South Wind

Solar power’s exponential global growth, along with real money to stop methane pollution, support clean grids and storage in poor countries, and protect forests and indigenous land rights, should have marked this year’s COP30 climate meeting as a resounding success.

Instead, it has to be marked down as a failure. It didn’t do the only thing that really matters: secure global agreement on the need to end fossil fuel use, everywhere, with the utmost urgency.

The trebling of compensation for poor countries facing worsening climate change impacts is also a measure of the guilt felt by rich countries avoiding their own responsibilities to keep reducing their carbon emissions.

As the people of the lowest-lying parts of the world know already, adaptation means more powerful storms and surging tides drowning precious land. To some unfortunate valley communities it means whole towns washed away or buried under collapsing hillsides. Across south and south-east Asia it means extreme rainfall and storms bringing chaos and death.

Whatever amounts of financial help might have been floated at the Belem meeting, there is no way they can even begin to compensate for the life-changing or life-ending losses already being felt by the communities hit by these disasters.

And such money does nothing to slow the momentum of global warming as the world surges past what was once called the “safe limit” of 1.5C of warming. After centuries of relentless growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and with no more than five years up our sleeves to halve carbon emissions, we are now deep in an existential crisis.

Today’s weather is the consequence of things that happened many years or even decades ago – decisions not made, opportunities missed, errors that weren’t obvious at the time because of the lag in the response of climate to an ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Years of concerted disinformation streaming from the vested interests that mine, process and sell fossil carbon has persuaded the world to keep using it. Now, having lost its argument that burning fossil carbon doesn’t change the climate, the industry is putting vast resources, including armies of opinion-shapers, into spreading the appealing but utterly false idea of overshoot.

The overshoot argument is that exceeding temperature limits doesn’t matter because everything is reversible. It says we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves by setting ambitious targets and wasting resources on unreliable wind and solar. If nature in the form of plant photosynthesis and rock weathering isn’t enough, we are developing technology to suck carbon out of the air and store it safely and permanently.

It’s all garbage. We cannot return to what we had before this all started. The trillions of tonnes of excess carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels over centuries will remain in the air for a thousand years or more. No means natural or artificial – no offsetting of any kind – can remove anything more than a trivial percentage of this amount, let alone safely store it.

Everything in our armoury needs to be directed toward reducing dangerous concentrations of heat-trapping gases. But in the scheme of things artificial removal, or direct air capture (DAC), is essentially a diversion to distract us from the main game, which is to lower emissions.

And that – the one thing that can stop the situation getting worse – is what fossil capital fears most. A rapid and complete end to use of coal, oil and gas necessarily involves a shift in the global economic order far bigger than the industrial revolution in Britain that started it all.

It will happen. The crucial questions are how it will happen, and when.

If the world had seen the writing on the wall half a century ago, perhaps when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House, we might have worked out how to make the transition with a degree of order and planning. But that’s no longer possible. Disorder and discomfort are now unavoidable.

The drive to mitigate emissions continues to threaten fossil fuels’ stranglehold on the global economy, but the industry and its financial backers are far from finished. With any number of myths and false assurances up their sleeves, they will continue to fight mitigation on any front that will help secure the industry’s future – even to the extent of dimming sunlight, a whole other topic for another time.

Belem’s failure to address the extraction and burning of gas, oil and coal only worsens our awful pickle. Exploiting remaining reserves will raise the planet’s temperature by several more degrees. That’s a place not even the most ardent fossil-fuelled traveller would want to visit.

When people describe themselves as agnostic we take it to mean they don’t know what they believe. The dictionary tells us it comes from the Greek “agnostos”, which means not knowing.

Now the word has crept into Australia’s climate debate. At the launch of their “Affordable and Responsible” plan last week, both Coalition leaders Sussan Ley (Liberal) and David Littleproud (National) spoke of their plan’s “technology-agnostic” approach to reducing emissions.

Agnostic is the right word. Both leaders cautioned against discussing the future because neither has a clue as to how the “breakthrough” technologies they briefly mentioned – blue hydrogen (hydrogen made from fossil fuels), carbon capture and storage and small modular nuclear – can be deployed at the scale needed to affect global emissions. Because they can’t.

Both leaders said they accept that human-induced warming is real and that cutting emissions is important, but, said Ley, “it’s all about affordability”. “Why wouldn’t you … prioritise affordable energy instead of the ideology of an 82 per cent renewable grid by 2030, which everyone acknowledges cannot be reached?”

Ideology? Ambitious targets are our only hope. Australia is a significant global player as both an influencer and, to our shame, a fossil fuel supplier. We must be a leading voice for the one single action known to have a chance of slowing planetary heating, ending their use.

The Coalition has determined that renewable energy, a key weapon in our climate struggle, is its enemy while gas- or coal-fired power is the most affordable when it’s actually the most expensive. Our real economy versus their fanciful ideology is the catch-cry of fossil fuel’s most ardent supporters, led by Barnaby Joyce and Senator Matt Canavan.

Last week’s indifferent public response suggests that this false claim hasn’t worked for now, but as Ley pointed out the next election is still years away, allowing ample time to work up the slogans and get the message out. For which you need money, and for that you just need to know where to look.

One place to see money at work is Belem, on Brazil’s Amazon River, which has just hosted tens of thousands of COP 30 delegates. Often thought of as environmental talkfests, these meetings have increasingly become a focus of industrial lobbying at a scale and intensity rarely seen in world affairs.

The climate journalism group DeSmog reported that global agribusiness giants paid nearly 200 Brazilian social media influencers to extol the virtues of livestock farming and cropping, which between them have deforested about 20 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, a crucial regulator of global climate.

But the biggest lobbying presence, as always at these meetings, was the fossil fuel contingent, and it got what it paid for – no mention in the final communiqué of the one thing that’s completely essential if we’re to escape this enveloping climate crisis, a phase-out of fossil fuels. Reprehensible, but unsurprising.

Yet there are glimmers of light. Unlikely as it seems, the Albanese government’s climate policy may be in for a serious makeover. In Belem, in the process of ceding next year’s COP meeting to Türkiye, climate minister Chris Bowen secured the role of “president of negotiations” for that meeting, to be held in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya.

At the same time a breakout contingent led by Colombia and the Netherlands announced they would co-host the first of what is planned as an annual event, an international conference aimed at ending fossil fuel use globally, next April at Colombia’s main coal export port, Santa Marta.

Unexpectedly, considering our country’s reputation as a fossil fuel exporter, Australia joined 23 others in signing the “Belem Declaration on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels”. It’s not hard to see why; the list of signatories includes most of the nations of the Pacific on whose behalf Australia had been seeking to host COP 31 next year.

The fact that Bowen signed on to the fossil fuel phase-out statement while negotiating his pivotal COP organising role signals that he sees the Colombia-Netherlands proposal as something he needs to be part of.

At the same time, his COP role also gives him a rare opportunity to introduce new thinking to a UN framework fraying at the edges and threatening to break under the weight of decades of self-serving deals and missed opportunities.

With those Pacific communities breathing down his neck, Bowen may yet serve up a COP 31 for the ages. Success in Antalya would also leave the Coalition’s policy to abandon previously-agreed climate goals looking even shoddier than the train wreck it is today. If that’s possible.

In a meeting with Nick Duigan, Tasmania’s Minister for Energy and Renewables, a few months ago a member of the advisory group Climate Tasmania asked the minister if he would care to say anything about the need for Tasmania to transition from petrol, diesel and gas to clean energy.

His response? “No, I don’t see the need to.” End of discussion.

In requesting the meeting, Climate Tasmania took at face value the government’s repeated assurance that it’s serious about cutting Tasmania’s high per-capita emissions. Knowing that the biggest single source of those emissions is exhaust from motor vehicles, the group wanted to learn more about government plans to secure alternative energy sources.

It’s not just Nick Duigan who doesn’t like talking about such things, but the the entire Tasmanian government. And now we know it’s also most members of the federal Coalition, who have just dropped emissions reduction as an energy policy objective – a whole other story for another time.

A Climate Tasmania colleague at that June meeting commented that the minister’s response explains why the government has been silent on what we used to think was the main motivation for Marinus, which will more than double electricity transmission across Bass Strait.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s biggest-ever investment, $3.8 billion covering 80 per cent of the cost of a single Marinus cable, has been made on the basis that the investment is critical to Australia’s achieving the net zero emissions target.

In February last year Marinus Link Pty Ltd, the company overseeing the work, put climate change at the top of its list of reasons Australians should get behind the project. “Marinus Link will help address climate change, creating a better tomorrow for future generations,” it said, enabling states on both sides of Bass Strait to stop relying on fossil fuels.

The Marinus statement went on: “Australia is undergoing a renewable energy revolution, with rapid growth in renewable generation, closure of coal plants and support from investors and governments for large-scale energy storage. Marinus Link supports this revolution.

“Marinus Link will ensure customers and businesses have access to the most reliable, clean power. It will unlock Tasmania’s hydropower resources, providing Australia access to green energy storage with a capacity approximately 30,000 times bigger than Victoria’s Big Battery.

“When demand for power exceeds supply, Tasmania’s hydro power will be readily available for use as top up or back up across the National Electricity Market.”

With some qualifications this is all very rational and sensible. But in his most recent statement on Marinus, in August, the minister spoke of jobs and the economy but made no mention of the potential for Marinus to cut fossil fuel emissions.

The Marinus promo might have benefited from the kind of insight Ruth Forrest MLC brought to the debate in an analysis of prospects for hydro power last month.

“History shows a pattern,” she said. “Every two or three decades, severe droughts have tested the limits of the state’s storages, forcing emergency measures and reshaping energy planning.” She cited Hydro Tasmania chief executive officer Rachel Watson last August speaking of 2025 being “the second year of the worst multi-season drought … in Tasmania’s history”.

There are lessons from this for both sides of Bass Strait. Asked Forrest, “are the rivers of gold predicted to flow from Marinus exports based on risky assumptions?” And with more frequent droughts, “will Marinus need to be relied upon for significant imports rather than the current assumption of lucrative exports?”

Despite large construction subsidies from Canberra, Marinus will add as much as $170 a year to Tasmanian power bills, according to analysis by the University of Tasmania’s Richard Eccleston and Kimberly Brockman. But if recent low rainfall is a trend, the link will end up being more valuable to an energy-starved Tasmania than to the rest of the National Energy Market.

Tasmanian government ministers and MPs have been noticeably absent from consultations about the project with North-West communities most affected by new transmission infrastructure.

Community consultation by Marinus Link representatives has generated a sense of resignation, resentment and mistrust, as one North-West resident put it to me. He added, “What would gain my endorsement is a clear plan for how this proposal will directly drive a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and a robust strategy to maximise broad local benefit.”

All of which brings us back to the main driver of all this: climate. The Rockliff government avoided that word in allocating portfolios. Perhaps that’s what opened the door for Nick Duigan to determine that reducing Tasmanian emissions is not worth discussing with Climate Tasmania.