What can be done?

November 11, 2025

What can be done about the “Conclave of the Pernicious”? COPs have been increasingly co-opted by fossil fuel companies, their apologists, and those who are unapologetic. The big four — US, China, Russia and India — who could make a huge contribution if they cared to, are absent. Though it must be said that China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, also leads the world on renewable energy, installing more wind turbines and solar panels last year than the rest of the world combined.

Australia believes it has good credentials, even as we continue to cave to those same fossil fuel interests. We are in danger of succumbing to the hype, misinformation, greenwashing and manufactured anxiety about “living standards” falling due to the energy transition and denying what is on the horizon.

Most of the damage wrought by global heating, as reported in The Lancet, is not occurring in wealthy nations yet (though they have not been totally immune from “unprecedented” weather events). Perhaps the reality (and costs) of climate change has to impinge on the daily lives of the affluent so that anxiety about the stockmarket will be replaced by a more urgent attention to our existential crisis.