It’s worse than any war or pandemic, so why are our leaders ignoring it?

Silly season, new year, serious question: What would you most like to see in 2025 to change our future for the better? The theme was impossibly large and difficult, but an answer popped straight out, even if it seemed in poor taste to rant with a despairing earnestness.

After the federal election, whoever wins government must form a national, multi-party emergency cabinet on climate change, its purpose being to achieve net zero carbon emissions not by 2030 or 2040 but AS-frigging-AP.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Australia forms unity cabinets during wars and pandemics. The current emergency is far greater than either.

I won’t insult the reader with a glib outline of the evidence, which goes back decades and is easy to find, if constantly superseded by data on ocean and atmospheric heat that is catastrophically worse than forecast. Evidence, in any case, has proven counter-productive, overwhelming Western populations and driving them into their shells. (Climate is one of the big audience turn-offs in media, too, but here goes.)

There is a measure of Australians’ apathetic retreat: a record low birth rate. Since 2016, birth rates have plummeted in every G7 country. It’s hard to procreate when your head is in the sand, hiding from the 10 hottest years on record.

A national cabinet on climate, or even a bipartisan advisory board to influence the climate implications of every new law? The objections line up. You’ll never get the major parties to put politics aside on climate or energy. Our political culture doesn’t work that way. Divisiveness is Canberra’s drug of addiction.

Call me naive but I don’t think our leaders are complete idiots, even if they think there are votes in seeming so. After an election, there is always a tide of big-heartedness. After an election, Peter Dutton doesn’t have to look to Gina Rinehart or Tony Abbott for guidance on climate science. He doesn’t have to go through the ideological motions of rejecting state socialism, given that his solution to climate change – Go nuclear! – is the biggest state socialism project in the Coalition’s illustrious history of asking big government to solve big problems.

Nor does Labor have to position itself as just a few notches more climate-sensible than the Coalition. For once in their lives, after the election, these people can sit in a room, listen to scientific communicators and take time out to read a life-changing document like Michael Mann’s The New Climate War, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, James Bradley’s Deep Water or any of the evidence presented to the last two United Nations COP summits. Equipped, they can seize their moment. Call me childlike, but I believe that making the country better is why most in the politics business were drawn to it, and what they hope to leave behind. All they need now is to wake the f--- up.

As the world’s second-biggest exporter (behind Russia) and second-biggest per capita consumer (behind the US) of fossil fuels, Australia bears a responsibility beyond its population size. Bipartisan leadership would be noticed. If we can be a groundbreaker on banning social media for minors, why can’t we do it on the disaster staring us in the face? At a time when the US is entering four years of climate regression, the urgency is greater yet. Imagine if, as leaders, you had the opportunity to stamp your name on history. And imagine if you gave that away.

But doesn’t the collapse of the Green vote show that the electorate doesn’t see climate as a priority? It shows the opposite. For decades, the Green vote has come from single-issue voters who just want to send a message that they want more on climate and the environment. In 2024, with the Greens jumping the shark on industrial relations, housing, finance and international policies, those voters no longer know what signal they are sending by voting Green.

But what of the Coalition’s nuclear plan? My opinion is that Peter Dutton would be quickly forgiven for retracting a make-believe policy for a make-believe future when we still have the Great Barrier Reef, the polar ice caps and permafrost, countless species and human lives, and a collection of island nations. The only real thing about his energy policy is the prolongation of fossil fuel use.

The nuclear policy of 2025 is a kind of tribal signalling, a gesture in a culture war where the assessment of facts gets mixed up with unrelated team loyalties. (You think Ben Roberts-Smith is innocent because you think trans women should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports; and so on and on, on both sides. Yawn.) Yes, I’m naive in my optimism that such signalling will be consigned to the dustbin where it belongs.

Real leaders don’t look for climate evidence outside their window. A bad storm or a cataclysmic fire season are no more conclusive than a pleasant summer or a cold winter. The frog can’t perceive the boiling water it lives in. We can also do without a kind of radical cruelty on the left that wishes for extreme events to put climate back on the agenda. During the downfall of Tsarism, Vladimir Lenin said: “The worse things get [for the regime], the better things get [for revolutionaries]”. It’s a desperate view. Real leaders don’t react to a Black Summer, or a perfect summer. Real leaders respond to the long-term evidence.

Many on the climate science-denying right take the view that global heating is caused by natural cycles rather than humans. On the outside chance that that is so, wouldn’t you still do something about it? Even Elon Musk makes electric vehicles. The argument brings to mind a mum and dad, in their burning house, bickering over whether an arsonist or a lightning strike started the fire, instead of calling the fire brigade. The argument goes on, unresolved. A pity they’re still in the house when it burns down.

A nation as wealthy as Australia has infinite ways of reaching an energy base of 100 per cent renewables while suppressing prices. Corporate Australia is already streaking ahead of government. In a parliament where no party or group has a majority, as is likely this year, there is a golden chance for Canberra to motivate our population, firstly by convincing them that we are living in an emergency more urgent, by many multiples, than any war or health crisis. Unity is possible.

It’s just a matter of recognising the urgency, and stop talking about an issue as if the evidence is still open to question. Get your election out of the way, and then, in the name of humanity and your children’s future, make 2025 the year of bloody well doing something. A dream? Yeah, I know. But it’s only the first week of January.

Malcolm Knox is an author and Herald columnist. His latest novel is The First Friend.