Accelerating down the highway to climate hell
[This post supplements Chapter 12] We humans may be the most advanced form of life on Earth, and possibly in the Universe, but we are the only species that has fouled its nest so comprehensively as to threaten its own survival. Humanity has become its own worst enemy bringing upon itself an unprecedented and monumental existential emergency. So much for the grandiose label, homo sapiens (wise human) that we have bestowed on ourselves! Smart – yes; wise – no.
In his book, How to Fix a Broken Planet: Advice for Surviving the 21st Century, Julian Cribb, describes the emergency in erudite detail. The emergency, he explains, comprises 10 inter-connected crises, all of our own making. How to Fix a Broken Planet is a disturbing book, but it is also a hopeful one. It explains (also in erudite detail) how each of the crises can be effectively addressed – providing we have the wit, wisdom and will to do so.
Arguably, the most urgent of the crises, and one that is being emphatically announced by extreme weather events, is the warming of the planet. Earth’s temperature has risen by an average of 0.06° C per decade since 1850, or about 1.10 C in total. The rate of warming since 1982 is more than three times as fast: 0.20° C per decade.
At this rate, global warming is on track to produce hothouse conditions that will make the planet unliveable by 2100, if not before.
There is no mystery about the reason for climate warming. It is the increased concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the Earth’s atmosphere. These so-called greenhouse gases trap some of the sun’s heat, producing a blanketing effect that keeps the Earth’s surface warmer than it would otherwise be. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, and especially in the last two decades, the loading of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased at an unprecedented and accelerating rate.
António Guterres is fully but sadly justified in saying: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
World population growth accounts for part of this increase but it is driven mainly by excessive and wasteful consumption in the world’s richest countries. Ten of these countries are responsible for 50% of the world’s total annual emissions of greenhouse gases.
As the driest and flattest continent, Australia is particularly vulnerable to climate warming, the consequences of which for the Australian way of life and for our national security, health and unique ecosystems are, in the words of Professor Joëlle Gergis, profound and immeasurable.
And Professor Joëlle Gergis should know. She is one of the world’s top climate scientists and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) author. Her recent publication, Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future; Quarterly Essay 94, is compulsory reading for anyone seeking an authoritative, readable and uncompromising account of the climate crisis and why people are not appreciating the need to respond urgently.
Despite topping the list of countries threatened by climate warming, Australia sits among the countries least concerned about it. A Griffiths University 2023 survey of 4000 people showed that, while 82% of Australians think climate change is real, only 15% think it is a serious problem now or will be in 2050 (34%).
It is possible that Australians are even more relaxed about climate warming than the figure of 15% suggests. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communications (YPCCC) recently surveyed over 100 countries using a questionnaire that identifies six distinctive responses to the climate warming crisis:
- Alarmed – are the most worried about global warming and the most likely to engage in pro-climate action
- Concerned – are also worried about global warming but view it as a less serious threat and are less motivated to act
- Cautious – are uncertain about global warming, are not very worried about it and are less motivated to act
- Disengaged – are disconnected from the issue and rarely hear about it
- Doubtful – question whether global warming is happening or human-caused and are not worried about it and motivated to act
- Dismissive – reject the idea that global warming is happening and are highly likely to oppose climate action
The YPCCC survey figures for Australia, the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse cases and the third-largest exporter of fossil fuels, and for the USA, the second largest total emitter, are troubling and telling, especially when compared with those of other relatively high greenhouse gas emitting countries, such as India and Mexico:
These and others figures from the YPCCC survey show that, compared to others of the top emitters (15 countries, excluding Russia, China and Iran), the USA and Australia are among the countries with the lowest proportion of alarmed or concerned citizens and the highest proportion of citizens in the doubtful and dismissive categories.
This finding goes a long way towards explaining Australia’s shamefully irresolute efforts over the past two decades to rein-in its greenhouse gas emissions. It indicates that there is no strong political incentive for a governing party, Labor or the Liberal-National Party Coalition, to heed the science and to make the rapid and total elimination of greenhouse gas emissions an enduring and bi-partisan commitment.
With almost as many climate warming sceptics and deniers as there are alarmed and concerned voters in Australia, it has been electorally safe for the major parties to neglect the climate warming crisis. In fact, in different ways they have managed to oversee a small increase in Australia’s direct carbon emissions as well as the maintenance of our status as one of the world’s leading fossil fuel exporters. Ironically, this status gives Australia the potential to be a major influencer in relation to the fate of fossil fuel usage worldwide. Consider the positive impact it would have on the world’s thinking and action about climate change if Australia announced a firm 10-20 year timeline for phasing out all of its fossil fuel production.
But such action seems unlikely. Climate change action in Australia remains a political battleground where the primary focus of the two major parties is on winning the war, not the future well-being of Australians.
The resulting situation is neatly summed up by Ross Gittens, one of Australia’s most respected economic commentators: You’ve got a Labor party that cares about climate change but is hastening slowly, versus a Liberal Party that only pretends to care and whose latest excuse for doing nothing is switching to nuclear power. (Sydney Morning Herald. March12, 2025)
While it might be argued that Gittens’ assessment is tainted by political partisanship, Professor Gergis’ scientifically informed observations lead her to the same conclusion:
Although some good ground has been made, particularly in legislating Australia’s net zero by 2050 emissions target, scaling up support for renewable energy and placing tighter restrictions on industrial emissions, the federal government’s actions still don’t reflect the urgency of the planetary-scale crisis we are in. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising and enormous fossil fuel projects continue to be approved to meet domestic and international demand.
This prompts her to ask: So, as this fateful moment [ Australia’s upcoming federal election] approaches, we need to take an honest look at the government’s climate policy and realistically assess the situation we are in. Are the climate wars really over, or has a new era of greenwashing just begun?
If it has, it must be stopped. The science is irrefutable: carbon emissions are overheating our atmosphere with increasingly catastrophic consequences to life and property. There is no debate about what must be done: To survive as a species, we must end the use of fossil fuels. Not overnight. But at a minimum, agree to phase out fossil fuels and immediately end the exploration, production, and sale of new coal, oil, and gas.
Peter McKillop, journalist, founder and editor of New York-based Climate & Capital Media, finds it difficult to regard as anything less than a crime against humanity the rejection of this goal in favour of deliberate action that increases fossil fuel production.
He confronts us with the challenging proposition that wilfully increasing fossil fuel production, which will eventually bring suffering and death to millions, belongs in the same category of unconscionable human behaviour as genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery and the denial to First Nations peoples of their freedom and right to self-determination.
If deliberately engaging in climate-damaging actions that are known to seriously imperil human life is not to be regarded as a crime against humanity, it is arguably a crime of another kind – “climate homicide”. The case for the crime of climate homicide is presented by two legal academics in an article published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review. The main perpetrators of the “crime” are Fossil Fuel Corporations (FFCs). After over a 100 pages of meticulous legal analysis, the two academics, David Arkush and Donald Braman conclude:
The acts committed by FFCs are like those supporting many other successful homicide convictions: the corporations disregarded serious risks that were brought to their attention and engaged in conduct that accelerated or contributed to one or more deaths. In another sense, however, the scope of the lethality is so vast that, in the annals of crime, it may eventually dwarf all other homicide cases in the United States, combined. The scale of the crime may invite some readers to think it too vast to admit to anything but a political remedy. We disagree. Acts this culpable and harmful should not be beyond the law’s reach, even for the most powerful actors in our society.
Clearly, Australia and the rest of the world cannot keep humanity accelerating down the highway to climate hell. But is there any prospect of us shifting our foot from the accelerator to the brake?
This is the question I plan to address in my next post, perhaps under the heading: “Hitting the brakes on the highway to climate hell”.
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