As a record-breaking heatwave rolled across Europe last week Chris Wright, the Trump Administration’s Energy Secretary, told a London gathering that “cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is.”
A former oil and gas executive,Wright urged the UK to embrace fossil fuels. “More people die in the winter than die in summer,” he told an audience of right-wing activists. Climate change was a “slow-moving phenomenon” that technology would sort out. Presumably he means green energy technology, which his president, Donald Trump, has said is perpetrating the “climate hoax”.
Claptrap is a word that comes to mind. It seems comical but no-one should be laughing. The fabricated Wright-Trump climate narrative is deadly serious, with a ripple effect that’s being felt on our own side of the world.
“London isn’t just hot,” UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres told another London meeting last week – London Climate Action Week. “It’s cooking.” And the principal driver of its discomfort was climate change, a product of the world’s addiction to fossil fuels.
Europe’s boiling temperatures, said Guterres, were intimately connected with both the climate crisis and the war in the Middle East. “They share the same destructive origin, fossil fuels, and they demand the same answer: a fast, fair transition to clean energy and a surge in adaptation, resilience and climate justice for those already facing climate harm.”
It would be astonishing, given the (literal) atmospherics across Europe last week, if the views of Guterres didn’t resonate more than those of Wright. We desperately need a stocktake at the most fundamental level, to work out where the effort to stop global warming has landed the world midway through 2026. And then we need the world to pay attention.
But we all know in our hearts that nothing like that is going to happen. In part that’s because the idea of a global authority has lost its shine after 80 years of the United Nations, the organisation of nation-states set up at the end of World War II.
Back then the United States led the UN push, supported strongly by war-weary allies including Australia. Back then the world listened to UN leaders because it was sick of squabbling. But up against a hostile US administration and neglected by a world grown cynical and suspicious – especially in the Trump era – the UN is now a shadow of its former self.
Two people sharing the same British heatwave last week said a lot about how we approach climate change. “Horrible,” a road worker told the BBC. “No shade, no letup… it’s just baking.” “Brilliant,” said a woman in a deckchair. “A few drinks, a few nibbles, fish and chips later – what’s not to like?”
This is a part of the world where acting on climate change, while not without its issues, enjoyed bipartisan agreement until Nigel Farage’s Reform movement became de facto Opposition. Now it’s gone, as it is here, where in the depths of winter a warming climate holds few fears.
But it should. Australia’s 2050 net-zero emissions target and its 2030 target of 43 per cent lower than 2005 have come in for merciless rubbishing – not just by extreme One Nation climate deniers Barnaby Joyce and senator Malcolm Roberts, but also by many Liberals and fossil fuel cheerleader Matt Canavan, now Nationals leader.
The targets are there for a reason. Thanks to some serious slackening-off, especially since Donald Trump’s second coming last year, the global aim of preventing warming from exceeding 1.5C is now well and truly gone, and the real danger mark of 2.0C is looming ever closer, maybe as early as next decade.
The warming shows that at a global level the targets aren’t working. But as a 2026 US-UK research paper in the journal Nature has pointed out, our failure in chasing such goals may trap us in a kind of psychological paralysis, driven by a narrative of failure. Instead we need to focus on what we can do at a national and community level, say the authors, Kwesi Quagraine, Mark Lynas and Erle Ellis.
Europe is sounding an alarm. We need a clear understanding, everywhere, that continued burning of fossil fuels – petrol, diesel, marine fuel, jet fuel and so on – is behind the level of heat now holding that continent in its grip.
For Australia, the best antidote to all that is to redouble the building of renewable infrastructure (a tick for the Albanese government) while bringing to an end the extraction and export of fossil fuels – a massive fail.
And for Tasmania, we need to see something real emerge from our Climate Change (State Action) Act – a law that’s nearly 20 years old. We’re still waiting for the “state action”.