Taking responsibility for our emissions

September 9, 2026

Bob Brown has given us an excellent concept: that if Australia produces five per cent of global emissions, then we are responsible for five per cent of the damages caused. So, we should be giving Nepal $350 million, not $8m, towards their $7 billion in damages. We should be responsible for 4,650 of the 93,000 people affected by the disaster including 300 of the dead or missing. We should be responsible for 1500 of the 30,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this year. And if there are to be two billion climate-related deaths by the end of the century, then we should be responsible for 100 million of those.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Malcolm Fraser famously said many years ago. No, we can’t turn on the tap of Beetaloo Basin gas nor sign off on the extension to BHP’s Saraji coal mine in Central Queensland, as members of federal Cabinet did this week, without bearing responsibility for the damages that the emissions from burning the gas and coal from those projects will cause. It is simply not good enough for us to have sound policies on reducing domestic emissions if we have profoundly unsound fossil fuel export policies.