We live on one planet. What happens in other places has repercussions here, and vice versa – a fact we’re reminded of every day. This is why bigotry is the refuge of fools. But that’s where Barnaby Joyce now finds himself.
In the end not even the Nationals, a party where solid, informed thinking often seems in short supply, could accommodate Joyce’s thought-free politics, best described as basic instinct. So he fled to One Nation.
You would never find Barnaby Joyce immersed in a UN climate assessment. These are invariably hard going, not because they’re badly written – they’re not – but because they deal with complex global processes. The just-released 2025 Emissions Gap Report was no exception.
The global network that makes these reports possible – part of the intellectual framework that underpins civilised existence – is under threat. Its work is being severely curtailed by the noise of uninformed but well-funded populists, amplified mightily by Donald Trump’s administration.
As usual the latest Emissions Gap Report, titled “Off Target”, was thoroughly researched, referencing over 100 papers and reports representing the work of thousands of scientific, technical and economic specialists. You must dive deep to find the meaty bits, but when you do they take the breath away.
The report reveals that global carbon emissions last year rose by 2.3 per cent, up from just 1.6 per cent in 2023 and more than four times higher than the annual average growth rate in the 2010s, the decade of the landmark Paris Agreement when it seemed the world was taking greenhouse warming seriously.
“Despite the key role of fossil fuels in driving total emissions,” it says, “deforestation and land-use change was decisive for the rapid increase in 2024 emissions… The large increase in 2024 was likely exacerbated by climatic conditions.”
The report’s concern is underlined by a finding, published recently in the journal Scientific Reports, that annual biomass growth in Africa’s tropical forests and savannahs has shifted to loss. This greatly weakens Africa’s ability to support the global effort, including its ability to offset emissions from the developed world (the net in our net zero targets).
Allow a moment to let this soak in. Fossil fuels remain, as always, the main driver of human-induced warming. Nearly 80 per cent of this came from G20 member states, among which only the European Union is lowering emissions. But now the climate itself, which humanity has been changing for centuries by burning fossil fuels, is driving further changes.
We won’t know for sure whether the world has moved beyond a big climate change tipping point until well after it’s happened. But continuing our centuries-long practice of taking fossil carbon from underground and sending it into the air only makes it more likely.
The Emissions Gap Report is discouraging. It finds that national responses to the global stocktake, in the form of nationally determined contributions (NDCs), remain “off target”, with 62 per cent of new NDCs setting a target to reduce fossil fuel use in the electricity mix and only 29 per cent setting a coal phase-down target.
“To date no NDCs have set targets to reduce oil and gas production or phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies,” it says. We need look no further than Australia’s continued licensing of gas and coal exploration and export – of which it’s a global leader – to understand that in this respect our own country is very much in the firing line.
New NDCs and other policy updates of the G20 members have lowered estimates of emissions in 2035, says the report, but those reductions “are relatively small and surrounded by significant uncertainty.” Hardly a ringing endorsement.
In 2013, Barnaby Joyce moved from being a Queensland senator to winning a lower house NSW seat – quite an achievement. When he was deputy prime minister in a Malcolm Turnbull-led Coalition, Turnbull rated him Australia’s best retail politician. That would have put him in a good position to help people deal with a changing climate.
But the evidence for human-induced climate change and the measures by which the world seeks to address it are complicated and nuanced. That calls for leaders willing to spend time getting their heads around that complexity and conveying its implications to ordinary people.
Barnaby Joyce simply can’t do this. Reflection and introspection aren’t in his playbook. And now he’s off with the fairies, or more correctly Pauline Hanson’s band of bigots, with whom he plans to run for the Senate in 2028.
He’s betting that NSW voters will swallow his line that a real, present and rising threat from climate change is pure fantasy. I’m betting that they won’t.