South Wind

Never write off the spirit of humanity. When all seems dead and buried – and in my lifetime things have never seemed so dead and buried as now – it keeps finding its way to the surface, opening doors to unforeseen possibilities. Especially never write off the spirit of the young.

Every student of history knows the value of checking the rearview mirror to see what the past can tell us about the present, and that includes consulting with elders. But the many radical challenges we face today demand that we go beyond conventional sources of wisdom.

Visionary innovator Steve Jobs (he died in 2011) said in a 1995 video interview for Washington’s Smithsonian Institution that the world would stagnate without death, “the greatest invention of life”. The world changes and keeps evolving, he said, but older, settled adults are ruled by the past, whereas young people see the world as it is, free of preconceptions.

I was born into the postwar generation, the start of the Great Acceleration when human activity became the dominant force influencing Earth’s systems. This was when population, industry and fossil fuel use really took off and began to have a measurable impact on climate and biodiversity.

It’s beyond debate that having set us on this fossil-fuelled path, my generation should lead a change of course. But changing course is something people my age tend to avoid. And the most prominent living member of the generation that made the mess is the biggest obstacle to cleaning it up, the “drill-baby-drill” US president, Donald Trump. Leaving things in such hands is not an option.

So this is an appeal to those who came after me. It’s directed especially at our youngest and most energetic adults, the first generations of this century, Z and Alpha.

First, I must apologise to you. I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to draw government into this cause. Unlike some in my generation – real troopers prepared to go to prison for a safer climate – I have not put my body on the line.

Some of you in this cohort cannot currently vote or use social media, but you are the ones who will bear the heaviest burden resulting from our failure to cut carbon emissions and slow global warming. And you’re probably unable to invest in new energy technology, like domestic solar power, home batteries and electric vehicles.

But you do have youth and vigour, and you’re not so stuck on those preconceptions that bothered Steve Jobs. You’re well placed to grasp why we need to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. You’re not without influence both within your home circle and out in the wider community. And your power will only increase as the years pass.

The first thing to do is to come together. As their names suggest, the places to start are the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (ayc.org.au, the country’s largest youth-run organisation) and our state’s umbrella group, the Tasmanian Climate Collective (tasclimatecollective.org). These organisations remain active and committed in the face of chronic government neglect, even hostility.

In the case of Tasmania, government failure has been especially egregious. We had the best start of any Australian jurisdiction when we began this journey decades ago, but with the possible exception of the Northern Territory have done least to improve our position.

Stuck in a financial mire of epic proportions, the result of many years of mismanagement, Tasmania looks less likely than ever to lift its game. We who care about the future of our island community should not let this be the excuse for continuing to do nothing.

Nationally, the focus of youth action should be the government’s enduring failure to break the powerful hold of fossil fuel interests on the public purse. The Australia Institute calculates that in 2024–25, federal fossil fuel subsidies reached $12.6 billion, mainly due to the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme which refunds fuel tax to major diesel users.

Mining corporations were key beneficiaries, with the coal industry receiving $1.1 billion through the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme. In forward estimates, subsidies are at a staggering $67 billion – 14.2 times larger than the nation’s $4.75 billion disaster response fund. Meanwhile the government continues to approve licences to continue exploiting gas and coal resources far into the future.

On the other hand, Canberra’s support for the rollout of both large-scale and domestic renewable energy, while not without shortcomings, is really worth celebrating. Australia has won global plaudits for its commitment and innovation in this mighty quest. Contrary to what its legions of critics say, we are entitled to feel proud of this nation-building exercise. More on this next time.

The spectre of failure has hung over climate conversations for years. In an interview last July for the Toronto online journal iPolitics, Canadian ecologist David Suzuki declared that the battle to contain global warming was lost. The return of Donald Trump, he said, was “the dagger in my heart”.

Suzuki’s right: we’re screwed. Trump officials and acolytes around the world can rewrite science to suit their self-serving world view, but real science says we’ve missed the window of opportunity to stop a heating atmosphere from destabilising the climate. The mayhem of today will get a lot worse, and we can’t stop it.

Now we must “hunker down”, said Suzuki, who’s 90 next month. “Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it.

“Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the routes of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.”

Inequality, a driver of ecological breakdown, was in Suzuki’s crosshairs. The lavish Venetian wedding of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in June, he said, was “a disgusting phenomenon”. One of so many.

Suzuki’s deep and enduring commitment to Earth’s natural systems is beyond question. Equally, the Finnish government’s letter to its citizens warning them that when the bad weather hits they’ll have to take personal responsibility is something all countries should do. At the very least.

Climate change captures the headlines, but there are many environmental threats. Of the nine planetary boundaries identified by science as the safe limits of human impact, we’ve already crossed seven, are about to cross an eighth and have succeeded with only one, saving stratospheric ozone. That says only one thing: global ecological collapse is happening around us, now.

It’s a challenge to stay sane in the face of that grim diagnosis, on top of the daily media barrage of human craziness. That challenge is only intensified by advertising, a key component of modern capitalism that offers pretend solutions to the awful predicament it’s done so much to create. You want to be free from fear? Here, buy some more hope!

Promises of hope are just promises. Hope is a chimera that does nothing to stop global climate change and environmental collapse. It’s long past time we focused on reality.

One reality to bear in mind is that civilisation, however much we might value it, is a mere blip in the human story. We started cultivating plants, raising animals and building cities just 12,000 years ago – less than a twentieth of the time our species has walked the planet.

Before then we were part of nature, gatherers and hunters (or sometimes hunted), our fortunes rising or falling with natural cycles. Agriculture seemed to be a pathway to breaking that dependency, a pathway that the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels turned into a paved multi-lane highway.

But the highway leads to a dead end. We have always needed the biosphere, the community of life in which our species evolved. Our troubles began when we imagined otherwise, and the excesses committed under that delusion have now brought the biosphere to a state of collapse.

Times of plenty are disappearing fast. Today’s droughts, fires, storms, floods, collapsing hillsides, rising seas will get worse. In coming years we will see cascading climatic and ecological shifts that will devastate communities and the economies of whole countries, Australia included.

This won’t be the end of everything, just the end of things we’re accustomed to. We’re entering times of scarcity, with occasional, sometimes frequent breakdowns of order, and the loss of familiar services and supply chains. For a sizeable chunk of the world’s people life will return to what it was long ago, tougher and shorter.

The shifts – sometimes gradual and hard to see, sometimes sudden and shocking – will get worse before they get better. Political leaders who’ve been saying it’s just ideology will eventually be forced to accept that it’s real.

It doesn’t have to be miserable though. If we can accept that living will be harder and catastrophes will happen, if we can trust and support each other, beginning (like charity) at home and working outward, and if despite everything we can find joy in small things – we’ll manage. Like we used to, before we got drawn into this cul-de-sac.

“We live in an age of depravity, in an age of selfishness, in an era where morality, decency, ethics, integrity, have all substantially collapsed.”

That’s former Republican master strategist Steve Schmidt on a Daily Beast podcast earlier this month, speaking about his country’s far Right and the breakdown of moral authority in America.

His language is extreme, but so is Donald Trump’s relentless pursuit of political opponents, his abuse of his office to enrich self, family and benefactors, his administration’s seizure of people alleged to be illegal immigrants – mainly on the basis of skin colour – in city streets, his territorial ambitions and his trashing of international agreements and alliances.

While the list of Trump’s wrongdoings is shocking, his worst crime has been undermining our future by removing all US climate mitigation measures and revoking a long-standing finding that carbon pollution poses a danger to US citizens.

Australia may find itself in Trump’s sights as it seeks to improve the viability of green industries with the use of carbon tariffs for selected commodities. Last week’s review of measures against “carbon leakage” – preventing companies shifting production to countries without strict carbon laws – will not go down well in Washington.

The new Liberal leadership team, Angus Taylor and Senator Jane Hume, took a Trumpian stance at the weekend by warning against carbon tariffs and claiming Labor’s clean energy policy was “ideological” because it excluded nuclear.

The complexity of climate policy makes it a prime target for the extreme Right, whose particular talent is to make everything seem simple, as in the vacuous “no net zero” slogan. Australians may be repelled by Trump’s abuses of power, but there are echoes here of Trumpian rhetoric among many in the Coalition.

Those echoes were bouncing around Parliament House walls leading up to Taylor’s defeat of Sussan Ley as Liberal leader after polls put One Nation well ahead of the Coalition. That was a shock for everyone, but it was devastating for the Liberals.

The Liberal Party must now “change or die”, said Angus Taylor on his election as leader. No prizes for guessing where that’s heading. South Australian Liberal senator Alex Antic put up “everyday Australian” Pauline Hanson as a model, and Taylor and at least some of his Liberal Party backers appear to have decided it’s the way to go.

Taylor emphasised immigration issues in his and Hume’s first media conference as leader and deputy leader. In a throwback to former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, he proposed hardline immigration policies to exclude people who “hate our way of life”.

There’s an irony in holding such a position while advocating a return to the values espoused by the party’s founder, Robert Menzies. Menzies was a pragmatic conservative whose beliefs were shaped by both the rise of communism and the world war against fascism. He knew that success for his fledgling Liberal Party depended on confronting enemies on the Right as well as those on the Left.

Menzies’ balanced stance seems to be the last thing on the minds of Taylor and his backers, distracted by all the ruckus on the Right. Sussan Ley might have helped shift them to a centrist position, but she’s gone, and now her entirely predictable retirement forces the Liberals into a battle to hold her NSW Riverina seat of Farrer.

In 2025 Ley held on against eight others. Her closest opponent was independent Michelle Milthorpe, whose two-candidate-preferred tally reached nearly 44 per cent. Closely allied with Helen Haines, independent MP for the next-door seat of Indi, Milthorpe is standing again on a platform of community values and climate action. She has a good chance of winning regardless of any One Nation surge.

Former PM Tony Abbott enthusiastically endorsed Taylor, the energy minister in Scott Morrison’s government who advocated for nuclear power in the face of a deafening silence from the energy sector. On the other hand, another former Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said a lot of people describe Taylor, a former Rhodes Scholar, as “the best qualified idiot they’ve ever met”.

The rising fortunes of One Nation will only increase the noise from the Right of politics about a coming right-wing revolution and encourage some Liberals to aspire to be “more Hanson than Hanson”. But as Turnbull remarked, “that’s a battle you can’t win.”

Political argument is often described as hot air, but outside this bubble a real warming is happening. That reality hit home in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara last week when news emerged that heatstroke was the likely cause of the death of a fit young migrant woman mustering cattle during a 45-degree December heatwave.