Which brings me to this week’s deal between Labor and the Greens to pass the so-called safeguard mechanism, one of the most significant and misunderstood pieces of legislation to be introduced into parliament in recent times. Trying to avoid climate change without stopping fossil fuel expansion is like baking a cake with no oven or even a cake tin. The science says we need to stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure, stop destroying what’s left of our forests and start investing heavily in low-carbon technologies. The market cannot save us from the market failure of climate change, and while private investment in renewables, batteries and energy efficiency is necessary, these measures are not sufficient. Only our parliaments can protect us from the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry’s war against our climate isn’t cheap, but it is profitable, which is why these industries have no intention of stopping their expansion. Even now, the fossil fuel industry is planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build 116 new fossil fuel projects in Australia. In the year after the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, Australia opened $80 billion worth of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities, making us the largest LNG exporter in the world. Since Kevin Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2008, Australia’s coal production has increased by about 40 per cent and our gas production has tripled. Yet the science of climate change is as simple as it is settled: it doesn’t matter where in the world Australia’s coal and gas are burned, the emissions will continue to cause the climate change that will ruin our reef and fuel the fires and floods that are already causing so much pain. In the same fortnight that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared there could be no new fossil fuel projects if we are to avoid further climate catastrophe, the Australian minister for Resources, Madeleine King, made it clear that she supports lifting a moratorium on gas fields in Victoria.Īustralian governments, state and federal, Labor and Liberal, have spent decades denying the need to confront the fossil fuel industry, either by refuting the science or by distracting us with accounting tricks. While their progress has been slowed in recent years, the relentless bombardment of our future by the coal and gas industries continues unabated. They will not be over until the fossil fuel industry stops waging them.
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