Any sane foreign policy would put climate risks, not China, at centre stage

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Australia’s defence and foreign policy settings are focused on geopolitical rivalry, while far greater systemic risks – especially climate disruption – receive little strategic attention.

Blinded to the greater risks, the Albanese Government and the security commentariat have spent four, unrelenting years making the case that China is the biggest threat to Australia’s future.

Defence and foreign policy, encapsulated in the AUKUS agreement, tie Australia to a nation currently engaged in what the historian Timothy Snyder calls “Superpower Suicide”: “a systematic undoing of American power by Americans” in which “fighting a war for no reason we can name, losing it, and covering our defeat with genocidal and apocalyptic propaganda” had led to ”rapid and catastrophic decline as the result of specific choices in the last year”.

Energy security is now inseparable from national security. Australia has options, but they’re being neglected

 by Adm Chris Barrie & Ian Dunlop, first published at The Sydney Morning Herald 

Camels flee a burning oil well during the first Gulf War, Kuwait, 
1991. Photo: Steve McCurry

Just as the war on Iran dents oil production, drives up petrol prices and ricochets around the global economy, Thursday’s fire at the Geelong oil refineries causes even more domestic pain. The disturbing energy vista only heightens the need for a far faster transition to renewables and widespread electrification.

The fragility of fossil fuel supply lines and our reliance on them is now obvious, yet the newly released defence strategy downplays the strategic consequences of Australia’s fossil fuel dependence. The strategy fails to fully recognise how Australia’s expanding coal and gas exports are perpetuating a cycle of fossil fuel addiction, undermining our long-term security and claims to regional leadership.

Has climate policy-making gone completely off the rails?

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Has climate policy-making gone right off the rails? That question pops into my head with increasing frequency these days, most recently when I glanced at a Guardian headline: ‘Daunting but doable’: Europe urged to prepare for 3°C of global heating.

The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change has a new report,  Strengthening resilience to climate change recommendations for an effective EU adaptation policy framework,  and the story quoted Board member Maarten van Aalst saying that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit… It is a daunting task, but at the same time quite a doable task. It’s not rocket science.”

"Sustainable" aviation? Qantas's climate policy is heading for a crash landing

by Mark Carter

Rising fuel costs and disrupted flight paths, a consequence of the unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran by Israel and the US, are not the biggest risk to Qantas’s business. 

Its dependence on fossil fuel is. The harsh reality Qantas faces is that in less than five years it must cease flying completely if it is to stick to its stated aim of helping prevent 2ºC or more of global warming. 

Nothing confirms the level of risk associated with Qantas’s "sustainable aviation" claims more than this threat to its ongoing operation, exposed in a new report from Flight-Free Australia, “Brace for impact! Qantas’s climate crash flightpath”. 

Silence facilitates climate dis-information, and the government is complicit

By David Spratt

A shorter version of this article was first published at Pearls and Irritations.

The US–Israel war on Iran and another oil crisis has again highlighted the need for Australia to accelerate the transition to renewable energy and electric transport and sustainable industrial processes, and to phase-out the coal and gas export industries. At the same time, anti-renewable-energy and climate-change-scepticism dis-information campaigns have made inroads in Australia. 

In the face of a barrage of climate dis-information, silence from those who should be countering it constitutes an own goal: a boost to the dis-information campaign. 

As the Senate Select Committee inquiry on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy approaches its final report, questions must be asked about the Australian Government’s response to climate dis-information.  Is it using its unparalleled media power to educate Australians about accelerating climate change and the urgent need for a complete renewable energy transition? 

Fossil fuel dependence and climate disinformation are now Australia’s biggest threats. Power must be wrested back from big tech, say former defence leaders

Download the report

A former Chief of the Australian Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie Retd, has called for legislation to regulate, and if necessary break up, the digital-tech monopolies that are now enabling an information war threatening Australia’s future and undermining its ability to respond to escalating climate disruption.

Monopolies and duopolies can exercise dangerous market power and political power, including in technology, in the media and social media, and in communications. Anti-trust laws were first enacted in the USA in 1890, and resulted in companies like AT&T and Standard oil being broken up. 

Adm Barrie, a member of the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, was launching a new report, “The climate disinformation war: How to fight back for Australia’s democracy and security”.

This comes as the Federal Parliament’s Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy is due to release its final report this week, reflecting increasing attention on the role of disinformation in shaping Australia’s climate and energy policy.

Former defence leaders say oil wars threaten our security, and climate change deepens the danger

By Ian Dunlop and David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations  

View the Open Letter

In full-page statements in the national media today, nineteen Australian security practitioners and former Defence leaders have published an Open Letter on why Australia’s dependence on fossil fuels is a critical economic and security vulnerability.  

Published in the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald, the letter’s signatories include Admiral Chris Barrie, the former Chief, Australian Defence Force, Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO, Deputy Chief, Royal Australian Air Force (Retd), Cherl Durrant, the former Defence Director of Preparedness & Mobilisation, and Brigadier Michael Bond CSC & Bar, Australian Army (Retd). 

 They say that protecting Australians by accelerating the renewable energy rollout is now a security priority: 

 “We call on the Australian Government to accelerate the transition to clean, domestic energy. Rapidly expanding renewable energy — including wind, solar, batteries, hydro and renewable fuels produced in Australia — and electrifying our transport system with home-grown energy will strengthen Australia’s security, reduce exposure to global energy shocks and help limit the escalating risks driven by climate change.”

Major conflicts in Ukraine and in the Middle East — including the Suez crisis, two Arab-Israeli wars, the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war of 1991 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the USA  — have all caused energy supply and economic shocks. The consequences are rising food prices, higher transport costs and potentially severe economic disruption. Today, with the Israel/US/Iran conflict, we face another oil shock, possibly far worse than its predecessors. 

Authoritarianism is undermining climate action – and time is running out

 

Climate emergency briefing: Impacts, risks and key actions 
for Australia in the age of authoritarianism 
is published today by the Breakthrough 
National Centre for Climate Restoration. 

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

The global rise of authoritarianism is weakening climate governance just as warming accelerates and tipping points draw near. This failure now poses a direct threat to our future.

Authoritarianism is stalking nations and global institutions, often allied with climate scepticism and denial. This has weakened climate governance, most notably in the United States. In Russia and the Middle East oil and gas producers, climate denial-and-delay and authoritarianism co-mingle.  And climate barely rated a mention at Davos this year.

Climate hot takes on 2025

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

• ClimateGenn podcast:  2025 In Climate Review: AMOC, Overshoot & Emergency Briefings with Guest David Spratt

Scientific evidence in 2025 showed global warming accelerating faster than expected, while emissions continued to rise and climate policy lagged dangerously behind physical reality.

Climate warming is a field of fast-changing physical realities – in many cases beyond scientific expectations – and gob-smacking new flood and heatwave and fire extremes, month after month, enhanced by a heating climate. And we are now ending a year when climate denial reached new peaks in the American Presidency and within our home-grown Liberal-National-Party coalition.

Fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are expected to increase by 1.1 per cent in 2025 to reach a record high; the global average concentration of CO2 rose by 3.5 parts per million which was the largest increase since modern measurements started in 1957; and it is projected that fossil fuel emissions by 2050 will be barely lower than today, according to the 2025 Production Gap report (see diagram).  In fact, both oil and gas supply are projected to continue rising till 2050.

Leading from behind: How governments and advocates in Australia avoid the new climate reality

 

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).

Australia’s climate assessment fails on sea-level rise risks and vulnerable communities

 by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Australia’s first climate risk assessment has the stated purpose of guiding adaptation responses to protect people and property in a  heating climate, but what happens if the reality is worse than some low-ball projections of future risks?

Australia has just released its first-ever National Climate Risk Assessment, and some big numbers drew fairly predictable media coverage: First climate risk assessment finds 1.5m Australians at risk from sea level rise by 2050, No Australian spared and Apocalyptic report a ‘wake-up call’ on climate impacts: PM.

The global heating emergency and preventing 2°C by 2040: What's the plan?

 by David Spratt

We know where we are heading: towards a planet that will be unlivable for most people, as the human systems built up over centuries collapse. This is not news.  Nor is the evidence that we have reached 1.5°C and that, with accelerating warming, the world will hit 2°C around 2040. 

On present indications — with the fossil fuel giants and petrostates on the offensive — emissions will decline only slowly to 2050, as a number of reports on the "production gap" have indicated.  

Yet by 2°C or more, and perhaps even before then, there is the prospect of a "Hothouse Earth" scenario, a threshold in which a cascade of system changes makes warming self-sustaining, leading to conditions hotter than any experienced over the last few hundred thousand years by modern humans.

So cooling the system is must now be a key task, and that is the focus of coming online conference: The global heating emergency and preventing 2°C by 2040: What's The Plan? organised by the The Healthy Planet Action Coalition.

Podcast: Climate risk realism and the case for cooling to a livable planet

 

Listen to the podcast

by David Spratt

Recently I had the opportunity to join Arjana and Kathy from MEER podcasts to discuss climate risk realism and the case for cooling to a livable planet. We cover climate risk, tipping points, and the case for surface-based, and reversible cooling alongside deep decarbonization.

You can list on:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTQ-xjgtA5E
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/10RnCFsCUJrUqJksynlPKM  
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meer-podcast/id1735135001
• RSS: https://rss.com/podcasts/meer/2223406 

Chapters:
00:00 Intro & state of the climate 
09:23 Timelines, policy realism & trade-offs 
17:38 Risk, overshoot & stability 
26:25 Cooling options & evaluation 
35:20 Try this 
37:36 Myth vs Measurement 
42:17 Closing & resources 

MEER (surface-based cooling) develops frugal, reversible, surface-based cooling to reduce heat stress and balance Earth’s energy—alongside emissions cut:  https://www.meer.org/ 

 

 

 

 

 

A climate-first foreign policy is essential for Australia and regional security

Adm Chris Barrie (Rtd) launches the report. Parliamentarians attending the launch and supporting the report include MPs Sophie Scamps, Nicolette Boele, Monique Ryan, Allegra Spender, Kate Chaney, Helen Haynes, Zali Steggall and Andrew Wilkie, and Senators David Shoebridge and David Pocock.

  

by Australian Security Leaders' Climate Group, first published by Pearls&Irritations

A group of high-profile Australians, including Admiral Chris Barrie, have released a critical new foreign policy plan in the wake of climate change.

For too long, government policy processes have left climate action to energy or environment ministries. That separation is no longer viable. Climate change is an existential threat that demands a whole-of-government — and whole-of-foreign-policy — response.

Such a response should recognise that climate disruption is a key expression of the breakdown of the Earth’s complex physical-biological systems and of the human systems which rely on them.

Decision-makers should recognise that climate change is only one among a number of existential threats which now confront humanity as a result of our unsustainable management of the planet, all of which must be addressed, though climate arguably requires the most urgent action.

Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment has been a long time coming

by David Spratt

The Australian Government’s soon-to-be-released first National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA), which will be focused on domestic climate risks, has received some recent media coverage here and here.  Here is the story on the long evolution of the NCRA and what to expect.

Australia has never had a comprehensive climate risk assessment.  It has been a glaring omission because such assessments are a necessary basis for efficacious climate mitigation and adaptation policymaking.

In 2021, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG), a group of former defence and security leaders, proposed to the Labor opposition (and the Morrison Government) that a comprehensive climate risk assessment be undertaken as a matter of urgency, and this was included in the ALP’s 2022 election platform. The case was made in an ASLCG report, Missing in action.

Climate intervention in the thick present

 

by Anni Pokela, first published at operaatioarktis

Anni Pokela is a founding member of, and srategist for, the Finnish group Operaatio Arktis, a youth-led project that works for preserving Arctic Sea ice and preventing the crossing of Earth's tipping points. This is the text of a speech she delivered  at St. John's College, Cambridge as part of the Arctic Repair Conference in June 2025.

About 4 years ago, I was being escorted to a police van for protesting with Extinction Rebellion Finland. We had closed down a main road in central Helsinki and demanding that the Finnish Government hasten their climate action.

I had previously not been at all into the climate movement or environmentalism. As a teenager I felt like maybe that wasn't trendy enough or punk rock enough – and then came Extinction Rebellion. They spoke about climate impacts in a way that I'd never heard before. They were really concrete about it: they talked about death tolls and diseases and the horrible violence we are facing. 

 

And so to this day I think the fear of death is what inspired me into climate action. Pretty self-centered and grim, now that I think about it.

 

But my point is that I didn't feel climate anxiety. I felt climate grief, and climate rage. I wanted to have a kid in the future, and I was so angry because I felt like that had been taken away from me. It wasn't hope that got me to act. It was despair.

Will Australia's first National Climate Risk Assessment be more omission than commission?

 

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

The Albanese Government will soon deliver Australia’s first domestically-oriented National Climate Risk Assessment, which was due in December 2024. Will it describe the full spectrum of climate risks Australians will face in the future, or be marred by a poor approach to risk analysis, bureaucratic incompetence and a limited vision?

In mid-2022, shortly after assuming office, the Albanese Government ordered a climate and security risk assessment, in line with a pre-election commitment. The analysis was undertaken by the Office of National Intelligence and delivered to the government in late 2022. It focused on the region and did not specifically cover domestic risks. Since then, the government has barely said a word about the ONI findings or about climate-security risks, has not released the analysis in any declassified form and has indicated it does not intend to do so.

The 1.5 degrees climate advocacy conundrum

Breakthrough has just released a new discussion paper, Warming has reached 1.5°C. What does that mean for climate advocacy? This blog is part 3 of the paper, on the 1.5 degrees Celsius conundrum.

by David Spratt

1.5°C has become the policy-making target 

Until 2015, climate-policy making and advocacy was focused on the 2°C goal, which was seen as appropriate to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (Article 2 of the UNFCCC). As an aside, how was 2°C ever considered a reasonable goal? Answering that question — it wasn’t science-based, but first proposed by an economist — may provide insight into why 1.5°C isn’t either. 

At the Paris COP in 2015, the overarching goal adopted was to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”. Since the Paris Agreement, the focus of advocates has been 1.5°C.

How bad can climate damage get? Worse than you imagine

By David Spratt, first published at The Canberra Times

How bad can climate damage get? Worse than you imagine, if Australians’ recent experience of more extreme weather and natural disasters — driven by a hotter climate — are an indication, because the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future. 

Civil engineer Alan Hoban says flood maps around Australia drastically underestimate the impact climate change will have on rainfall due to conservative assumptions about how fast rainfall intensity will increase. “Very few flood maps in south-east Queensland, or even Australia, yet account for these changes,” he says. 

James Hansen and the scientific contest about accelerated warming: 2025 is the crunch year

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls and Irritations

The record-breaking warming years of 2023 (1.5°C) and 2024 (1.6°C) were above expectations and shocked scientists. Their responses and the subsequent research are a good example of how quickly the physical reality is changing, driving new and contested understandings.

In late 2023, as global and ocean temperatures soared, the most upfront assessment came from Zeke Hausfather: “Staggering. Unnerving. Mind-boggling. Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.” It was a widely-shared view, with responses such as “unprecedented” and “frightening”. “We’re not as aware of what’s coming as we thought we were,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick of the University of NSW.

As well, the decline in Antarctic sea-ice extent was much greater than model projections, leading Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center to exclaim: “It's so far outside anything we've seen, it's almost mind-blowing.” The same was true for North Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs), which were literally off the chart.