2025 has not started well, and you should be bloody angry.
We are less than five months from the federal election and both major parties’ climate change policies are an amalgam of indolence and lies.
Not one politician in either major party is being honest with voters.
The Liberals claim there is no need to do anything – no need for a target, no need for more renewable energy, no need for less coal or gas. Labor claims we just need a few tweaks to fix things – middle-path targets dependent upon offsets, all the while approving coalmines (sorry, “extensions”), talking up gas and never, ever requiring mining companies to cease doing anything that causes climate change.
After the 2019 election, I argued that “the Coalition isn’t being honest about the climate crisis. But neither is Labor”; but by the 2022 election, that seemed at least preferable to the deafening silence on the issue.
And now it’s all just a nuclear pantomime by both the ALP and Liberal party, and much of the media.
The Liberal party is happy because they can keep the deniers in their party quiet while pretending they have a meaningful climate change policy.
The ALP is happy too, because arguing about the evils and costs of nuclear means not having to talk about its own policies that encourage fossil fuel use.
Everyone is thus free to carry on, and so too are greenhouse gas emissions, which have not fallen since the end of the pandemic and, according to the government’s own figures, are not set to fall until 2028 – at which point they brilliantly drop at a constant rate to 43% below 2005 levels by 2030.
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Enough! Enough with saying you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, when the “good” is at best a farce; at worst, a grift designed to let questionable carbon offset schemes get rich and allow fossil fuel companies to carry on as before.
Enough with governments caring more about preventing protests against fossil fuel use than they are about preventing use of fossil fuels.
Enough with ministers of resources having the most say over climate-change policy and then easily moving into a role within the mining sector.
Enough with the pretence that these things take time and we need to find a middle ground.
Just stop it. If you have any soul left in your empty suit, please, stop it.
2024 was the hottest year on record. This was not a shock. We knew by August it would be, because every month in 2024 up to August was the record hottest month ever recorded (every month after August was the second hottest such month on record):
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That graph won’t change any minds, but facts do matter.
2024 was the hottest year on record and it wasn’t even close:
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The past two years represent a major shift. In 2016, which was also a record-setting year, I wrote how reporting on climate change scared the hell out of me. For 2025 to be merely as hot as 2016 would require the largest drop in temperature recorded in the past 150 years.
Oh, to have 2016 temperatures. Right now, a dream scenario would be that the pace was only as bad as it was over the past 55 years, rather than the past ten.
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Rising, too, are insurance fees, and they will continue to do so in the wake of the LA fires.
Insurance companies and those who insure them understand risk better than anyone. They know climate change causes both more and more devastating fires and floods – and they know as a result there will be more insurance payouts.
Oddly, insurance companies don’t like paying out because it loses them money – and weirdly, they are not about to take the word of someone on Sky News Australia saying that global warming stopped in 2008.
So reinsurers charge insurers more because of the increased payouts, and insurance companies pass on those costs (and in the end the fire- and flood-prone just become uninsurable):
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Do the major parties care about the cost of living in this supposed “cost-of-living election”?
Well, insurance has had the most outsized impact on inflation among all in the CPI basket of goods and services. Insurance costs should only contribute about 1.2% of the increase in overall inflation; instead over the past year they accounted for more than three times that amount.
As my colleague David Richardson noted this week, “as the world’s big reinsurers push up premiums to cover their losses from natural disasters, local insurance companies will be forced to do the same”.
Don’t let your anger turn to despair. We know from the experience of the 2019-2020 bushfires that the disaster in LA won’t change policy by the major players, nor will it change the minds of con-artist deniers. But let us not be limited by them.
The only thing that will change policy is your vote demanding a change.
Yes, protest. Yes, make your voice heard. But also know that your vote matters – climate change was the main driver of votes away from the Liberal party to the independents in 2022 – and none of that happened in “marginal seats”. And the ALP is not immune.
Throughout the campaign, be angry when you hear inadequate policy from politicians and ignorant questions from the media.
Be angry when you go to vote. Remember, every political party wants your first preference because it is worth $3.386 to them.
Just because you prefer them to the other mob doesn’t mean you need to give them your first preference and the $3.386 that goes with it. Make them earn it. And if they don’t, stay angry.
Greg Jericho is a Guardian columnist and chief economist at the Australia Institute and the Centre for Future Work
