Taken together, governments now plan even higher levels of coal production to 2035, and gas production to 2050, than they did in 2023. Planned oil production continues to increase to 2050. Source: Production Gap report 2025
by David Spratt
[This is an extract from Climate catastrophe: Is rapid cooling now essential?, published by Arena.]
‘To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticise power, because there is no basis on which to do so’, wrote Timothy Snyder, a historian of Europe and fascism, in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017). ‘If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights’, he added.
And one of those great spectacles is climate politics, and the fossil fuel industry’s deep pockets.
According to Minister Chris Bowen, climate is a good news story of wind, solar and batteries, and jobs, clean hydrogen and Australia as a clean energy superpower. Ask him about faster-than-forecast physical impacts, accelerating warming and imminent tipping points, and he will respond that Australians don’t want bad news or climate fear. The pattern is very clear in Bowen’s speeches, media and parliamentary performances (Spratt, D., ‘The Albanese government has created a climate vacuum, and we will pay the price’, Pearls and Irritations, 25 July 2024).
Likewise is the Albanese government’s post-science climate narrative of expanding coal and gas export industries, while avoiding conversations about escalating climate impacts and humanity’s collision course with a hotter world that will lead to economic, social and security collapse.
Think about it: is there a single occasion where any minister in this Australian government has spent a significant amount of time in a speech or any media performance explaining to Australians in some depth and with some scientific rigour how devastating future climate impacts will be, and their plans to mitigate the risks?
And who is seriously calling out the government for quite consciously failing to talk about the greatest threat to Australians’ future? Not Australia’s big climate advocacy organisations. In the first 18 months of the Albanese government, those advocacy groups’ strategy was one of no sharp criticism of the government, supposedly to give it time and space to do good things. And that worked out well.
There is no evidence that ‘hope’ narratives work better than ‘fear’ narratives when combined with a solution and a personally relevant path of action. Meta studies of public health promotion, such as on AIDS, smoking, exercise and COVID-19, show the value of pushing people’s buttons on the bad possibilities, when linked to efficacious actions that provide personal agency, such as safe sex, ringing the Quitline or getting vaccinated. Greta Thunberg and Roger Hallam triggered the education and mobilisation of more people than any lopsidedly hopeful brightsiding strategy ever will do.
The Australian government has worked overtime not to educate, let alone lead, Australians in understanding the threats that have arrived ahead of (scientists’) schedule. In mid-2022, the newly-elected government commissioned a regionally focused climate and security risk assessment from the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), which was delivered in December of that year to the National Security Committee of Cabinet. It was immediately suppressed by the Prime Ministers’ Office, apparently because it was a brutally frank assessment, with ministers saying that they had never heard anything like this before (surprise!).
The ONI report remains classified, and most members of parliament have not seen it, though a few Teals and independents were briefed on 9 December 2024, when the government thought it might need their support after the 2025 election. Senator David Pocock, who was at the secret briefing, told the Saturday Paper in March 2025 that the ONI report is ‘frankly terrifying, what our national security agencies are telling us is coming, and the government is not acting… we’re woefully underprepared for what’s coming’ (Spratt, D., ‘Government refuses to articulate ‘frankly terrifying’ security risks’, Pearls and Irritations, 18 March 2025).
Likewise, the domestically-focused National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA), which was due at the end of 2024 and was yet-to-be-released in September 2025. The assessment’s initial scenario of 1.5‒2°C by 2050 was abandoned after it was flushed out in Senate estimates and demonstrated to be way out of date. In August 2023, I described the NCRA’s interim (first pass) report as ‘poorly conceived, won’t do the job and should not proceed in its present form’(see Spratt, D., ‘Are we failing to see the wood for the trees on climate risks?’ Pearls and Irritations, 6 August 2023). It was looking at risks in silos, from the bottom up rather than systemically; the assumptions were too conservative; and the method was narrow. Now, there is a risk that the NCRA will surround warming scenarios of 1.5°C, 2°C, and 3°C with ‘uncertainty’ about their timing, thereby obfuscating the current physical reality that warming has already reached 1.5°C, fifteen years ahead of IPCC projections.
Last year, a parliamentary select committee chaired by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi reported on the impact of climate risk on insurance premiums and availability (Select Committee on the Impact of Climate Risk on Insurance Premiums and Availability, November 2024). Faruqi has drawn attention to the 2025‒26 budget overview document as reflecting the government’s aversion to talking about climate risk: ‘It was really telling that the overview has an entire section on disaster recovery and rebuild, which does not mention climate at all. In fact, the whole 64-page budget overview does not mention the word climate’ (see ‘Your house is becoming uninsurable due to climate risks’, Crikey, 31 March 2025).
By and large, the hope-over-fear narrative is echoed by Australia’s large, professional climate advocacy organisations, who cheer-squad for renewables whilst shying away from an informed conversation about escalating climate and security risks and the need to revise their strategy in the light of accelerating warming, which has shocked scientists and left policymakers living in a world of make-believe.
These organisations do not have a deep engagement in the rapidly-worsening scientific realities of climate disruption, but instead habitually fall back on the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a venue where politics and science collide, where petrostates defend their interests, where risks are understated, and the outcomes are systematically conservative and scientifically reticent (‘Is scientific reticence hindering climate understanding?’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 12 March 2025).
In many climate-focused NGOs, rigorous scientific analysis appears to play second fiddle to marketing imperatives and the edicts of communication managers. Those advocates built a major campaign to ‘Stop Adani to save the (Great Barrier) Reef’, knowing full well that there was no scientific basis to the claim and that the Reef was stuffed, with or without Adani.
Another case is the ‘wicked problem’ of the aerosol ‘Faustian bargain’, which appears not to play any part in their advocacy thinking. A by-product of burning fossil fuels are sulphate aerosols, which have a strong, short-term cooling impact (via cloud formation and sunlight reflection) of 0.5 to 1°C or more, and which has been temporarily ‘masking’ some warming. Aerosols are short-lived in the atmosphere, and are removed as acid rain, which has far-reaching adverse effects on human communities and ecosystems. So there are good reasons to reduce aerosol production by ‘cleaning up’ emissions, that is, reducing the use of high-sulphur fuels such as coal and shipping fuels. This has been done at scale in China, and by the World Maritime Organisation mandating cleaner fuel policies, for example.
But doing so has revealed the ‘Faustian bargain’. The short-term impact of reduced aerosol production is an acceleration in the rate of warming. New research shows that China’s aerosol cleanup is likely a key contributor to recent global warming acceleration sufficient to explain a majority of the rise in the global warming rate since 2010 (‘China’s aerosol cleanup has contributed strongly to the recent acceleration in global warming’, Research Square, Feb 19 2025). Researchers also say that without aerosols, the global warming we see today would be 30–50% greater, and that over the next 20 to 30 years they may add as much as 0.5°C to global warming as their production decreases (‘Aerosols must be included in climate risk assessments’, Nature, 21 November 2022). While a rapid reduction in fossil fuel emissions is a key climate mitigation action, the aerosol dilemma casts doubt on how much mitigation will ameliorate warming over the next few decades.
On energy transition issues, there appears to be a widespread assumption that the take-up of renewables is decarbonising the global economy. Now renewables are key, but focusing on energy supply is not enough; the surge in energy demand is a catastrophe. Physically, emissions from fossil fuels are still rising, which means that globally renewable energy is not yet replacing fossil fuels, but rather adding to the fossil-fueled energy supply. The fossil-fuel intensity of production is decreasing, but energy demand is increasing rapidly for sectors such as AI, crypto and cloud computing, electrified transport and heating, and in India and China. So, in absolute terms, the world is not yet on a pathway to decarbonise. Big oil and gas are fast backtracking on reduction commitments, and planning increased production to 2050. Big banks and big business are abandoning previous climate net-zero commitments, in part because the COVID-19 mobilisation and the Ukraine and Middle East wars have reduced focus on climate policy. There is the prospect of global emissions dropping only 10–20% by 2050 on the current policy path, according to the UN (Production Gap Report 2023, UN Environment Programme, November 2023).
But it is rare for climate advocates to speak about these fundamental realities. Or to recognise the new climate time-bomb which has materialised: accelerating climate heating and faster-than-forecast impacts have mugged climate policymaking and advocacy. In practical terms, the world has already reached the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C, fifteen years earlier than the IPCC forecast just seven years ago (‘Warming has reached 1.5°C: What does that mean for climate advocacy?’ Breakthrough, 29 July 2025).
Fifteen years in the emissions-reduction timeline have just gone up in smoke, and so have those remaining ‘carbon budgets’, which were largely an artifice of integrated climate modellers’ imaginations. So the Paris global net-zero-by-2050 goal now needs to be global net-zero-by-2035, and a more stringent goal for high per-capita emitters, including Australia. But there is almost no public conversation about this.