and climate director, said
everything the Coalition announced so far would either slow down or curb
emissions reduction.
"I think
we're at one of those points where what happens at this election will
have enormous consequences, not just for the energy system, but also for
our emissions more generally."
The
Coalition’s climate platform consists of using nuclear energy to
decarbonise the electricity grid, despite its own modelling indicating
it will result in higher emissions between now and when any reactors
would come online.
What has Labor done for the climate?
CEO of the Climate Council, Amanda McKenzie. (ABC News: Supplied)
Labor
has made inroads in its last term of office on the regulatory and
policy framework that could guide Australia's transition to a green
economy, the often unsexy work of climate progress.
Some
of the changes introduced under the last government include: new laws
so that Australia's biggest corporations have to disclose their climate
risk and actions; strengthening the regulation of Australia's biggest
polluters; and introducing emissions standards for cars sold into the
country.
At the same time, it
continued to approve new coal and gas projects, disappointing climate
advocates such as the Climate Council's CEO, Amanda McKenzie.
"It's
sort of two sides of the one coin. You've got to grow the good stuff
and you've got to stop the bad stuff. We've been doing a lot of the
growing the good stuff," McKenzie said.
"We
need to continue doing all the good stuff around the clean energy, but
we need to work hard on replacing fossil fuels and exiting fossil fuels
from our system much more quickly."
Climate
policies matter because they send strong signals to investors and
companies about the path Australia is on, and also offer the structure
for how Australia could bring down emissions across the economy (whether
they do lower emissions remains to be seen).
While most of the focus has been on energy in this election, these policies are firmly in the Coalition's crosshairs.
"This
is a really interesting fork in the road. And I've never seen a
situation where we've had such a divergence of proposals from the two
sides of politics," Tony Wood said.
Cleaning up our transport emissions
Transport makes up more than 20 per cent of Australia's total emissions. (ABC News)
Last
week, the opposition leader confirmed that if elected, he would end a
popular tax break for electric cars aimed at reducing the cost of
switching to electric.
The car industry told the ABC the policy has driven a spike in EV sales and reversing it would increase the cost for Australians of going electric.
The
benefit allows people to lease an electric car through a novated
leasing arrangement without paying fringe benefits tax. It's intended to
boost the number of electric cars coming into the second-hand market in
a few years when the leases end.
Set
to come into effect this July, the fuel efficiency standards ensure car
makers supply Australia with more-efficient petrol cars and more hybrid
and electric cars, which are cheaper to run and better for the climate.
Such
regulations are standard in most countries around the world, with
Russia being one of the only developed countries without one.
The
policy works by setting an emissions limit for each manufacturer on all
the cars it sells cars into the Australian market. It means the car
companies can still sell any higher-polluting cars they want, but will
have to offset them with more efficient models.
Car
makers are only fined if they go over their cap for three consecutive
years, but Dutton wants to scrap the penalties altogether.
"The
policy that Dutton has proposed would totally undermine the new vehicle
efficiency standards," the Climate Council's Amanda McKenzie said.
"That
policy is intended to reduce climate pollution [by] more than 300
million tonnes. So that pollution would still [go] in the atmosphere."
Australia has been dubbed a "dumping ground" for inefficient cars that can't be sold elsewhere.
Transport
now makes up almost 23 per cent of the country's emissions, and — with
the exception of the pandemic — have continued to rise steadily as
Australians opt to drive heavier, dirtier SUVs and fly more
domestically.
The Greens helped
pass the legislation last year, at the same time stating they hoped the
pollution limits would be reduced further.
Standing with the world on climate targets
The climate pact aims to limit global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. (ABC News)
Australia
has a target of a 43 per cent emissions cut by 2030, promised by Labor
at the last election and legislated by parliament.
The
Coalition is critical of Australia’s 2030 target. After statement made
in an election debate by shadow minister for climate change and energy,
Ted O’Brien, the Coalition had to clarify that it was still committed to the Paris Agreement.
In
a statement to the ABC, the Coalition campaign said it wouldn’t set any
targets in opposition “but we will be required to do so in government”
and cast doubt on Australia’s ability to hit the current 2030 target.
“The
emissions reduction targets we set from government will consider the
impact on the economy, the trajectory of emissions, and our own
policies,” the statement read.
President Donald Trump has wasted no time dismantling climate policies and promising a new era of fossil-fuel dominance.
Under
the Paris Agreement, countries are meant to increase their ambition,
not weaken policies, so it's unclear what the consequences would be if
the Coalition watered down the targets.
"We
think this is a really important election in terms of where it is in
timing, because 2030 is very close for major investment. If we start
veering off moving towards that target, it's really hard to get back on
track," Grattan's Tony Wood said.
In
the last term of parliament, the teal independents supported the
government in passing its 43 per cent target, while at the same making
it clear that they wanted it to be higher. Independents such as Monique
Ryan, Zoe Daniel and David Pocock want to see a target of a 60 per cent
emissions reduction by 2030.
The teal Independents have called for more ambitious climate targets. (Reuters: Simon Dawson)
The Greens want to see Australia adopt a 75 per cent target for 2030, which is what the Climate Council is advocating for.
In government, Labor held off announcing a 2035 target until it receives advice from the independent Climate Change Authority.
Swapping fossil fuels for clean energy
Renewable energy is rapidly increasing, with a pipeline of projects under construction. (ABC News)
Australia's
2030 climate target hangs on decarbonising the electricity sector
first, which can then help other areas like transport and industry
reduce their emissions.
Australia
has a target of getting to 82 per cent renewable energy by the end of
the decade. Currently, around 40 per cent of the electricity system is
already renewable, and there is a pipeline of projects already under
construction or in the planning stages.
The
independent Climate Change Authority reported to the government last
year that emissions need to start falling faster if Australia is to hit
that 2030 target.
Regardless,
the Coalition’s plans to flood the market with gas, as it’s been
described, and to also build taxpayer-funded nuclear power plants would
both diminish renewables investment, according to energy experts.
President Donald Trump has wasted no time dismantling climate policies and promising a new era of fossil-fuel dominance.
Under
the nuclear pathway, renewable energy would only supply around 54 per
cent of Australia's energy mix, a small increase from the current 40 per
cent.
"What the opposition has
put together over the last few months has been a series of policies
that would generate a very different mix of electricity generation," the
Grattan Institute's Tony Wood said.
"In
government, a Coalition government would slow down the move to
renewables and the transmission that goes with that. It would extend the
life of coal-fired power stations somewhat, and it would introduce more
gas generation into the mix so that the system remains reliable until
we then had nuclear."
According
to the Clean Energy Council, capping renewables at 54 per cent would
forego $58 billion of new private investment in large-scale solar and
wind projects and Australia would reach the cap in another four years.
Director of the Energy Program at Grattan Institute, Tony Wood. (ABC News: Sean Warren)
"What's happening now is considerable uncertainty and flip-flopping is not good at all for investment," Wood said.
"We
already know that the uncertainty around offshore wind and the
uncertainty around some renewable projects has meant that people say,
'well, we better stop, right?'"
In
its statement to the ABC, the Coalition referred to modelling from
Frontier Economics that shows electricity sector emissions will be lower
in the middle of the century.
“...
emissions in the Coalition’s plan will drop below Labor’s before 2050,
and will generate fewer emissions in 2050 and beyond.”
But
because CO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere, overall, the modelling
shows far higher cumulative emissions for the Coalition’s plan.
That
modelling also only accounts for the electricity sector and assumes
there's a slower uptake of other clean technologies and a smaller
economy overall.
The Climate
Change Authority estimates a nuclear policy would add two billion tonnes
of climate pollution by delaying the transition. The modelling that
forms the basis of the Coalition plan also has much higher emissions.
Using 'green' money for more gas
The Coalition proposes to include gas projects in the Capital Investment Scheme. (ABC News)
The
Coalition has focused on gas this election more than the nuclear policy
it spent most of last year pitching to voters. In his budget reply
speech, Peter Dutton promised to open up the Capacity Investment Scheme
(CIS) to allow gas projects.
The
CIS is a government program to boost renewables investment by
underwriting major projects, taking some of the financial risk out for
investors.
It applies to clean power generation (wind, solar) and storage and has so far secured 32 gigawatt of capacity by 2030.
This
policy has allowed the government to secure renewable projects into the
grid as the country's ageing coal power stations retire, and to plot a
trajectory for how Australia's dirtiest sector — electricity — will
reduce emissions.
Labor's plan
for the electricity grid still involves some gas, and it has refused to
address the issue of Australia's gas export industry despite calls from
climate experts.
Holding the dirtiest 200 to account
The Safeguard Mechanism aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from Australia's largest industrial facilities. (ABC News)
The
safeguard mechanism policy is the groaning machinery that underpins
much of Australia's climate response, but thanks to its complexity, it
is often overlooked and under-acknowledged.
First
introduced under former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott, it sets the
rules for how much Australia's dirtiest facilities can pollute each
year, and was reformed and strengthened in the last parliamentary term.
It
covers just over 200 facilities across industries like mining,
manufacturing, waste and gas, which account for almost a third of
Australia's emissions.
"The
safeguard mechanism is the only policy that we have that regulates
fossil fuel pollution from industry. So it's a really important piece of
our policy mix," the Climate Council's Amanda McKenzie said.
Each
facility has its own cap for annual emissions, called a baseline, which
decline at five per cent each year to 2030, plus there's an overall
limit or "hard cap" on the emissions across all facilities.
Importantly,
the safeguard is set in legislation, so while a sitting government can
make some changes, there are fundamental tenets that can't be altered
without a vote in parliament.
Amanda
McKenzie said the safeguard mechanism was already a flawed policy,
allowing polluters to buy or trade offsets to meet their targets.
"It's
not a strong enough policy … it includes offsets, which enable
companies to have a get-out-of-jail-free card when we need genuine
reductions in pollution. So what we'll be advocating for in the next
term is to strengthen that piece of reform."
Data
from the first year of the revamped safeguard mechanism has just been
released and has found that 60 per cent of the facilities used offsets
to meet their targets.
Plugging in our future energy system
Rewiring the Nation aims to modernise and upgrade Australia's electricity grid. (ABC News)
The
Rewiring the Nation policy helps fund the construction of transmission
lines needed to move renewable electricity around the system.
Transmission
projects have become a sensitive topic politically, with some people in
regional Australia, where most of these projects run, mounting
opposition to them.
The
Coalition latched onto these concerns, and said that its nuclear policy
would alleviate the need for as many transmission projects as
electricity generation would remain centralised at the existing coal
power stations.
“Renewable
energy deployment will still grow responsibly under the Coalition’s
plan, but we will avoid the massive overbuild required for Labor’s
plan,” the campaign told the ABC.
But
energy expert Tony Wood says these projects will be needed before the
Coalition's nuclear power stations would start running.
"They are becoming critical to maintaining the current reliability of the system," he said.
"As
we find the coal-fired power stations becoming less reliable as they
get older, the need to be able to move electricity between states when
something does go wrong in one state becomes really important," Wood
said.
"I think a Coalition
government would be faced with some quite difficult challenges if they
were to seriously try and slow down the building of some of those
transmission lines."
The roll-out of transmission projects has sparked backlash in the regions. (Supplied: EnergyCo)
Wood
says that Australia won't be able to connect enough renewables to meet
its other targets without speeding up the transmission rollout.
"We
haven't been building the necessary transmission to connect the
expansion of renewable energy, wind farms, and solar farms, which have
to be built in places we've never had generation before. So to connect
those generators to the main grid needs more transmission."
What could happen to climate after the election
The
world is already halfway through what climate experts call the critical
decade. In Australia, there are several climate issues that are likely
to be prominent in the next parliamentary term.
The election will have a significant impact on how Australia tackles climate change over the coming years.
(Supplied: Spyrakot)
Currently,
major developments can be assessed and rejected if they impact the
surrounding ecosystems, threatened species, waterways, but not if they
have a significant climate impact.
"It's 2025 and we don't have any way of stopping projects on a climate basis," Amanda McKenzie said.
The
Australia Conservation Foundation ranked the major parties and key
independents on their climate and environment policies, and gave the
Coalition just 1/100, while Labor was rated 54/100.
"Labor
scored points for its work on the clean energy and clean manufacturing
transition and its strong stance against costly, thirsty, risky nuclear
power, but lost points for its commitment to expanding the
climate-wrecking coal and gas industries," ACF lead Kelly O'Shannassy
said.
If it wins, Labor wants
to host the major UN climate conference next year alongside Pacific
countries as host, which will ratchet up the pressure on Australia to
outline its position on fossil fuels.
In
a statement to the ABC, climate minister Chris Bowen said that acting
on climate change is in the national interest, calling its reforms
“overdue”.
“Australians don’t
want to see more tired, frustrating climate wars, that only see us miss
the economic opportunities of the global push towards Net Zero."
How
Australia faces the climate challenge over the next three years will be
different depending on the outcome on May 3. If there is a hung
parliament, climate policies will be a strong negotiating point with the
teal independents and the Greens.
As Grattan's Tony Wood points out, three years is a long time in a world that's changing fast.
"If
the current government was to be re-elected for another three-year
term, that would almost make it impossible for the coalition's nuclear
plan, as they've described it, to actually be implemented. It would be
too late," Wood concluded.
"The renewables would be built. The transmission line, hopefully, would
be built. The coal-fired power stations, some of them would have shut
down. So this is a really interesting fork in the road."
