If Australia is to use and produce more fossil fuels than we are now, the rest of our climate policy amounts to tinkering at the edges, writes Rod Campbell.

It’s hard to believe in 2024 we still have Governments pretending we need to expand fossil fuel production to “help tackle climate change”.

While social licence for fossil fuels has slipped, gas seems to be clinging on longer than the rest.

With the Future Gas Strategy, government policy has entered a backward land where logic is reversed, writes Stephen Long.

They knit, they sing, they even have their own ‘nannafesto’, and these unlikely environmental activists are a force to be reckoned with.

Can you imagine Qatar or Saudi Arabia panicking about a gas or oil shortage?

You can’t prevent people from having bad ideas and you can’t prevent people from talking about their bad ideas.

Despite a decade-long commitment to establish the Great Koala National Park, the NSW Labor Government is delaying its creation so that the forests can be exploited for carbon credits. It’s a decision with disastrous consequences for the koalas, and the climate.

Gas extraction is often lauded by the industry as the ‘backbone of the Australian economy’, but the actual revenue collected from one of the main taxes on the industry falls staggeringly short of what most people would expect. Find out why this is the case – and what we can do to fix it.

While last year’s robodebt royal commission exposed a shocking lack of ethics among senior ranks of the Australian public service, the systemic condition still largely seems to be regarded as an aberration.

Jigsaw Farms, long held up as a shining star of carbon neutral farming, is no longer carbon neutral, although only just. 

Rather than backing cheap and abundant renewable energy, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has gone all in on nuclear.

Nuclear energy really is remarkable.

When AUKUS was announced, the ANU was quick off the mark to cash in.

2023 has shown us a planet on the brink of collapse. Cyclones, heatwaves, catastrophic floods, fires and landslides have killed people, destroyed ecosystems and decimated communities. And yet Australia is still yet to repair all the homes lost in the Black Summer bushfires of 2020 or the devastating Lismore floods of 2017 and 2022. No

One of the key things about this whole problem is that the only way to solve it is that we need to rapidly reduce and phase out fossil fuels. That can’t wait a decade. We need to be making substantial reductions this decade.

The Australia Institute will do everything it can to keep fossil fuel expansion, fossil fuel subsidies, dodgy offsets and much more on the agenda ahead of the next federal election.

What would an evidence-based response from the government to climate change look like? And how can we build integrity back into our democratic system? At the Climate Integrity Summit 2024, our first panel discussed the power of political leadership and evidence-based policy. Featuring: Bernie Fraser, Former Governor, Reserve Bank of Australia Dr Monique Ryan MP,

Removing the fossil fuel industry’s influence on politics and parliament is how we change the story and restore trust in government decisions.

“The growing interest in ESG is driving the biggest change to financial markets and financial reporting and disclosure standards we’ve actually seen in a generation. We’ve got to make sure that we are ready to meet the challenge of that change at every step of its development.”

Words are only as good as the actions that follow. There’s no integrity in climate ambition without commensurate climate action. Having integrity means keeping our word, and that includes countries like Australia and other members of the G20 transitioning away from fossil fuels and doing so now.

Today, we stand at the crossroads of opportunity and crisis.

I am starting my address to this year’s summit in the exact same way that I started last year’s address. Because it is just over a year since I delivered these same words, which aren’t actually my words. They are the words of our Climate Change Minister, and they provide a baseline of sorts for what progress has been made in that time.

Climate integrity is a critical issue for a small atoll nation like Tuvalu, I need not remind people that Tuvalu is one of the most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change with the highest points above sea level for the entire country being four meters. But our vulnerability should not be a bargaining chip for regional security issues.

We are trying to make our voices, our knowledge and wisdom heard by those with the power and the responsibility to create change to do better. We must not give up hope. We have no more decades to make these changes.

Climate change is the greatest moral challenge that humanity has ever had to face, and for those of us who have the capacity to stop it, are we going to do it?

If we wanted to fix these things, we could. If you think that we need some complicated policy measure or some very expensive investment, you’ve been misled.

The Albanese government’s failure to back up its rhetoric with meaningful action on climate change is “very disappointing”,  according to a former President of Kiribati, Anote Tong.

Enjoy five key takeaways from Richard Denniss’ address to the National Press Club, 31 January 2024.

Carbon offsetting has received a lot of attention recently. As businesses and governments look to meet their climate targets, many are turning to carbon offsets. That is, they are paying someone else to reduce or avoid putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, so they don’t have to.