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[…] Climate-change-denying federal politicians are often part of the ‘revolving door’ pattern of Australian politics, whereby individuals enter as lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry, go on to become government ministers, and then exit politics to become directors of fossil fuel companies.

Both major parties, and even independents, have used this ‘revolving door’. Labor’s Martin Ferguson was minister for resources and energy. A vigorous promoter of fossil fuels as minister, after leaving politics he went on to the board of oil and gas company the BG Group, and to chair the advisory board of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.

The Liberals’ Ian MacFarlane is an example from the other side of the house. He too was the resources and energy minister, and after retirement became CEO of fossil fuel lobby group the Queensland Resources Council. The Independent Clive Palmer was more brazen. He didn’t use the revolving door, but was simultaneously a senator and an owner of coal assets.

But the revolving door is not used only by politicians. Far more insidious, because it is hidden from public view, is the practice of advisors moving between companies, peak industry associations, ministerial staff and senior bureaucratic roles. At worst, this revolving door allows company insiders to write legislation in areas where they have (or will have) a vested interest.

— The Climate Cure by Tim Flannery

When it became impossible to deny the impacts of its pollution, the fossil fuel industry changed its line. It admitted the irrefutable — that the climate was changing — but claimed that humans were not responsible. When the human influence on the climate in turn became undeniable, it switched to the line that while we humans might be responsible, the costs involved in fixing the problem were too high. When even that was proved false, it turned to promoting despair, promulgating the idea that it’s too late to address climate change and that nothing can be done anyway. These staged retreats have had an immense impact, their power to disempower and demoralise being a major factor in holding us back.

The most morally repugnant aspect of this litany of misinformation is that the fossil fuel industry has known all along just what the impact of burning fossil fuels would be. In 1982 a simple graph was produced by the world’s largest oil company, Exxon. It projected the increasing concentrations of CO2 that would result from a business‐as‐usual approach if it and other fossil fuel companies were allowed to pollute unchecked. The graph also correlated CO2 concentrations with temperature. Looking at where we are in 2020, Exxon’s prediction has proved to be accurate.[6]

It is shocking to think that the fossil fuel industry had begun planning its war on climate action decades ago, in the full knowledge that it would cost us our world. But that appears to have been what happened.

Learning the truth about the fossil fuel industry is confronting. We buy its products daily, and many of us have some further link with it, either through shares, superannuation or employment. A sense of outrage is mixed with guilt. How are we to respond? Christiana Figueres councils us to forgive, and move on, saying: ‘We must let go of the fossil fuel dominated past without recrimination. The process of letting go is essential, and it must be intentional. The more work we do to let go of the old world and walk with confidence into the future, the stronger we’ll be for what lies ahead.’[7]

Personally, I’m still struggling with the issue of forgiveness, particularly of those who continue to stymie climate action. But I can see that Figueres is right. We will need to reserve every atom of effort for the job ahead to have any chance of success in the battle to stabilise our climate. But as we do so, we must be severe on further efforts to misguide.

— The Climate Cure by Tim Flannery

Australia is a climate paradox, for it is rich in fossil fuels, yet exceptionally vulnerable to a changing climate, and this means that we have purchased our prosperity at terrible cost. Our political struggles to reconcile these facts have become a diamantine version of the more diffuse dilemma the world faces as it deals with the climate emergency. Perhaps as a result, the actions of our politics, citizens and corporations have embodied the best and worst of all climate actions.

The dilemma the nation faces in its relationship with fossil fuels is not new. From the earliest days of European settlement Australia has been a resource economy, and exploiting those resources has always entailed risk. Perhaps the closest parallel to our current dilemma occurred in 1938 when ‘Pig‐iron Bob’, as Robert Menzies became known, insisted on the export of iron to Japan, on the eve of World War II. Menzies, who was attorney‐general in a conservative government at the time, was affronted when trade unionists at Port Kembla refused to load ships with pig iron when they learned that the cargo was destined for Japan, where they feared it would be made into weapons. At the same time, other ships in Melbourne were loading iron bound for Nazi Germany, again with the Australian Government turning a blind eye to the weapons potential of the cargo.

Menzies accused the unionists of trying to dictate Australia’s foreign policy, and he forced them to load the ships with iron that, just a few years later, rained down on the Allied Forces in the form of bullets, artillery shells and torpedoes.

— The Climate Cure by Tim Flannery

Australians and Chinese people had taken to wearing masks, but for very different reasons — Australians because of potentially deadly smoke from the climate‐induced megafires, and the Chinese because of the new respiratory disease. Things that travel invisibly in the Great Aerial Ocean, as I’ve come to think of our atmosphere, represent a particular danger, because the atmosphere links us in the most intimate of ways.

— The Climate Cure by Tim Flannery