As the world cooks, why have our political leaders gone cold on global warming?

Pope Francis was entombed on Saturday in a simple wooden coffin in accordance with his wishes. He is remembered by millions as the “people’s Pope” after a lifetime of advocacy for the poor and disenfranchised.

In climate circles, Francis is remembered for Laudato Si, his second encyclical letter to the faithful, subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home”. It is a 184-page treatise lamenting climate change and the destruction of the earth and its environmental systems in support of reckless consumerism.

Illustration by Joe BenkeCredit:

Its publication in 2015 helped secure the 2016 Paris Accord, signed by almost every nation on earth, which pledged to hold global warming to less than two degrees and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees. But it had other political impacts. It drove what is sometimes referred to as the “Francis effect” in the US, hardening the views of right-wing Catholics against his papacy, including his calls for climate action. Their support helped Donald Trump secure his second term, which he is using to dismantle climate action domestically and to disrupt it internationally.

An anti-Francis faction is now seeking to make the Vatican great again with a right-wing pope. “The hope is to have a pontificate that concentrates more on Catholic issues, such as pro-life and family, rather than climate change and immigration,” Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a German aristocrat and a prominent member of a right-wing push Europe and the US, told Politico this week.

Born in Argentina, Francis never returned to his country of origin throughout his papacy. Despite Francis’s climate advocacy, Argentina is now led by Javier Milei, a right-wing populist and climate sceptic who flirts with abandoning the Paris Accord.

On Monday, Canada reinstalled Mark Carney as prime minister. Carney is a former governor of the central banks of Canada and England, but in climate circles he is known for an address made at Lloyds of London in 2015, often referred to as his “tragedy of the horizon” speech.

The first action of the reinstalled Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was to ditch the country’s carbon tax.Credit: AP

He warned global financial institutions that climate change presented a real and overwhelming economic threat. Though its impacts would be most devastating to future generations, it could be addressed only by our own. This was the tragedy.

The speech is credited with catalysing a tectonic shift in the view of the financial sector to climate risk. Carney’s advocacy would later help secure the Glasgow Climate Pact at 2021 world climate talks, accelerating actions to achieve the Paris goals. Optimists believed that the financial sector’s engagement would serve as a bulwark against backsliding politicians. Banks, insurance companies and even the fossil fuel giants came on board with ambitious investment and emission reduction targets of their own.

But on becoming prime minister, Carney’s first act was to dump Canada’s unpopular carbon tax. “This will make a difference to hard-pressed Canadians, but it is part of a much bigger set of measures that this government is taking to ensure that we fight against climate change, that our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward,” he said. Even for Carney, the political reality trumped the climatic one.

So what happened?

Climate change was a preoccupation of the late Pope Francis.Credit: AP

In the years between Glasgow and Carney’s election, the world had taken a dark turn. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused an energy crisis. Europe, threatened with shortages, turned back to gas and coal. Global recovery from the economic crisis caused by COVID-19 supercharged emissions. China, despite its staggering success in the vast deployment of renewables, stimulated industries that demanded steel, concrete and in turn, coal power.

While the wealth – and numbers – of billionaires exploded, middle classes were battered and populism surged. Conservative political movements surged, backed by fossil fuel lobbyists determined that their industry might extend its limited lifespan.

In Australia, the Coalition prepared for this weekend’s election by developing a policy to replace coal-fired power stations with nuclear, which it claims will allow it to meet mid-century Paris targets (but not interim targets Australia has agreed to), but which the Australian Climate Change Authority estimates will lead to an extra 2 billion tonnes of carbon emissions by prolonging the life of coal power. It’s a policy backed by Australian miners.

Writing in these pages earlier this year, Christopher Pyne praised Dutton’s nuclear gambit as ingenious, not because he believed that a nuclear power plant would ever be built in Australia – he doesn’t – and not because it will cut any emissions – it won’t – but because he had “united the Liberal party room” in support of it.

It is a “gem” of a policy, wrote Pyne, perhaps inadvertently highlighting the psychic difference between those who would govern, and those who are governed.

Labor has plans to replace coal power faster by accelerating the deployment of gas-backed renewables, batteries and hydro. But it, too, backs the expansion of Australian exports of fossil fuels. Like Carney’s Liberals, it is determined not to provide its opposition with an angle of attack. It has addressed the politics and fudged the physics.

Meanwhile, the terrible costs of climate change mount rapidly. The past 10 years are the hottest on record and the past two are the hottest of those. In Australia, the average temperature is already 1.5 degrees higher than it was in 1910. According to a study published by Nature, the economic impact of climate change between 2000 and 2019 totalled $US2.86 trillion, averaging $US143 billion annually.

In the face of the obvious and dangerous changes to their world, the overwhelming majority of people want more climate action, 89 per cent of them according to a new study published in Nature.

But the Australian election campaign, like the Canadian before it, and the US before that, shows that politicians understand that even if people want climate action, what they want first is relief to their immediate financial circumstances.

Even though they can see that the tragedy is deepening, and the horizon is shrinking.

Nick O’Malley is national environment and climate editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.