It’s been a dismal week for climate action in this country. First there was the Albanese government’s omission of any climate trigger from new environment laws, intended to stymy litigation against new gas or coal projects. Then came the Nationals’ decision at the weekend to oppose a 2050 net-zero emissions target.
It’s reasonable to expect these political discussions to take account of what’s happening to the global climate, currently being informed by a spate of key reports leading into the 30th annual climate summit in Brazil this month. Yet climate rated barely a mention in public utterances on both sides.
None of this would surprise anyone familiar with the history of this country’s environmental law. There’s long been a sense that most people in political office put the importance of the natural world several rungs below infrastructure or the economy.
Instead of wrestling with environmental impact and sustainability of energy demand, the policy debate has focused on technology: wind and solar if you favour the current national rollout (which I do) and nuclear if, like the political Right, you think that’s the way to go.
Wind and solar with grid-scale energy storage are essential, so the new laws’ provision for faster project approvals is welcome. But the unstoppable AI revolution, demanding energy at city scale for each data centre, has shifted the goalposts. In the US, knowing that coal- or gas-fired power for its planned Washington mega-centre wouldn’t sit well with customers and shareholders, Amazon has gone for up to 12 small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), to be built by 2040.
Good luck with that. Nuclear reactors, always very complex, have to be big to make financial sense. China’s single operating SMR is actually well over 100 MW, took 15 years to build and cost over $500 million. Not exactly “like dumplings in a yum cha restaurant”, a Mercury reader’s breezy description of China’s presumed SMR rollout (Letters, 29 October).
But we can’t discount nuclear completely, even in Australia. Whatever its hazards, they’re minuscule compared to the danger from fossil fuels, now threatening us with a miserable climate future.
Exercising practically limitless financial power, the powerful fossil fuel lobby puts the utterly false and very dangerous argument that it doesn’t matter if the world goes on getting warmer because we have the technology – or will get it soon – to eventually reverse the process and return everything to “normal”. Labor and the Coalition alike have based their planning on this total fantasy.
There was a time when politics at least paid lip service to scientific facts. Here’s one: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has for many years been at its highest level for at least three million years, today is rising faster than it’s ever risen since life evolved on Earth.
For most of the 20th century the rate was around one part per million per year. Last week we learned that in 2024 it rose by 3.5 ppm – the largest single-year jump ever. Warming above 1.5C, says the UN, is now locked in and we can expect a 2C warmer world by 2050 at the latest.
Levels of methane are rising even faster – no surprise in light of UN advice last week that nearly 90 per cent of satellite-detected leaks from fossil carbon extraction and processing are not being acknowledged. Which puts gas industry expansion plans in an even more dangerous light.
Disturbing new developments are coming into play. The 2025 University of Exeter global tipping points report confirms that it’s now too late to stop the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets from collapsing, ultimately causing over 10 metres of sea level rise. Add to that another temperature tipping point around 2040 where plants stop taking up carbon dioxide and begin expelling it.
Australia’s strongest climate signal is from the ocean, shown by repeated, worsening bleaching of Great Barrier Reef corals. Warming is even greater off eastern Tasmania, where right now – well before summer – scientists are reporting unprecedented numbers of Aurelia (moon jellyfish) in the Prosser estuary and a bloom along the entire East Coast of the single-celled organism Noctiluca, known to kill salmon and other fish.
In the face of all this, in September the Albanese government approved Woodside’s outrageously polluting North West Shelf plans stretching out to 2070. Now, its second attempt to rewrite nature laws excludes consideration of climate change, the centrepiece of our environmental future.
Each in its own bubble, Labor’s framing of its environment bill and Coalition debates over emissions targets have studiously avoided reference to actual climate. Both sides fear reality, and that is to their lasting shame.