Climate Integrity (my employer) is launching a new expert legal opinion on the implications of the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on climate for Australian company directors and climate risks.

The event will be held at the State Library of NSW, on the evening of 7 May, and I’d like to extend an invitation to readers of Tempests and Terwatts to attend.

RSVP for the Event

Published last year, the ICJ Advisory Opinion was a landmark moment in international climate law. In a unanimous opinion, the ICJ concluded that countries had an obligation to prevent significant harm from being caused to the climate system. Failure to do so could amount to an ‘internationally wrongful act’ for which countries could be held responsible, potentially leading to an obligation to pay financial compensation to another State for damages caused by climate change.

The ICJ specifically called out the ongoing expansion and operation of fossil fuel industries as an example of what could amount to an ‘internationally wrongful act’. In a statement that challenges the long-term viability of continued fossil fuel use, the ICJ said:

Climate Integrity (my employer) commissioned three leading Australian barristers to answer the question: What implications does the ICJ Advisory Opinion on climate change have for Australian companies and directors’ duties?

The answer was provided in a comprehensive joint legal opinion, authored by Ruth Higgins SC, human rights law expert Jennifer Robinson, and climate law expert Zoe Bush.

You can read that joint opinion for yourself here: www.icjdirectorsdutiesopinion.org

The joint opinion finds that company directors, particularly those on the boards of Australia’s fossil fuel companies and emissions intensive industries, face heightened obligations to proactively assess and manage the risks that climate change poses to their business. Australia’s status as a signatory to the Paris Agreement and as a major producer of fossil fuels means Australian companies should anticipate stricter regulation of emissions in the future, and fossil fuel companies should be anticipating the likelihood that their business models face significant decline.

The joint opinion found:

And:

You can read the Australian Financial Review’s coverage of the joint opinion here.

Climate Integrity hopes the release of the joint legal opinion will help inform increased scrutiny of, and engagement with, Australia’s continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry, and how corporate Australia engages with the increasing expectation that it proactively prepares for a global phase-out of fossil fuels.

The event on 7 May should be an informative evening for anyone interested in climate law and how international and domestic law can intersect to amplify the risks imposed on major emitters and fossil producers. The event will hear from authors of the joint opinion, Jennifer Robinson and Zoe Bush, and will be chaired by leading international climate law expert, Fleur Ramsay.

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The judgment in the long-running greenwashing case brought against Australian gas producer Santos - published earlier this week - was, on its face, a blow to efforts to hold major fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change.

The Federal Court dismissed all greenwashing allegations levelled at Santos by the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR), finding Santos had not misled consumers or shareholders about its decarbonisation plans or status as a producer of ‘cleaner fuels'.

The judgment was largely disappointing for those seeking to hold major fossil fuel producers, like Santos, accountable through legal action. However, analysis of the judgment provides useful insight into the status of Australian climate law and the extent to which the law continues to fail to grapple with the unique and complex issues of climate justice.

The allegations of greenwashing against Santos

The ACCR alleged that in a series of corporate reports published between 2020 and 2021, Santos had made three key categories of misrepresentations that:

1. Santos is a producer of ‘clean energy’ and that natural gas provides ‘clean energy’.

2. Santos had a ‘credible and clear’ plan, based upon reasonable assumptions, for reducing emissions in line with its 2030 and 2040 targets forming part of a ‘Net Zero Roadmap’.

3. Santos could, in the future, deliver ‘zero-emissions’ or ‘clean’ hydrogen, and hydrogen with ‘no emissions in its production’, while intending to produce ‘blue hydrogen’ from fossil gas.

The case represented a first-of-its-kind legal test of the credibility of a fossil fuel company’s climate transition plans, particularly one that relies heavily on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies and carbon offsets.

Much of ACCR’s case centred on what it alleged were the unreasonable assumptions that Santos had made about its future business, including the future viability of CCS technologies, the size of the future market for hydrogen and the basis on which it claimed gas was a source of ‘clean energy’.

ACCR also alleged that Santos had made a series of material omissions from its corporate reports, including those that concealed the impacts that its plans to increase the production of gas would have on the company’s future emissions and that Santos’ plan to achieve its emissions reduction targets was heavily reliant on the use of carbon offsets.

What is the law?

While the term ‘greenwashing’ does not appear in any corporate legislation, the act of greenwashing is effectively rendered unlawful by laws that protect against misleading or deceptive conduct or representations.

Various laws protect different groups from different types of misleading representations. For instance, the Australian Consumer Law is primarily focused on protecting the buyers of products or services from misleading claims and many of the provisions of the Corporations Act are designed to protect shareholders from misrepresentations about the prospects of the businesses in which they are invested.

In many cases, a key factor in determining whether a claim is misleading is a test of whether a person or company had ‘reasonable grounds’ for making that claim. If someone doesn’t have ‘reasonable grounds’ for a claim, then the claim is likely to be deemed misleading or deceptive.

The ‘reasonable grounds’ test was considered throughout the ACCR v Santos judgment in assessing whether the gas company’s claims were misleading. Much of the court’s focus was on whether Santos had sufficient contemporaneous documentation of its decision making processes and the evidence it relied upon to make the statements it did.

What did the Federal Court conclude?

In short, the Federal Court accepted virtually all of the counterarguments put forward by Santos and found that none of the issues raised by ACCR amounted to misleading or deceptive conduct. ACCR’s case was dismissed in its entirety, and ACCR was ordered to pay Santos’ legal costs.

Gas is clean and Santos is a clean fuels company

One of the more contentious conclusions of the Federal Court judgment is the acceptance of Santos’ claim that gas is a ‘clean energy’ source and that the company is a ‘clean fuel producer’.

In finding those claims were not misleading, the court accepted that Santos had made it sufficiently clear that gas was being called ‘clean’ in comparison to other fossil fuels. The court found the ‘statement does not convey that natural gas is “clean” but that it is in relative terms cleaner than coal and diesel.’

The court concluded that a ‘reasonable member of the target audience would have understood that consumption of natural gas was a material contributor of GHG emissions’ - in other words, those reading Santos’ statements would have understood that Santos’ use of the term ‘clean energy’ did not imply that gas produced zero emissions.

The court also found that Santos’ description of itself as a ‘clean fuels company’ was not misleading, because Santos had the ambition of producing lower emissions fuels in the future:

‘the description by Santos of it as a “clean fuels company” was made in the context of its statements about the “transition to a lower-carbon future” and “the transition from natural gas to hydrogen.” That and the associated statement of Santos as a “clean fuels business” spoke of Santos’ future aims. That is, as Santos put it, the type of company that Santos wanted to be as it transitioned to net zero by 2040.’ - at [521].

A Clear and Credible Plan to Net Zero

Santos’ corporate documents outlined what it described as a ‘clear and credible roadmap’ for achieving net zero by 2040, backed up by ‘a realistic, doable plan’ and that it was a ‘realistic roadmap, real activities and a plan to achieve net zero by 2040.’

This plan was largely predicated on Santos making significant progress in three key areas: being able to maintain its level of gas production while reducing emissions, expanding the use of carbon capture and storage technologies, and substantial growth in the market for net zero emissions hydrogen. It was also heavily reliant on the use of carbon offsets to meet targets.

ACCR alleged that Santos’ plan fell considerably short of being ‘clear and credible’, and that parts of the plan presented to shareholders were contradictory to what Santos’ own analysts were recommending.

Crucially, the court held that despite calling it a ‘clear and credible’ plan that was ‘realistic and doable’, that none of these statements amounted to a promise to actually deliver the plan.

‘The impugned statements concern Santos’ long-term objectives which necessarily and reasonably remained subject to uncertainty and contingencies and dependent upon the emergence of new markets.

The target audience would understand expressions like “realistic and doable” or “clear and credible” as measured descriptors setting expectations lower than certainty. That a plan is realistic suggests that it can be achieved but not that it will be achieved.’ - at [828-829].

CEOs and Senior Executives have singificant discretion

The fluid nature of Santos’ ‘net zero roadmap’ was made clear in correspondence between senior Santos staff and its executives, and the manner by which the company produced forecasts of its future emissions and gas production.

While preparing a draft investor presentation outlining Santos’ net zero strategy, analysts within Santos produced a chart of future gas production and greenhouse gas emissions. The first version of this chart showed Santos’ future emissions rising in future years, corresponding to increases in forecast gas production.

This forecast was based on the analyst’s understanding of which projects Santos was likely to develop in the future, and the logical conclusion that increasing gas production would lead to higher company emissions.

But, when this chart was reviewed by Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher, changes were ordered. Emissions had to be flat, and so must gas production.

ACCR alleged that Santos had no reasonable grounds for assuming that both its emissions and gas production would remain flat out to 2035. Evidence showed Santos’ internal teams were forecasting increases in both metrics and the ‘flatline’ scenario that Santos ultimately published was purely based on the request from Gallagher. Internal correspondence showed that at least one analyst thought there was ‘effectively no basis’ for the flatline forecast.

However, the Federal Court ruled that this did not mean the revised presentation was misleading or deceptive. Accepting Santos’ arguments, the court concluded that it is within the remit of CEOs and other senior executives to amend the findings of their own analysts. Stating at [643]:

‘Strategic decisions about production and emissions were made by the CEO and senior executives and not by more junior employees ... Unsurprisingly, intervening strategic decisions may need to be made after preparation of the data. That is what occurred in 2020 with the development of the Targets and the Net Zero Roadmap.’

What does this mean for corporate accountability?

On the surface, the case was a victory for Santos. Companies have significant flexibility when outlining their net zero targets and climate transition plans. Companies can consider the inherent uncertainty and evolving nature of future policies, markets and technologies as factoring into what constitutes ‘reasonable grounds’ for those plans.

However, what the judgment really highlights is the extent to which ‘the law’ is a blunt tool for holding companies accountable for climate harms and delivering climate justice.

This is not a new understanding. Prior Australian climate cases have highlighted the extent to which the current law fails to adequately grapple with the evolving, complex and unique challenge of climate change. Climate litigation only emerged as a distinct area of legal practice within the last two decades.

Part of the reason for this is that the fossil fuel industry actively works to prevent the emergence of new climate law. The fossil fuel industry knows it is on the wrong side of climate justice. It is in its (short-term) financial interest to maintain the legal status quo.

It is why it attacks groups like ACCR and the lawyers that represent them. It is why companies like Santos target environmental law firms with SLAPP tactics.

Did ACCR succeed in its greenwashing claim against Santos? No.

But the judgment reinforced factual findings that the use of fossil gas is a contributor to global emissions and worsening global warming. Santos’ representations might not be misleading, but that does not mean the company’s actions are an adequate response to the climate crisis that we face, and to which it is a major contributor.

The law will continue to evolve and the pressure on fossil fuel companies will continue to grow.

Evidence of a new threat to climate information integrity has emerged in the latest batch of federal political donation disclosures. Fossil fuel interests spent more than $7 million to back groups that spread misinformation and attempted to dissuade voters from supporting pro-climate action candidates at the 2025 federal election.

This week, the Australian Electoral Commission published the details of political donations made during the 2024-25 financial year, the period that mostly covers the lead-up to the 2025 federal election. The disclosures provide insight into how the campaigns of political parties and major campaign groups were funded.

Millions in coal industry funding was provided to newly sprouted astroturfing groups – falsely presenting as grassroots organisations in support of fossil fuel projects – including groups with strong ties to the Liberal Party.

All up, fossil fuel interests gifted almost $4 million to Australia’s major parties.

There are the usual fossil fuel suspects throughout the data:

• Adani Mining donated $621,500 to the LNP in Queensland (as well as $121,000 to the Australian Labor Party and $100,000 to Katter’s Australian Party).

• The Minerals Council of Australia donated $565,000 to the Liberal Party (a further $125,000 was gifted by the Minerals Council to the Jacqui Lambie Network).

• Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting made a $204,000 donation to the Liberal Party.

• Pro-gas lobby group Australian Energy Producers made a combined $210,000 in donations, which was spread between Labor and the Coalition.

For the most part, these donations are used to buy access to politicians. While some funds are provided to political parties as straight cash gifts, companies seeking to influence policymakers will purchase tickets with inflated prices to attend exclusive dinners and become members of groups like the Federal Labor Business Forum.

Such tickets cost upwards of $5,000 per person and it is generally understood that the inflated price is a de facto financial contribution to the respective political party. In return, a fossil fuel executive can get the ear of a prospective climate, energy or resources minister.

A more detailed breakdown of all fossil fuel donations has been published by Climate Integrity. While the sums donated to the major parties remain significant, they are dwarfed by the scale of funding flowing from the coal industry into astroturfing campaigns.

In fact, coal industry funding of astroturfing campaigns that specifically targeted the 2025 federal election was almost double that of all fossil fuel donations to the major political parties.

The revival of Astroturfing in Australia

Astroturfing is not a new concept. It refers to efforts to manufacture the appearance of ‘grassroots’ or community support for a cause, industry or policy, when, in reality, no such broad-scale support exists. The term has been around since the 1980s and has referred to the campaign tactics used by pharmaceutical, tobacco and fossil fuel industries that sought to pressure governments and policymakers with the illusion of being backed by a large number of their constituents.

Advance Australia is a classic example of modern astroturfing in Australia. The group claims to have over 330,000 supporters, while it is primarily funded by a small number of very wealthy individuals. Advance Australia has sought to import Trump-style campaign tactics into Australia, and has run major campaigns against progressive politicians and opposed the Voice to Parliament. Previous analysis has detailed where Advance has sourced its funding, which overwhelmingly comes from a select group of wealthy business owners and investors.

The latest batch of donation disclosures published by the AEC adds Gina Rinehart to the list of Advance’s wealthy backers, which is perhaps unsurprising given how much Rinehart appears to idolise Donald Trump. Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting gave $895,000 to Advance ahead of the federal election. This helped to fund Advance’s campaign efforts, including a huge spend on social media advertising that spread negative messaging and misinformation about Labor, The Greens and ‘Teal’ independent candidates. Advance Australia’s social media spend during the 2025 election exceeded $1 million.

But the latest donations data revealed a potentially larger and more concerted effort by Australia’s coal industry to influence voters before the election.

Coal Australia is an organisation established and funded by the coal industry. Its members include some of Australia’s largest coal companies. Company records show it was registered in early 2023 and has four directors, each of whom is a senior executive within either Whitehaven Coal, Peabody Energy, New Hope or Yancoal – all coal companies listed as members of Coal Australia. Coal Australia’s company secretary is also the CFO of Bowen Coking Coal.

The donation disclosures show that Coal Australia contributed $7.12 million to groups with the veneer of being grassroots organisations – with names like Australians for Prosperity, Energy for Australians and Jobs for Mining Communities.

Australians for Prosperity is the most active of the three groups, and the most overtly politically aligned. Australians for Prosperity was headed by former Liberal MP Jason Falinski, and its ‘advisory board’ includes Liberal Party officials, a former president of the Young LNP and several former Liberal Party advisors.

Australians for Prosperity received almost $3.7 million from Coal Australia and in the lead-up to the 2025 election, spent $234,000 running paid Facebook ads targeting the Australian Greens, ‘Teal’ Independent candidates and the Albanese Government, according to analysis prepared by the University of Technology Sydney.

According to transparency data published by Facebook, Australians for Prosperity created and ran more than 500 different advertisements, each attacking different progressive candidates and shown to people in different parts of Australia. Some of the ads were shown to more than 1 million people across Facebook and Instagram.

On Monday, seemingly pre-empting the scrutiny it would receive following the release of the donations data, Australians for Prosperity released a statement that said:

“Unlike many advocacy organisations, Australians for Prosperity is not funded by unions, industry super funds, taxpayer-funded charities or inherited endowments.”

The statement omits to address that nearly 95 per cent of the funding received by Australians for Prosperity in 2024-25 was provided by Coal Australia. That statement was issued by Caroline Di Russo who is both spokesperson for Australians for Prosperity and the current president of the Liberal Party’s Western Australian chapter.

The other two groups – Jobs for Mining Communities and Energy for Australians - have been less active online, but received $2.36 million and $1.08 million from Coal Australia, respectively. Their remits also appear focused on advocating on behalf of mining interests, with Jobs for Mining Communities spending a further $164,000 on Facebook advertising during the election.

Energy for Australians spent $136,000 on Facebook ads, focused on blaming Labor for higher electricity prices.

The revival of astroturfing campaigns appears to be well underway. With millions flowing into these groups from the coal industry, it is likely that further campaigns and the use of social media to spread misinformation will continue.

Whether they will be successful is yet to be fully measured. There seems to be plenty of funding available to these groups to promote fossil fuel interests and campaign against pro-climate action candidates.

But in the case of the 2025 federal election, the efforts of groups like Advance Australia and Australians for Prosperity appeared to have failed spectacularly.Not only did the Albanese Government get re-elected with an increased majority, but most ‘Teal’ independents held onto their seats while the Greens gained a balance-of-power position in the Senate.

It is only through stronger donation disclosure policies and effective campaign transparency laws, that we will know the full influence the fossil fuel industry continues to exert over Australian democracy.

Thank you to RenewEconomy for publishing this piece.

What else I’ve been up to

In October last year, I took the leap out of corporate consulting and joined the excellent team at Climate Integrity as their new head of corporate accountability. We’ve had a busy start to the year, and some of the work I’ve been involved with includes:

• Climate Integrity’s investigation into an Australian crypto-carbon offsetting platform that has completely disregarded core integrity principles for carbon crediting methods. Carbon credits aren’t great in general, but this is a particularly bad example of carbon credits not being backed by real-world emissions reductions. We worked with the EDO to refer the platform to the ACCC for potentially misleading consumers.

  • Read our investigation here, and reporting in Guardian Australia.

  • Read my op-ed in RenewEconomy.

• Climate Integrity has also undertaken a much deeper dive into fossil fuel donations to political parties in the lead-up to the 2025 Federal Election.

  • Read our media release with a full list of fossil fuel donations.

  • Read the Guardian’s further reporting about the donations made by Coal Australia, with contributions from Climate Integrity.

  • Climate Integrity’s executive director, Claire Snyder, also has a piece in Cheek Media.

Travelling by train between New York City and Boston takes passengers on a snaking route through New York’s boroughs. Soon after leaving Manhattan, the journey passes through Brooklyn, into Queens and back across the East River into the Bronx, before heading out of the city.

When making that final crossing of the East River, train riders would be forgiven for thinking they’ve traversed an otherwise unremarkable rail bridge. But ask any Australian, and that bridge will be instantly recognisable as one of Sydney’s most iconic landmarks.

There, in the middle of New York City, sits the Sydney Harbour Bridge – or at least its original design, which Sydney copied, expanded and made its own.

Its name – the Hell Gate Bridge – is an unfortunate corruption of the Dutch term Hellegat, meaning “bright gate” (or perhaps a reflection of the long-held opinions that hardcore New Yorkers and Bostonians have of each other’s cities, as connected by the bridge’s rail line).

The Hell Gate Bridge sports the same “through-arch” design and predates the Sydney Harbour Bridge, with construction completed in 1916 — a full seven years before work began on its Sydney counterpart.

In recent times, the New York edition has been called ‘ugly’, ‘a good place to hide from zombies’ and ‘a crumbling symbol of urban decay’. Yet when it opened, it was lauded as an engineering triumph, and consistently described as one of the most beautiful bridges in the world.

Today, it is often ranked among New York City’s more ironic landmarks - notable for a city that has no lack of landmarks - and features in the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Christmas model train display.

And Hell Gate is undoubtedly the inspiration for the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

A note from Tempests and Terawatts

After a longer-than-expected hiatus, Tempests and Terawatts will return in 2026 to provide its usual semi-regular analysis and updates on climate science, policy and politics.

This piece is a is intended as a piece of lighter summer reading - a brief pause from the heavy and relentless climate crisis which dominated much of 2025 and which will, inevitably, continue to shape coverage in the year ahead. 2026 is already setting a frantic pace. Trump’s wild kidnapping of a world leader in pursuit of billions in oil is an early example, and no doubt it’s only start of the story.

Thank you for continuing to read and support Tempests and Terawatts. If you are not already, please consider signing up to receive future updates.

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But the setting of each bridge couldn’t be more different. While the Harbour Bridge spans Sydney’s iconic Harbour, casting shadows on landmarks that include the Sydney Opera House, the Hell Gate Bridge spans a rather less impressive part of New York.

Finding a good vista of the Hell Gate Bridge proves difficult. It connects the Queens neighbourhood of Astoria with the Randalls and Wards Islands, with the conjoined islands shielding the bridge from Manhattan. The islands themselves provide the best view of the Hell Gate Bridge but are probably the least appealing part of the otherwise dynamic and tireless New York City. The islands, bounded by the East and Harlem Rivers, are home to essential but unglamourous public infrastructure serving the city’s 8.8 million inhabitants, including public parks, a sewage treatment plant, an operating psychiatric hospital, a homeless shelter.

The Hell Gate Bridge was designed by Gustav Lindenthal, an engineer who emigrated from Austria to the United States in pursuit of a career in bridge-building. Remarkably, Lindenthal had no formal qualifications in engineering or construction, having taught himself mathematics, metallurgy and engineering concepts. The lack of formal qualifications apparently an impediment to his career in Europe, it posed no obstacle to his ability to find work in the United States. Lindenthal later played a leading role in the design and construction of the neighbouring Queensboro Bridge, which adopts a distinctive cantilever design.

In Sydney, in response to the increasingly urgent need to connect two halves of a rapidly growing city – the northern to the southern shore of the harbour – a competitive tender was run to solicit designs for a new Sydney Harbour Bridge. The tender was launched in 1922 (just five years after the Hell Gate Bridge was opened) following persistent advocacy by Australian engineer John Bradfield, the bureaucrat who ultimately oversaw its design and construction.

In its successful bid, British bridge builders Dorman Long copied and then scaled up the Hell Gate design to meet Sydney’s needs, almost doubling its span and the width of the bridge deck to enable car and pedestrian usage.Dorman Long subsequently repurposed the design for the nearly identical Tyne Bridge in Northeast England.

Collaborating with the American construction firm McClintic Marshall, Lindenthal contributed to the preparation of alternative designs for Sydney’s new Harbour Bridge. Despite his pivotal role in producing the Hell Gate Bridge design, McClintic Marshall’s ultimately rejected proposals included a more conventional and ‘less grand’ suspension bridge that would have mirrored the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges – other bridges that also cross New York’s East River.

Bradfield is credited with the design and construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but the structure is, at its core, Lindenthal’s conception — a pioneering example of long-span through-arch design.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge is the most impressive example of the design: the longest and widest of its kind and distinguished further by its dramatic crossing of Sydney Harbour and its impressive position of dominance within the Sydney skyline. It plays host to the city’s New Year’s fireworks spectacular, helping the world to kick off New Year celebrations.

Lindenthal’s aesthetically ambitious design may be maligned in New York, but in Sydney, it gets the limelight – and the fireworks - it deserves.

As Australians begin casting their votes in one of the most consequential federal elections in more than a decade, it’s a critical time to be reminded that every Australian voter has a powerful vote that matters on climate.

The second presidency of Donald Trump looms large over the Australian election - raising fears about the local implications of Trump’s attacks on democracy, the global economy, and the United States’ relationships with its allies.

But with regard to climate, the equation remains steadfastly the same - the crisis is increasingly urgent and existential, and the solutions are well understood and ready to be deployed - if only there were political initiative.

It is a common lament of voters that their individual vote has little bearing on the overall outcome of an election. In historically safe seats this can feel particularly true.

But every Australian voter gets to cast two votes at federal elections – one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate – and at least one of those could make the difference on whether Australia’s next parliament ramps-up the nation’s climate ambition or extinguishes it.

Your vote matters, especially for the climate

If you live in a marginal electorate, especially an electorate where an independent or Greens candidate stands a good chance – then you obviously have an influential vote to cast on your House of Representatives ballot.

Marginal electorates get a lot of attention from politicians because just a few votes can change the outcome. But as many of the ‘teal’ community independents showed at the 2022 election, even safe seats can become a contest when the community gets behind a better candidate.

And there are plenty of candidates contesting lower-house seats with strong climate policies. There are 35 candidates contesting House of Representatives elections that have received support from Climate 200. The Australian Greens are also contesting every ballot.

But even if you live in a very safe seat or a seat without a viable progressive candidate – your Senate ballot still provides you with an important vote to cast when it comes to climate.

In every state and territory there are marginal Senate races that will decide whether a progressive candidate gets up. Pro-climate action candidates are often in direct competition with conservatives and outright climate change deniers for their Senate spot.

Take Queensland as an example, Queensland Greens Senator Larissa Waters is seeking re-election, as is Labor’s Nita Green – both of whom have been strong voices in support of climate action. They are in a contest with former LNP senator Gerard Rennick and One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts – two outspoken climate change deniers who have spent the last six years in parliament spreading some wild conspiracy theories on climate.

Even if you lived in Australia’s safest seat – Nationals leader David Littleproud holds the Queensland seat of Maranoa with a 72-28 margin – you still have a vote in one of the most consequential Senate contests.

The Australian Greens have candidates up for re-election in every state. Independent Senator David Pocock is contesting the ACT Senate contest, and the Northern Territory Senate election is effectively a three-way contest between Labor’s Malarndirri McCarthy, the Country Liberal Party’s Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and the NT Greens’ Aia Newport. Price told an anti-renewable energy rally last year that she was ‘angered’ by the sight of wind turbines.

While the House of Representatives determines which parties form government, the Senate has equal powers to protect or block legislation, and to push amendments. No major party has commanded a majority in the Senate since the Howard government in 2004 - for more than 20 years the Senate has served as a critical chamber where the passage of legislation requires negotiation and compromise.

The stakes are very high

Does 2025 count as a “climate election”? Every election since at least 2007 has been a “climate election”. Climate change remains as important an issue as ever.

The rise of Donald Trump in the United States is a major threat to global progress towards ending the climate crisis. Trump has already sought to undermine global efforts to phase-out fossil fuels and block public investment in clean energy projects. The adoption of such policies in Australia would be disastrous.

Peter Dutton is, in effect, the Donald Trump proxy at the 2025 election. There is no escaping the fact that Australia will be much more aligned and sympathetic to the Trump-controlled United States with Dutton as Prime Minister.

Dutton is pledging to pursue a hugely costly, risky and disruptive deployment of nuclear energy – that will work to prop up the fossil fuel industry and delay the deployment of new renewable energy projects. I’ve previously spelled out The 11 ways going nuclear would be a disaster for Australia.

Dutton has also previously said he would oppose Australia’s current 2030 emissions reduction target and has not committed to announcing his own target. He is also running an election campaign that is massively funded by fossil fuel interests. The Coalition’s broader energy policy platform is incoherent and mostly aligned with those fossil fuel interests.

Labor is by no means perfect when it comes to climate policy – its own record on supporting the growth of the fossil fuel industry is poor. But there are several important policies and initiatives at stake. These include Australia’s bid to host the COP31 climate talks – which itself could put pressure on the Australian government to demonstrate greater leadership on climate, and the introduction of mandatory climate risk reporting by corporations.

A positive outcome could be a minority government that requires Labor to negotiate with a crossbench of Greens and community independents that mandates the adoption of stronger climate measures.

As a specific example, under a minority government the Greens and progressive independents could be in a position to demand the introduction of a ‘climate trigger’ into federal environment protection laws, after this year’s election.

They could also continue to push for such amendments if they collectively held the deciding Senate vote.

The Gillard government that formed after the 2010 election serves as the model of how a progressive minority government led to stronger climate measures.

The climate policies negotiated between Gillard, the Greens, and independent MPs Andrew Wilkie, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, included the carbon price mechanism. It also included the formation of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Climate Change Authority and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Those three organisations still exist today, due in large part to the Greens and Independents that demanded their creation, and the subsequent ability of Labor, Greens and later Independents to use their votes in the Senate to protect those agencies from abolition.

Using your vote to support progressive members of the House of Representatives, if there is one running in your electorate, could help prevent a Dutton government and help push an Albanese government towards stronger climate action.

Likewise, using your vote to support progressive Senators will be critical to the defence of existing climate change policies as well as the passage of good climate legislation.

Either way, no matter where you live, you have a vote that matters on climate.

A lawsuit launched by a group of Australian parents against one of the country’s largest energy companies could be about to deliver a mortal blow to Australia’s carbon offset industry and the carbon neutral certification scheme run by the Australian Government.

Climate action group Parents for Climate are suing EnergyAustralia – one of Australia’s ‘Big 3’ energy retailers and the owner of two coal fired power stations – alleging the energy company misled customers about the environmental benefits of its ‘carbon neutral’ energy services.

If successful, the case could have profound implications that ripple through the Australian market for carbon offsets and fundamentally change the way companies can promote themselves and their products as climate friendly.

In submissions to the Federal Court, Parents for Climate allege EnergyAustralia misled or deceived its customers – breaching the Australian Consumer Law - when promoting two electricity and gas products that it claimed were carbon neutral.

Advertising material produced by EnergyAustralia claimed that by purchasing “Go Neutral” branded electricity and gas services, the customer’s energy purchases would “make a real difference to the environment”, “support global efforts to address and mitigate climate change” and that the emissions associated with the products had been “cancelled out” or “negated”.

EnergyAustralia’s claim that the products are carbon neutral is based on the certification it received through the Federal Government run Climate Active program. Under the Climate Active scheme, companies can obtain a carbon neutral certification for the company itself or the specific products and services it sells by offsetting greenhouse gas emissions using carbon credits.

The case against offsets

In bringing the case to the Federal Court, Parents for Climate alleges that EnergyAustralia had misled its customers about its Go Neutral products because the carbon offsets used to secure the Climate Active carbon neutral certification were not backed by any meaningful reductions in emissions.

Principal Solicitor at Equity Generation Lawyers, the firm representing Parents for Climate in the case, David Hertzbergsays EnergyAustralia’s use of carbon offsets potentially resulted in an overall increase in emissions.

“Our case includes a simple argument,” Hertzberg said. “Burning fossil fuels creates emissions; offsets do not permanently remove them. That means that offsets cannot undo the climate harms caused by burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels always contributes to climate change, with or without offsets.”

Director of the Climate & Energy Program at The Australia Institute, Polly Hemming, says the evidence of the effectiveness of carbon offsetting remains lacking.

“The onus is ultimately on proponents of carbon offsets to show that they permanently offset greenhouse gas emissions and ultimately lead to an economy-wide reduction of emissions, and they have consistently failed to do this. Carbon markets have been around for decades and it has proven impossible to unequivocally demonstrate or verify claims of carbon neutrality using carbon offsets,” Hemming said.

“Conversely, there is a rapidly growing catalogue of independent investigations exposing fraud, misadventure and non-additionality in carbon credit projects and revealing how carbon offsets are used by industry to maintain or increase their emissions.”

Parents for Climate is seeking two key outcomes; a declaration that EnergyAustralia had misled its customers about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their electricity and gas usage, and an order preventing EnergyAustralia from making further “carbon neutral” claims about its Go Neutral electricity and gas products.

Such an outcome would have substantial consequences for the government-run Climate Active program and the Australian market for carbon offsetting more broadly. Companies would no longer be able to rely on Climate Active’s government-backed stamp-of-approval for their carbon neutral claims, and companies would not be able to make claims that products have a positive impact on the environment if they have relied heavily on carbon offsets.

“If we succeed, it will send a clear message: the era of unchecked greenwashing using so-called "offsets" is over,” Parents for Climate CEO Nic Seton said.

“Polluters will need to come clean in their marketing and develop genuine emissions reductions plans that consumers and the community expect. And government and regulators will need to catch up with guidance and schemes that propose offsetting as a decarbonisation pathway.”

“This case could raise the bar for transparency, integrity, and real impact in setting standards for any further use of carbon markets - because parents who want a safe climate for their kids won't settle for smoke and mirrors when it comes to climate action.”

The Defence

EnergyAustralia is mounting a defence to the claim, with a company spokesperson saying the company had continued to undertake efforts to reduce its emissions.

“EnergyAustralia is decarbonising by investing in and supporting assets that enable the clean energy transformation, and helping our customers to directly reduce their emissions,” the EnergyAustralia spokesperson said.

“While our focus is firmly on direct decarbonisation measures, EnergyAustralia will require offsets for the abatement of residual emissions to ultimately reach Net Zero.”

“Carbon credits are not used by EnergyAustralia to delay or diminish the work we are doing to invest in assets that will allow us to directly decarbonise our underlying operational emissions.”

In the defence filed by EnergyAustralia, the company stresses the fact its carbon neutral certification scheme was issued by the Australian Government backed Climate Active program. Additionally, EnergyAustralia argues that the carbon credits it has used to offset emissions of the electricity and gas products were “verified by independent auditors through internationally recognised standards” to ensure the credits “represent real and actual emissions sequestered or avoided.”

EnergyAustralia is, by-far, the largest participant in the Climate Active scheme, offsetting as much as 1.6 million tonnes of emissions each year. According to the public disclosure statements produced by EnergyAustralia and published by Climate Active, almost 99 per cent of the carbon credits EnergyAustralia used to offset these emissions were Certified Emissions Reduction credits, which are issued under the Clean Development Mechanism.

Despite being overseen by the United Nations, the Clean Development Mechanism has been the subject of intense scrutiny and criticism. There is a growing body of research that finds most credits did not contribute to any real-world reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This includes a study commissioned by the European Commission that found the Clean Development Mechanism had “fundamental flaws in terms of overall environmental integrity.”

Reflecting their questionable environmental value, and the ease at which projects have been able to generate vast volumes of the credits, CERs generally sell for less than one dollar per credit and have been labelled “junk credits”. Nonetheless, CERs represent around half of all carbon offset credits used by companies under the Climate Active program.

A further one-quarter of the credits accepted by Climate Active are produced under an international voluntary carbon offset scheme known as the Verified Carbon Standard. The Verified Carbon Standard has also faced criticism for overstating emissions reductions achieved by offset projects, leading to claims it generates “phantom credits”.

EnergyAustralia has ceased offering the Go Neutral products to new customers, and says it will be phasing out the product for existing customers.

Hertzberg says companies making claims of carbon neutrality could be putting themselves at risk of breaching consumer protection laws.

“We’ve seen many businesses make questionable carbon neutral claims based on carbon offsets. If our client is successful, this case would set a precedent which may discourage other businesses from making carbon neutral claims about polluting activities,” Hertzberg said.

“Our client’s hope is that this case, and legislative and regulatory intervention, will stamp out the dodgy claims. But, if companies continue to greenwash by making claims that don’t stack up to reality, they will continue to face the risk of legal action.”

Is this government sanctioned greenwashing?

In an implicit recognition of the issues facing the Climate Active program, in October 2022 the Albanese government instigated a review and potential overhaul of the design of the Climate Active program. A consultation paper released by Climate Active proposed new restrictions on the types of international carbon offsets that could be used and went so far as proposing to abandon and replace the ‘carbon neutral’ terminology used by the Climate Active scheme.

But no reforms have been implemented and with the government now in caretaker mode ahead of the election, the Climate Active scheme operates unchanged.

“A decision about the future direction of the Climate Active program is yet to be made,” a spokesperson for the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water said.

“The Australian Government is carefully considering the future direction of the Climate Active program, including how to drive effective voluntary climate action and provide consumers with confidence about business’ climate claims.”

More than one hundred companies have withdrawn from the Climate Active program in recent years, including Afterpay, Jetstar, Ovo Energy and the federal government’s green bank; the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Telstra announced its withdrawal from Climate Active alongside a commitment to make greater investments in directly reducing its emissions.

Hemming argues the involvement of the Australian Government in administrating the Climate Active scheme encourages companies to prioritise using carbon offsets, rather than investing in reducing their emissions.

“In the case of Climate Active, businesses have been allowed, and actively encouraged, by government to use carbon offsets rather than having to reduce their absolute greenhouse gas emissions in line with science. Government has also endorsed claims about these businesses being climate leaders and encouraged consumers to seek them out,” Hemming said.

“Yet it has become clear that these businesses are often not reducing their absolute emissions (some have increasing emissions), they are not climate leaders, and the carbon offsets they are using are not actually storing or avoiding the claimed amount of carbon in many cases.”

The substantive hearings in the case Parents for Climate v EnergyAustralia scheduled to start in mid-May. Parents for Climate argue a successful outcome would empower consumers and the broader community to demand companies take greater efforts to avoid producing further emissions.

A win for Parents for Climate would not be an outcome without international precedent. In 2024, a group of Dutch climate campaigners, working with the organisation Fossielvrij, successfully sued KLM Royal Dutch Airlines with a Dutch court finding the company had misled customers when it claimed its carbon offsetting measures were “creating a more sustainable future”.

“Any company that continues to rely on offsets to market their products as somehow "carbon neutral" is at risk of challenges like this one,” Seton adds.

“Parents and consumers are waking up to the fact that "carbon neutral" claims are bogus. We want companies to take constructive and responsible action to market their wares honestly and to take genuine steps to reduce pollution.”

This is the story of the POWR (pronounced ‘power’) token, a cryptocurrency created by an Australian-based company called Powerledger that promised an “energy revolution” and the “democratisation of energy”, and how that coin slipped into the world of crypto fraudsters and their pump-and-dump schemes.

This story starts in 2017, when the technology sector was obsessed with Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and the hype around blockchain was reaching a level of mania that has since only been matched by that currently directed at AI platforms.

If you believed that hype, blockchain was an all-powerful panacea that had the potential to solve all the world’s problems. The hype perhaps peaked in absurdity with the rise and fall of ‘non-fungible tokens’ (NFTs) as a means of ‘digitising and democratising’ art, earning comparisons with Tulip Mania in the process.

But in certain applications, the opportunities for blockchain technologies were very real. With its promises of revolutionising the way that energy could be traded, tracked and verified across the vast and vastly complicated energy markets, blockchain developers attracted a lot of attention from the energy sector.

Out of this buzz emerged Powerledger, an Australian-founded blockchain platform that promises to “[leverage] blockchain technology to address the pressing challenges of intermittency and grid congestion caused by integrating renewable energy into the grid”.

Its business model has perhaps never been very well explained - it was never clear why blockchain technology was necessary to solve those problems - but in 2017 there were huge sums of money being poured into cryptocurrencies and blockchain platforms. Powerledger leveraged this excitement, raising a massive A$34 million through an ‘Initial Coin Offering’ of its POWR tokens. It was reported in the Australian Financial Review as “Australia’s first crypto IPO”.

Powerledger received most of that investment in the form of other cryptocurrencies – such as Bitcoin and Ethereum – and potentially benefited further from the subsequent increase in value of those cryptocurrencies.

Cashed up, Powerledger said it would use the funds it raised to support the development of its blockchain products – including a peer-to-peer energy trading platform, and a registry for issuing, trading and verifying renewable energy certificates – as well as investing directly in clean energy projects.

The hype was substantial. In 2018, Powerledger co-founder, Dr Jemma Green was named EY’s Fintech Entrepreneur of the Year. The team was flown to Richard Branson’s Necker Island where it was named as the winner of the 2018 Extreme Tech Challenge.

Powerledger established a base in Zug, Switzerland, a town colloquially known as “Crypto Valley” due to the large number of cryptocurrency ventures that have become headquartered there.

The company attracted the interest of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which provided grant-funding to early studies for a project that deployed Powerledger’s peer-to-peer energy trading platform at a residential development in Perth. Dr Green was also featured in an ARENA-produced “innovators” podcast.

But Powerledger ultimately struggled to commercialise its blockchain technologies. It closed a Melbourne office in 2019and a pilot of the technology by Origin Energy failed to progress beyond a “desktop trial”. In 2021, The Australian reported that Powerledger had generated just $250,000 in revenue from its blockchain software.

The price of the POWR token has mirrored these difficulties. Powerledger sold the initial batch of POWR tokens for just 5 cents each. Amid the hysteria around cryptocurrencies, the price of the POWR tokens rapidly surged in value, reaching $1.65 in early 2018 and Powerledger’s “market cap” peaked at around $650 million.

But as with most cryptocurrencies, that early excitement subsided just as quickly, and the price of POWR tokens had fallen below 10 cents before the end of 2018.

The tokens currently trade at around 15 cents each, with Powerledger’s market cap now at around $85 million.

Blood attracts sharks

It is clear the POWR token issued by Powerledger was created with the best of intentions; to support the development of new technologies that would enable greater uptake of renewable energy technologies. However, its real-world applications appear limited (although, it was apparently used to run VB’s solar-to-beer swap promotion in 2021).

Due to its reduced market capitalisation and the lack of regulation and oversight of cryptocurrency markets, the POWR token is one of many cryptocurrencies vulnerable to market manipulation.

There is strong evidence that the POWR token is now being targeted as part of fraudulent “pump-and-dump” schemes that seek to defraud other crypto traders. It’s not unique in this regard, many small and mid-tier cryptocurrencies become targets for fraud. Crypto market manipulation is now a multi-billion dollar industry.

For those unfamiliar, a pump-and-dump scheme is perpetrated by traders with huge sums of funds at their disposal, who identify a target cryptocurrency and, by suddenly buying large volumes of the coin, work to artificially and rapidly inflate the coin’s price (the “pump”).

This is done with the goal of drawing in other innocent traders who are attracted by the price spike and also begin buying the cryptocurrency, believing there’s an opportunity to profit.

However, once the price has spiked, and the other traders have been drawn into the trap, the “pumpers” then rapidly sell all the cryptocurrency they amassed at the inflated price, securing a profit (the “dump”).

This dump usually causes the coin’s price to collapse again, and the tricked traders are left holding a cryptocurrency that has substantially lost value. These schemes are generally illegal, but in the under-regulated and largely anonymous world of cryptocurrencies there is little to prevent its regular occurrence.

The Power pump-and-dumps

Market data shows that such schemes may have been perpetrated on multiple occasions using the POWR coin issued by Powerledger.

A clear example occurred in January 2024, where the price of POWR tokens increased by 330% over a 4-day period, only to then dramatically collapse, shedding two-thirds of the inflated value in a matter of hours.

It was a textbook ‘pump and dump’ scheme.

This YouTube breakdown from a crypto analyst provides a good breakdown of what occurred during the January 2024 incident.

Indicators of the pump-and-dump are the sharp increase in trading activity which disappears just as quickly, the sharp rise and fall in the price, and the extent to which the trading is related to any developments announced by the company itself.

Similar spikes and collapses occurred in October 2023:

And more occured on multiple occasions in late 2021 and early 2022:

There is no evidence that the Powerledger company, or any of its co-founders or employees have done anything improper. No suggestion of wrongdoing on their part is being made in this story.

Crypto is inherently risky, and not a climate solution

There is a high general danger of using blockchain platforms as an alternative to traditional share placements – and as an investment more generally.

While Initial Coin Offerings theoretically can be used by ventures to raise funds to be invested in a range of virtual or real-world projects, cryptocurrencies are not subject to anywhere near the same level of regulation as share placements on exchanges like the Australian Securities Exchange or the New York Stock Exchange.

Ventures that issue cryptocurrencies do not have the same requirements to publish annual reports on their financial performance, and owners of cryptocurrencies may or may not have any meaningful rights as the owners of more traditional shares.

Ironically, it is the anonymous and decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies that makes the market so vulnerable to manipulation, and financial regulators are largely powerless to do anything about it.

The real-world deployment of blockchain technologies has also failed to offer any meaningful solutions to the climate crisis. In fact, they are generally working to make the problem worse. Like AI platforms, blockchain and crypto technologies demand huge volumes of computing resources that in turn drive significant increases in energy consumption.

While the usefulness of blockchain technology is debatable, its ability to drive increased fossil fuel consumption is very real.

Blockchain proponents had promised to change the world with their “decentralized, distributed, and transparent digital ledgers” and to “democratise energy”. But these promises have fallen flat.

The energy sector is still very much controlled by fossil-fuelled oligarchs.

Powerledger and its co-founder Jemma Green were contacted for this story, as was the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, but no response from either was received.

After the Albanese government spent half the parliamentary term promising to overhaul Australia’s government-run carbon neutral certification scheme - data obtained by Tempests and Terawatts shows the Climate Active program is in a state of decline.

Climate Active, it appears, is being abandoned by corporate participants and the federal government alike, and with caretaker mode now in effect, the public remains in the dark as to what reforms the Albanese government may have made to the scheme.

This week, to assess the current status of Australia’s carbon neutral certification scheme, I submitted a request to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) for data on corporate participation under the Climate Active program. The data requested included the volume of emissions offset by each participant and the types of carbon credits used.

DCCEEW declined to provide the data in a useful format and instead pointed to the 540 individual reports - all published in PDF format - for the data about each entity that has obtained a carbon neutral certification.

So, with some assistance, I have extracted and refined the latest data from these PDFs into a single, pivot table-friendly spreadsheet and hereby make this March 2025 update available for download.

This exercise is essentially an update to the same undertaking I completed in February 2023 and a link to the data from that exercise is available in the article I wrote at the time.

The high-level findings

As of March 2025, there are 540 organisations, buildings, services, products or events that have current carbon neutral certifications under the carbon neutral program.

There are some interesting and some troubling trends in the data:

• The total volume of emissions offset under Climate Active has fallen by around 10 per cent over the last two years.

• Just three companies represent more than half of all emissions offset under the Climate Active scheme; electricity retailers EnergyAustralia, Powershop and AGL Energy.

• Participants in the program still overwhelmingly rely on cheaper international carbon credits to achieve carbon neutral certification. International units represent 89% of all offset credits used.

• Concerningly, more than half (50.7%) of offsets used by companies with active Climate Active certifications were Certified Emissions Reductions generated under the troubled Clean Development Mechanism.

• Offsetters have shifted away from using Verified Carbon Units (VCUs) issued under the also troubled VERRA scheme, which has been hit with significant claims that most VCUs were not backed by real-world emissions reductions.

• Offsetters have shifted toward using more Voluntary Emission Reductions (VERs) issued under the Voluntary Gold Standard. The quality of these offsets, unfortunately, also isn’t much better.

• Australian-sourced carbon credits (ACCUs) represent just 11 per cent of carbon credits used under the Climate Active program. Even their effectiveness has come under question from a former industry watchdog.

The Climate Active program has experienced an exodus of many prominent brands, including several that had ranked amongst the top 10 largest offsetters in my 2023 analysis. This includes Telstra, the Brisbane City Council, Opal Australian Paper and Australia Post.

To its credit, Telstra announced its withdrawal from the Climate Active program alongside a commitment to make greater investments in directly reducing its emissions footprint, but many have withdrawn without making such commitments.

Other major brands have also withdrawn from the Climate Active program, including Afterpay, Jetstar, Ovo Energy and the federal government’s greenbank; the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Notably, several consultancies that trade carbon credits or advise on carbon offsetting strategies have withdrawn from Climate Active, including Pollination, Corporate Carbon Advisory, PathZero, ERM Energetics, and PwC Australia.

At a time when there is growing urgency and concern regarding the extent of corporate inaction in response to the climate crisis, falling participation in the Climate Active action could be cause for alarm. The trend may indicate that companies are re-evaluating where they direct their climate efforts. It could also be symptomatic of a broader abandonment of ESG commitments and an embrace of ‘green-hushing’.

But mounting evidence suggests that carbon offsetting regimes have done little to reduce emissions and have instead diverted investment away from more meaningful actions. So the exodus from the Climate Active program could also be indicative of the fact that the time to move on from carbon offsetting is approaching.

Did the Albanese Government abandon plans to fix the Climate Active program?

In October 2023, recognising the need to evolve the program, Climate Active announced a review of its carbon neutral certification program via a statement titled ‘We're making changes’. Within a week, Climate Active had published a consultation paper and called for submissions on how the program could be reshaped to modernise it and ‘raise the level of climate ambition and action to get certified’.

In the consultation paper, Climate Active flagged potential changes to the certification process, including restrictions on the types of international carbon offsets that could be used. In an acknowledgement of the flaws with carbon offsetting, Climate Active went so far as proposing to abandon and replace the ‘carbon neutral’ terminology used by the scheme.

“The seventh proposal is to discontinue the term ‘carbon neutral’ to describe the certified claim and to use a different term. The current trade mark would be discontinued and replaced with a new trade mark, adopting a new term. It is important the new term does not risk consumer misunderstanding by being general or ambiguous. It also needs to be meaningful and reflect the achievements of participants through certification,” the consultation paper says.

The consultation paper was a positive indication that the Albanese government had taken seriously the concerns raised about the heavy reliance on carbon credits the scheme had encouraged, and the environmental integrity of carbon offsetting more generally.

However, that is where things stalled.

The last official update came in July 2024, when Climate Active said it was considering the submissions it had received in response to the consultation paper, and that it anticipated that “an announcement about program reforms will be made later in 2024”.

That announcement never came.

In response to my query about the status of the Climate Active program, a spokesperson for DCCEEW said “a decision about the future direction of the Climate Active program is yet to be made.”

“The Climate Active program continues to operate as usual, following the Climate Active Carbon Neutral Standard,” the spokesperson told Tempests and Terawatts.

“The Australian Government is carefully considering the future direction of the Climate Active program, including how to drive effective voluntary climate action and provide consumers with confidence about business’ climate claims.”

The Federal Government is now in caretaker mode and the fate of the Climate Active program (and all of Australia’s federal climate policy) now depends on the outcome of the federal election.

The problems with carbon offsetting

The problems with carbon offsetting are well documented. The problem is not so much with the underlying concept of offsetting - there is perhaps a time and a place for emissions offsetting to aid the overall decarbonisation of particularly hard to abate industries.

However, the real-world use of carbon offsets has proven problematic. Rather than being used to account for the last remaining carbon after all reasonable efforts to reduce emissions have been exhausted - the final tier of the greenhouse gas mitigation hierarchy - programs like Climate Active incentivise the use of offsets to mitigate a company’s entire carbon footprint.

In effect, offsets serve as an easy shortcut to carbon neutrality - why invest in transforming your pollutive business when you can just purchase credits to absolve your climate impact? Compounding the issue are the incredible volumes of carbon credits being generated under schemes where weak offset methodologies are prevalent. Junk credits abound and dominate most voluntary carbon offsetting schemes. The European Union has gone so far as to ban carbon neutral claims that overly rely on carbon offsetting.

In a landmark legal judgment, a Dutch court ruled that airline KLM had misled customers about the environmental benefits of its offsetting regime, finding that its claims that flights contributed to a “more sustainable future” were not backed up by reality. Australian group Climate Integrity has initiated a similar complaint to the ACCC against Qantas and its own carbon neutral claims.

The fact that the Climate Active program is administered by the federal government is significant as it provides the program - and the certifications it issues - a certain level of heft. If it is good enough for the government, why shouldn’t it be good enough for consumers and the courts?

EnergyAustralia has made this argument in its defence to a greenwashing claim brought against it by the group Parents for Climate Action. The group has alleged that EnergyAustralia’s marketing of ‘carbon neutral’ electricity and gas products is misleading and deceptive conduct, because the heavy reliance on carbon offsets means the products do not have a positive impact on the environment.

Hearings for Parents for Climate v EnergyAustralia will be held in May, and could have dramatic consequences for the Climate Active program - and carbon offsetting more broadly - if EnergyAustralia is found liable for greenwashing. Watch this space.

Recent years have unleashed a flurry of “unprecedented” climate change fuelled disasters on Australian cities and communities. Bushfires, floods, heatwaves and drought.

Cyclone Alfred is presently bearing down on the communities of Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Byron Bay, Lismore and Coffs Harbour, and others. The impacts of climate disasters are certainly not foreign to these communities, but cyclones are a much rarer occurrence. Is the presence of Alfred this far south also attributable to climate change? Science suggests the answer is Yes.

What does the science say?

The scientific evidence is unequivocal. Recent years have set consecutive records for global temperatures. The ten warmest years on record all occurred in the last ten years. Last year, 2024, ranks as the warmest year on record, with the average global temperature increase exceeding 1.5 degrees for the first time.

I recently wrote about the advances being achieved in climate attribution science – the ability to establish the causal links between sources of greenhouse gas emissions, the warming of the planet and the devastating impacts caused by disrupted climate and weather systems.

While Alfred is far from the strongest cyclone to ever reach the Australian mainland, it is notable – and a cause of significant concern for the communities in its path – due to how far southward it has travelled. It is not unprecedented, but it is extremely rare for a cyclone to have Brisbane in its potential trajectory.

Science has long understood the link between climate change and the increased likelihood of Australian cyclones travelling further south. There are copious research papers that describe the changing climate dynamics and the expansion of the zone of potential cyclone vulnerability caused by global warming. A recently published special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns of the “poleward” shift of cyclone intensity and the overall increase in cyclone severity.

Global warming is causing tropical weather conditions to stretch out increasingly further from the equator and with it, the warm ocean conditions that support the formation of cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are encroaching on new population centres and putting an increasing number of people at risk.

A landmark report published by the Australian Academy of Science in 2021, outlines the scientific understanding of the risks posed to Australia under 3 degrees of global warming. The report concludes Australia faces more intense cyclones, and an expectation that the occurrence of cyclones will become more likely in southern parts of Australia’s east coast.

“Cyclones in the Australian region have increased in intensity but decreased in frequency over the past 30 years. Slow-moving and larger cyclones are projected in the future, leading to more extreme rainfall events and flooding. The height of storm surges and resulting coastal damage will continue to be exacerbated by sea level rise,” the Academy’s report says.

“Cyclone activity is increasing in south-east Queensland, northern New South Wales, and some West Australian sites (e.g. Shark Bay), demonstrating a southward shift.”

The shift in cyclone behaviour could be devastating

Cyclone Alfred is an example of the vulnerabilities that become exposed as climate change pushes our climate and weather systems to new extremes. Global warming is pushing the path of extreme weather events towards new population centres that have rarely – and sometimes never – previously experienced such events.

As I type, Cyclone Alfred is expected to make landfall between Maroochydore and Brisbane after being downgraded to an ex-cyclone. Despite the downgrade, more than 250,000 properties have already lost power across Queensland and New South Wales, and communities throughout both States are being ordered to evacuate. Towns across the Northern Rivers region, including Lismore, are facing their third major flooding event in the last four years.

The potential for catastrophic damage in these increasingly cyclone vulnerable regions is considerable, with even comparatively “small” cyclone events able to inflict substantial damage on cities and regions that have never before been compelled to incorporate cyclone-proofing in city planning or disaster preparedness.

Some of the impacts of cyclones are obvious: they bring extreme rainfall, sea surges, flooding and damaging winds. But some impacts are less obvious and longer lasting: flood waters can foster disease, disrupt sewage systems and contribute to failures of electricity, telecommunications and drinking water supplies.

Crucially, for cities without a history of cyclones, the potential for damage is much higher. As infrastructure and critical services have never, or only rarely, had to deal with the disruption caused by cyclones, they are generally less prepared and less resilient to that disruption.

Earlier this week, Adjunct Fellow in the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW, Dr Tom Mortlock, warned much of the future risk of cyclone impacts resides in the increasingly vulnerable southern regions.

“Tropical Cyclone Alfred is a reminder that tropical cyclones, while normally contained to north of the 25 degree parallel, can still track further south. Most tropical cyclones near Brisbane have been minor – the most damaging were Dinah in 1967 and Wanda in 1974. The 'Great Flood of 1954' – which resulted in large flooding for northern NSW and SE Queensland – was also caused by a tropical cyclone that made landfall just inside the Queensland border,” Mortlock said this week.

“While uncommon, most tropical cyclone risk actually resides in South-East Queensland. This is because there is significantly more exposure (people and assets) than there is further north, and so while the probability is lower, the risk (which is probability multiplied by consequence) is much greater.”

Insurance companies understand future cyclone risks, and it could cost you

While governments have been slow to respond to the climate crisis, corporations with money at risk have been under no illusions about the potential damage that a changing climate could cause.

As one example, Australia’s largest insurance company - Insurance Australia Group (IAG) – recognised the emerging risks inherent in predictions of more severe cyclones and an increased likelihood of cyclones travelling further south.

In its 2019 climate-related risk disclosures, IAG predicted that it would need to increase insurance premiums on properties due to the increased variability in weather and climate systems being driven by global warming.

“An illustration of this variability is the potential worsening risk of tropical cyclones impacting South East Queensland which could double at 2°C warming by as early as 2035 and triple at 3°C warming by as early as 2050. Further still, impacts at property level can vary significantly due to additional compounding effects of changes to flood risk, storm surge risk and sea level rise,” IAG’s report says.

“A temperature increase above 2°C could result in significant access and affordability issues. The increasing frequency and or severity of weather events, coupled with compounding effects of perils, may push some areas beyond affordability or indeed habitability.”

Recent analysis from climate risk firm Climate Valuation warned that as many as 1-in-10 Australian homes could become uninsurable, due to the combined effects of worsening fire, floods and cyclones.

The new normal

Unfortunately for all of us, events like Cyclone Alfred cannot be categorised as a ‘freak event’. The term is clichéd, but the scientific evidence makes clear how the risks posed by climate change are becoming very real and reflect a “new normal” – this includes cyclones reaching new parts of Australia.

It underscores the urgency of action to both limit a further worsening of the climate crisis and for measures to rapidly build protections and resilience to the climate impacts that are already locked in.

Please stay safe

If you are in a region impacted by Cyclone Alfred, please stay safe. The situation can evolve rapidly, and it is best to follow the instructions of emergency services.

Local ABC Radio stations are broadcasting emergency information. For emergency assistance call the Queensland State Emergency Service or New South Wales State Emergency Service on 132 500. The NSW SES website has further advice about how to prepare and what to do in an emergency.

With the next federal election just months away and climate policies yet again set to weigh heavily on voters’ minds, analysis of the Albanese government’s track record in cutting emissions shows progress has all but stalled. In two-and-a-half years in power, the Albanese government has achieved a slower rate of emissions reduction than those of preceding Coalition governments.

This week, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) published the latest quarterly update to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory. This will almost certainly be the last update published before the next federal election. It provides government figures for emissions through to the end of September 2024, as well as preliminary estimates through to the end of the 2024 year.

The update allows us to take stock of the progress made by the Albanese government in delivering real-world reductions to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Upon winning government in May 2022, the Labor government re-confirmed Australia’s commitment to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and strengthened Australia’s 2030 target to a 43 per cent drop from 2005 levels. Both of these targets were enshrined in the new Climate Change Act.

But, according to the latest emissions data, in the two-and-a-half years since that 2022 election, the Albanese government succeeded in reducing Australia’s emissions by just 3.1 million tonnes. This represents a 0.7 per cent reduction in Australia’s total emissions, or just a 0.6 per cent drop if emissions from land use and forestry are excluded (their inclusion in Australia’s emissions inventory has always been contentious).

That is an average annual reduction of just 1.24 million tonnes per year under the Albanese government. To put that into perspective, it would take between 355 and 426 years for Australia to reach zero emissions, depending on which accounting method you use. With 25 years between now and 2050, Australia needs to achieve an average annual cut of at least 17.4 million tonnes to get to zero emissions. That would require cutting emissions at a rate 14-times faster than has been achieved under the Albanese government.

To say it falls short of the scale of response needed in the face of the climate crisis, would be an understatement.

While Labor argues we simply need to ‘stay the course’ and reducing Australia’s emissions is akin to ‘turning a ship’ – it remains true that the Albanese government isn’t taking all reasonable efforts to reduce Australia’s emissions. In fact, the Albanese government has worked to make the task harder, by approving new coal and gas projects.

Missed Opportunities

The emissions data allows us to dig deeper into Australia’s sources of emissions and identify which areas of the economy are failing to deliver the necessary reductions in emissions.

Concerningly, progress in the sector which has been the workhorse for reducing Australia’s emissions – the electricity sector - has effectively stagnated under the Albanese government. Emissions from the electricity sector have fallen just 2.4 per cent during the term of the Albanese government - a total reduction of just 3.8 million tonnes. Critically, electricity emissions have increased in each of the last four quarters - that is across the whole of 2024.

DCCEEW attributes this increase to ‘unusual weather patterns’, which has led to lower output from wind and hydro generators and an increase in overall demand that was met by increased coal and gas generation. But it is a worrying trend in a sector that should be delivering deeper and faster cuts to emissions. The last time the electricity sector saw sustained increases in emissions was under the Abbott government.

The sector that has seen the most notable increases in emissions under the Albanese government is the transport sector. Emissions have increased by 10.9 per cent over the last two-and-a-half years, reflecting a continued ‘return to normal’ following the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to DCCEEW’s data, emissions from domestic aviation reached their “highest level on record in the year to September 2024, 16.2% higher than they were pre-COVID”. Vehicle emissions have almost recovered to pre-pandemic levels, pushed higher by Australia’s growing preference for larger vehicles, particularly SUVs. Diesel consumption has surged, reflecting the increased use of larger vehicles for both freight and personal transport.

Negligible reductions have been achieved across Australia’s other economic sectors since the last election, with no sector keeping pace with the economy-wide reductions necessary for reaching zero emissions by 2050.

This trend highlights the opportunities Australia has squandered to implement systemic changes needed for lasting emissions reductions that the severity of the climate crisis dictates.

While the Albanese government set more ambitious climate targets compared to the preceding Coalition governments, the real-world emissions reductions needed to achieve those targets will not happen in isolation from meaningful policy. Targets alone do not translate to action, as was called out by the UNEP in its 2024 Emissions Gap Report, which went so far as suggesting Australia’s sluggish climate policies put it at risk of missing its 2030 emissions reduction target.

The hard truth for the Albanese government is that it has achieved slower emissions reductions compared to those of the prior Turnbull and Morrison governments, even as the climate crisis has grown more urgent.

Responding to the data, Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt said it showed that neither of the major parties could be trusted to deliver the necessary action to cut emissions.

“With emissions this high, Labor is blowing any chance of a safer climate and even their own weak climate goals are out of reach,” Bandt said.

“Labor’s continued approvals of new coal and gas means the country can’t cut emissions fast enough, and Peter Dutton would make pollution even worse. We can’t keep voting for the same two parties and expecting a different result.”

The Outlook

In a media release on Friday, climate minister Chris Bowen said record levels of investment in renewable energy projects had been achieved and that Labor’s policies would see increased emissions reductions in future years.

“The Albanese Government’s plan is working - emissions are now lower than when the Coalition left office and renewable investment into our energy grid is at record levels,” Bowen said.

“Collectively, Australia must stay the course and continue to lift our efforts to increase these reductions to 2030 and beyond.”

According to the latest Quarterly Carbon Market Report published by the Clean Energy Regulator, emissions decline under the Renewable Energy Target and the Safeguard Mechanism are expected to accelerate in 2025. The regulator forecasts the total reductions generated by the two schemes to increase to between 72 and 117 million tonnes (compared to the periods prior to their implementation).

But these estimates do not necessarily translate into reductions to Australia’s emissions bottom line – the Regulator’s estimates are relative to counterfactual scenarios. For example, as the latest emissions inventory data show, emissions from the electricity sector increased in 2024 despite output from renewable energy generators increasing throughout the year.

Worse still – much of the projected emissions reductions under the schemes administered by the Regulator are dependent on carbon offsetting methodologies that continue to attract immense scrutiny.

Even worse still – and this is one of the fundamental failures of the first term of the Albanese government – Australia has continued to greenlight new coal and gas developments. When it comes to the metaphorical bathtub, Australia is continuing to open the tap even more, while the bathtub is already overflowing.

Comment on current US events

It would be remiss to be writing about climate policy from the United States without acknowledging the rapidly evolving and deeply concerning developments here.

As I type, the Trump Administration is moving to fire around 800 employees from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is the latest move in a series that have seen critical climate risk data removed from government websites, a reversal of US government support for clean energy technologies and a second withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement.

The dismantling of NOAA, which serves as a vital source of information and data on the Earth’s climate and weather systems, is alarming. An ineffective public weather service will simply leave the United States, and its neighbours, blind and vulnerable to future extreme weather events. No matter what your views on climate change, gutting NOAA is reckless.

We are well and truly in a new and unprecedented era of American recalcitrance against climate action that could have truly global consequences. It will be critical for groups in the US and abroad to resist the efforts of Trump and Musk to derail global climate action, just as it will be necessary for Australian voters to demand political leaders adopt meaningful climate policies at the next federal election.

A secretive network of right wing think tanks – motivated by its role in defeating the Voice to Parliament referendum - is turning its attention to Australia’s next federal election with ambitions of a Trump-style dismantling of Australian climate policy, unseating Greens and teal independents - and it’s doing it with the backing of a Liberal Party fundraising body.

The Trump Administration is currently wreaking havoc on United States climate and energy policy with the backing of a network of conservative groups. Their Australian counterparts are hoping to replicate the same level of upheaval in Canberra by supporting the election of Peter Dutton as prime minister.

As I’ve previously reported for RenewEconomy, the Atlas Network is a global collective of conservative think tanks and activist groups, which has promoted an embrace of fossil fuels and nuclear power, stoked opposition to offshore wind farms and climate denial, in addition to outright hostility to anything that they considers to be ‘too woke’. This includes any support for marginalised or vulnerable communities, and any efforts to recognise and call out the impacts of racism.

American members of the Atlas Network include The Heritage Foundation – the primary authors of the ‘Project 2025’ blueprint now being implemented, almost word for word, by the Trump administration - and the Heartland Institute, a main generator of global climate change denial.

Australian members of the Atlas Network include the Centre for Independent Studies, LibertyWorks and the Institute of Public Affairs. Supporters of these groups have sought to import American-style misinformation and astroturfing campaigns into Australia, to undermine action on climate change and support clean energy policies and to back right wing policies.

With an Australian federal election just months away, it has become imperative that voters understand the tactics and tricks that these groups are looking to deploy, especially Advance Australia – the conservative ‘response to GetUp!’ that was accused of spreading misinformation during the Voice referendum.

The misinformation tactic unfortunately worked during the referendum, and it worked during the US presidential election. With another election set to feature climate policy as a prominent differentiator between parties and Dutton promising to burden Australia with an impossible nuclear power plan, it will be necessary to recognise and call out attempts to mislead and scare voters with the misinformation that will likely be deployed by groups like Advance Australia.

Greens call out Advance in Parliament

Two Australian Greens senators brought attention to the efforts and motivations of Advance Australia and the influence of the Atlas Network during the past parliamentary sitting week, with New South Wales senator David Shoebridge and Tasmanian senator Peter Whish-Wilson both addressing the right wing activist groups in speeches.

Whish-Wilson warned of the potentially deceptive influence that Advance Australia is seeking to leverage over Australian voters – including by obfuscating its origins, funding, motivations and whose interests it seeks to promote.

“Advance campaigns pretending that it represents ordinary Australians rather than a small handful of multimillionaires and coal barons funding its work through Atlas think tanks in Australia,” Whish-Wilson told parliament on Tuesday.

“Advance claims to be financed and powered by grassroots donations, but AEC donation data shows this is far from the case. Some of the wealthiest Australians are recorded as Advance backers, having funnelled hundreds of thousands of dollars through shady holding companies to fund Advance's campaigns to destroy climate action, defeat progressive social policy and stop First Nations justice.”

“To better understand Advance, we need to understand where Advance comes from. We need to understand who is behind Advance's mission to destroy climate action, stop progressive social policy and line the pockets of billionaires and multinational fossil fuel corporations at the expense of working Australians. Advance was spun out of two existing Atlas think tanks in Australia: The Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs,” Whish-Wilson added.

Advance Australia’s elite funding sources

The Greens are right to raise attention to Advance Australia and what the group will do during the forthcoming federal election. The group has already been hit with accusations that it spread deceptive advertising during the 2022 federal election that targeted independent candidates and that it was a source of misinformation during the Voice referendum.

Political donation disclosures recently published by the Australian Electoral Commission provide some insight into who is funding Advance Australia.

As flagged by Whish-Wilson, donors to Advance Australia have included the former Vales Point power station owner Trevor St Baker, Bakers Delight co-founders Lesley and Roger Gillespie, millionaire owner of Kennards Self Storage Sam Kennard, the former Blackmores CEO Marcus Blackmore, former fund manager Simon Fenwick, and former Shark Tank investor Steve Baxter.

Money is often channelled into Advance Australia through obscurely named holding companies, which help obfuscate where the funds originate. These include hefty donations from ‘Paslibdan Pty Ltd’ – an entity associated with the wealthy O’Hara family that owns numerous pubs and hotels, ‘Henroth Investments’ – a property development firm operated by the heirs to the ‘extensive property portfolio’ of the late Henry Roth and JMR Management Consultancy Services was created by transport investor and former director of the Melbourne Storm Brett Ralph.

Perhaps most indicative of the group’s plan for this year’s federal election is the massive, $500,000, donation the group received from the Liberal Party-aligned Cormack Foundation. The Cormack Foundation is a fundraising vehicle for the Liberal Party, collecting millions in donations from corporate supporters – including Rio Tinto and BHP – which are usually channelled into the Liberal Party.

But the Cormack Foundation’s substantial donation to Advance Australia points to the clear association between the Liberal Party and Advance Australia. The group was co-founded by former ABC chair Maurice Newman who has been a vocal opponent to wind farm developments and who once claimed, while serving as a business adviser to the Abbott government that climate change was a hoax. An ASIC Register search shows the director of Advance Australia includes former Canberra Liberal MLA Vicki Dunne.

Replicating the Trump-playbook in Australia

In his own address to the senate, Shoebridge warned of the sway the Atlas Network wields over Australian politics and, in particular, over a prospective Dutton-led government.

“Advance wants to bring Trumpian far-right politics here so that billionaires profit while communities and the planet suffer,” Shoebridge said.

“It's no coincidence that Advance and its Liberal Party backers are sounding distinctly Trumpian right now. In fact, the people who set up and funded Advance also set up and funded a bunch of other think tanks and astroturf groups around the world that are members of the US based Atlas Network.”

”In fact, Atlas has hundreds of these organisations active around the world, many here in Australia and including one you might have heard of recently: the Heritage Foundation, which literally wrote Project 2025 for Donald Trump.”

“It is the same playbook everywhere these billionaire funded junk tanks and their astroturf groups operate. Advance and these other groups want to pit people in our community against one another. They want to misinform and divide and conquer for their own interests, and we reject their division,” Shoebridge added.

A well-funded global network pushing the right wing agenda

Drawing the linkages between the Atlas Network, and the think tanks and right wing activist organisations that have spread around the world does give a sense of tracing out some sort of grand reverse-vampire conspiracy. But in many ways, that’s exactly what it is (albeit not that secret and no reverse-vampires, I think).

The Atlas Network openly advertises the fact that it provides training, funding and logistical support to hundreds of conservative and libertarian groups around the world – helping to coordinate and replicate campaign victories to the benefit of right-wing politicians and problematic industries like fossil fuels, tobacco and guns. All with the financial backing of billionaires.

A lot of credit goes to an Australian academic, Dr Jeremy Walker of the University of Technology Sydney, who has dedicated a considerable amount of effort in researching and documenting the work of the Atlas Network and its efforts to undermine progressive policy. Walker’s research details the history of the network, its links to the fossil fuel and tobacco industries, and the influence it is now seeking to exert over most Western democracies.

Analysis of newly published political donation data details how the fossil fuel industry is aligning its vast financial support behind the Peter Dutton-led Coalition, ahead of another federal election fight over the future of Australian climate policy and the Coalition’s embrace of coal, gas and nuclear.

This week, the Australian Electoral Commission published the political donation disclosures for the 2023-24 financial year. Analysis of the data shows how, in the midst of a global climate crisis, vast amounts of money flowed from fossil fuel companies and into the coffers of the major political parties.

Australia’s fossil fuel industry giants: including Woodside, Santos, Chevron and Adani were joined by several of the industry’s major lobby groups in gifting a combined $3.8 million to Labor, Liberals and the Nationals parties, and their fundraising vehicles.

The Peter Dutton-led Coalition was, by far, the largest beneficiary of fossil fuel funding. Across the disclosures reported by the federal and state entities of the Coalition - including fundraising bodies known as ‘associated entities’ - almost $3 million was received from the fossil fuel industry. A total of $1.46 million was received by the Liberal Party directly, with the Nationals reporting an additional $155,000. A further $1.34 million was reported by the Coalition-aligned fundraising bodies.

Loyal Coalition backer Gina Rinehart used her family business, Hancock Prospecting, to tip $500,000 into the Liberal Party, representing the largest single fossil fuel donation reported during the 2023-24 financial year.

Despite being the incumbent party of government federally, the Australian Labor Party received less than a third of what was raised by the Coalition and its fundraising bodies from fossil fuel donors. Labor reported receiving just over $832,000 in fossil fuel cash - still a substantial amount - with Labor’s largest fossil fuel donor being Low Emission Technology Australia.

With a somewhat deceptive name, Low Emission Technology (LET) Australia serves as an advocacy group for Australia’s coal and gas industries and works to promote carbon capture and storage technologies. Similarly large donations were made by oil and gas giant Santos, which chipped in $71,500, and another fossil fuel lobby group, Australian Energy Producers (the rebranded Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association) donated almost $95,000 to Labor.

Fossil fuel industry lobby groups were particularly prolific in funding political parties in 2023-24. Long-time pro-coal advocate, the Minerals Council of Australia, was a major contributor to the National Party, providing the Coalition junior partner with a $60,275 gift. Other sizeable donations to the Nationals came from LET Australia and Santos.

The Australian Greens did not report any donations from the fossil fuel industry, nor did any of the independents who made donation disclosures. The independents David Pocock, Allegra Spender, Monique Ryan, Sophie Scamps, Kylea Tink, Zali Steggall, Kate Chaney, Zoe Daniel and the Climate 200 funding group - all reported receiving no fossil fuel industry cash.

The fossil fuel funding reported by Labor and the Coalition appears to be a major increase from the amounts reported for the prior 12-month period. It also shows a significant shift in favour towards the Coalition.

In 2022-23, fossil fuel companies spread their gifts fairly equally between Labor and the Coalition. But ahead of an election that could determine whether Australia follows the new Trump presidency into outright climate denial - including a purge of its climate science capabilities - the Coalition raking in more than three times as much fossil fuel funding as Labor is a worrying signal that the fossil fuel industry had already begun to flex its influence.

Peter Dutton will go to the election attempting to convince Australians to back his nuclear power plan, a plan that has repeatedly been criticised for being costly, unrealistic, and generating new risks for energy security. It will also require the propping up Australia’s ageing coal and gas power generators to extend their operational life - a feature that has likely contributed to a surge in financial support from the fossil fuel industry.

Millions funnelled through Coalition’s funding entities

The 2023-24 disclosures show substantial amounts of fossil fuel money going into two key fundraising bodies for the Liberals and Nationals. More than $1.3 million in total.

The Cormack Foundation, which is associated with the Liberal Party, took in huge donations from BHP and Wesfarmers. Meanwhile, Laneway Assets - an entity created to funnel funds into the National Party - received about a third of its fossil fuel funds from Adani Mining.

These associated fundraising bodies work to obscure the sources of political party funding. From a cursory look, it would not be immediately apparent that an entity called ‘Laneway Assets’ was affiliated with a political party or that the donations it receives ultimately contribute to a party’s funding sources. Such bodies provide a layer of coverage for major corporate players to make donations, potentially limiting scrutiny that a prominent company like BHP may attract when donating such substantial amounts to a particular side of politics.

But that’s exactly what an entity like Laneway Assets was set up to do. It has served as the main vehicle for donations into the Nationals from some unsavoury industries, including fossil fuel companies, tobacco companies and gambling companies.

While no Labor-aligned fundraising bodies appear to have received fossil fuel donations, the Mining and Energy Union, which is affiliated with the Labor Party and which recently split from the CFMEU, received almost $3.4 million in ‘other receipts’ from fossil fuel entities. The Mining and Energy Union made a $2,500 contribution to the Labor Party in 2023-24.

Millions in dark money still plague Australia’s democracy

At this point, it is necessary to acknowledge that the financial data published by the Australian Electoral Commission this week relates to only the 2023-24 financial year – that is, the 12 months ending 30 June 2024.

Donation data for the current financial year, which will include the 2025 federal election, will not be published until February 2026. That is well after the votes in this year’s federal election will be cast and well after the ability to scrutinise the financial contributions being made by fossil fuel companies to the major political parties would be most useful.

Additionally, it must be noted that we have limited visibility of the sources of political donations. Analysis completed by the Guardian Australia estimated that almost half of all political party funding remains ‘dark money’ of unknown origin. This is primarily due to the generous disclosure threshold – which was $16,300 in 2023-24 – with donations less than that amount not required to be disclosed.

The Albanese government is seeking to reform the donation disclosure rules, including a lowering of the disclosure threshold to $1,000. This would provide much greater transparency around the sources of large donations, but the reforms are being paired with election campaign spending and donation limits that may disproportionately impact independent candidates.

Any such reforms will come too late to be useful for the 2025 federal election.

A note on ‘Donations’ verses ‘Other Receipts’

The AEC delineates financial payments to political parties as either “donations” or as “other receipts”. This allows political parties to distinguish between money received as donations and payments that aren’t ‘gifts’, such as payments from electoral commissions as public funding, interest earned from bank deposits, or other money received in return for services.

Regardless of how they are categorised by political parties, payments from corporate entities like fossil fuel companies almost always amount to donations. Political parties will sometimes seek to categorise the ”fees” companies pay to attend special events or lunches as ‘other receipts’, because the company has received something in return (the lunch).

But these event fees are usually greatly inflated, such as Peter Dutton charging $10,000 a head for a private dinner in Sydney, which - let’s be real - is purely designed as a fundraising opportunity for the Liberal Party. Such contributions amount to donations - no one is really paying $10,000 for the dinner itself - and so they have been aggregated as such in this analysis.

In July 2022, I was covering the Sydney Energy Forum for RenewEconomy. The forum was convened by the then newly elected Australian Labor Government and brought together Australia’s major trade partners to collaborate on opportunities in clean energy supply chains.

At the time, global energy markets were reeling from the impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which had disrupted energy supplies to Europe. Those disruptions rippled through global energy markets, pushing fossil fuel prices higher in virtually every market.

On the surface, the conference was about allies like Australia, the United States, Japan, India and other Indo-Pacific nations responding to the impacts of Russia’s invasion by forming new trade and collaboration agreements on low-emissions tech. The United States, in particular, had a major presence at the Sydney Energy Forum having sent then-US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm.

What went unspoken at the forum was the emerging threat from China. While the rest of the Indo-Pacific was well represented, Chinese representation was effectively nil. China controls a huge proportion of the global supply of clean energy equipment – particularly solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles and it was that level of control that had likely prompted the Australian Government to convene the forum.

The likely reasoning was that if Russia had been able to cause the level of chaos it had achieved in global gas markets by invading a neighbour, could not China also cause similar levels of disruption to the deployment of clean energy, if it decided to withhold supplies of solar, wind, battery and EV products from the United States or Australia?

Such a fear was never spoken out loud at the forum – if only to avoid provoking the Chinese government and causing a diplomatic incident - but Secretary Granholm made clear that it was critical the United States and its allies made greater investments in not just deploying renewable energy technologies, but also in developing their own domestic clean technology manufacturing capabilities.

“If we want to build a clean economy that avoids the vulnerabilities we see today, as Putin weaponises gas in Europe today, we have to work together. We have to collaborate,” Granholm told the forum.

“We have to collaborate to speed the development of new technologies and share novel innovations. We have to collaborate to spread them across the global market. Most of all, we have to collaborate to diversify our supply chains and protect them from outside threats.”

While the events of the 2022 Sydney Energy Summit may well disappear into obscurity with time, the sentiment remains ever valid - and provides critical context – as the second Trump presidency begins to play out.

Trump’s short-sighted view of American energy risks

We are just two weeks into Donald Trump’s second term as US President, and the overhaul of the policies and programs of the Biden administration is happening at a breakneck pace. Ramp up fossil fuels, halt the clean energy roll-out, was the general message.

In his declaration of a national energy emergency, Trump acknowledged that the United States energy supply is vulnerable to outside actors but misdiagnosed the problem.

“In an effort to harm the American people, hostile state and non-state foreign actors have targeted our domestic energy infrastructure, weaponised our reliance on foreign energy, and abused their ability to cause dramatic swings within international commodity markets,” the executive order states.

“An affordable and reliable domestic supply of energy is a fundamental requirement for the national and economic security of any nation.”

To achieve this, Trump’s orders call for a massive increase in fossil fuel production. However, heavy dependence on fossil fuels is what allows foreign actors to sow chaos in energy markets.

Digging deeper into Australia’s recent experience shows how a far-away conflict can destabilise local energy markets.

Australia tried ‘Drill, baby, Drill’ and prices skyrocketed

Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels, sending the vast majority of coal and gas offshore. According to Australian Government figures, around 90 per cent of Australia’s coal production and 75 per cent gas production is exported.

As a result, Australian domestic coal and gas prices are generally pegged to international prices, with Australian households and businesses competing with energy buyers from China, South Korea and Japan for Australian energy supplies.

The effect of this was evident in mid-2022 – at the time of the Sydney Energy Forum. Despite being a nation rich with coal and gas – and where the extraction of those resources is very well developed – Australians were not protected from the upheaval caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In the first half of 2022, wholesale gas prices in Australia more than tripled.

The price of coal from Australian ports skyrocketed above normal levels.

And this had flow-on impacts for wholesale electricity prices – with Australian consumers slapped with significant increases in charges.

Such was the impact on domestic markets, that the government temporarily halved the excise on fuel, and energy regulators were forced to suspend domestic electricity markets after price spikes for coal and gas caused an unprecedented meltdown.

A large fossil fuel industry did not protect consumers, but rather deepened the vulnerabilities to outside actors and weakened national security. In Australia’s case it made no difference that the volumes of coal and gas Australia produces are many multiples more than domestic consumption, the decision by Putin to invade Ukraine was responsible for price spikes across almost all of Australia’s energy markets, and domestic energy users were left to pay the cost.

The United States has already battled cartel behaviour

Fossil fuel markets are vulnerable to the influences of outside actors in two ways relevant to national security; disruptions caused by conflict and by cartel behaviour.

Inherently, fossil fuels are a commodity that can be controlled by a few powerful interests. Cartel behaviour exhibited by some countries – OPEC is a leading example of a highly institutionalised cartel operating in oil markets – shows how external actors can control the supply of energy to spike or collapse prices.

The vulnerability to cartel behaviour can be, to some degree, mitigated by delinking domestic supply from international markets. This was the approach adopted by the United States when it banned the export of domestically produced oil in 1975. The ban was designed to shield the United States from a repeat of the skyrocketing gasoline prices triggered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo.

With the export ban in place, the United States enjoyed a prolonged period of energy price stability, with local gasoline and fossil gas prices substantially below those of global trading peers – at least until the ban on oil exports was repealed by Congress in 2015.

The repeal of the oil export ban then re-linked American gasoline prices to global markets. Despite Obama-era policies contributing to a massive surge in American oil and gas production in the early 2010s, US consumers were hit by the same global surge in energy prices that had befallen Australia in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After decades of comparatively low fuel prices, and with the price shield the ban had sought to provide removed, American gasoline prices spiked to an historical peak in June 2022.

Trump has no intention of reintroducing a ban on fossil fuel exports, instead he wants to open up American energy supplies to the global market. As Trump said in his Inaugural Address:

“We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it. We’ll use it,” Trump said.

“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”

But, as history has shown - in Australia and the United States - you cannot have an expansive energy export industry and expect to retain control over the prices paid domestic consumers.

Trump’s ’Drill, baby, Drill’ plan will merely work to enrich fossil fuel companies, leave American households and businesses vulnerable to energy price spikes - which could be created by hostile actors. It will also undermine global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

Clean energy is the pathway to peace and lower prices

Clean energy sources – especially wind and sunshine – cannot be controlled by a cartel or disrupted by war. They are abundant. The sun shines and the wind blows, and their supply cannot be controlled by any government or corporate (at least until such time as a Mr Burns-esque Sun Blocker is invented). Renewables do not lead to the same national security vulnerabilities or price volatility that are inherent to fossil fuels.

As Granholm told the Sydney Energy Forum in 2022:

"No country has ever been held hostage to access to the sun. No country has ever been held hostage to access to the wind. They have not ever been weaponised, nor will they be," Granholm said.

"So, therefore, our move to clean energy globally could be the greatest peace plan of all."

The path to energy security is through investment in domestic clean energy manufacturing – it is the only realistic path to energy independence and lower energy prices for domestic energy consumers. Thankfully, it also happens to be the path that will help us avoid the worsening climate crisis.

The Biden Administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), had put America on track to grow its clean energy manufacturing capabilities and achieve true energy independence. Trump’s efforts to dismantle the IRA and go all-in on fossil fuels are a national security disaster waiting to happen.

Two weeks into 2025 and it already feels like a turning point for climate action - for good and bad. We start the year with news that the Earth experienced yet another ‘warmest year on record’ and global temperatures surpassed the 1.5-degree mark for the first time. Los Angeles is on fire in the middle of winter, and Donald Trump is returning as US President.

The task ahead of us - phasing out the use of fossil fuels, investing in clean energy technologies, and protecting vulnerable communities from the locked-in impacts of climate change - remains huge.

But the task is not insurmountable and there are reasons for optimism that fossil fuel companies will be held legally and financially responsible for the damages caused by climate change, thanks to progress in the field of climate attribution science.

Bridging the gap between polluters and legal liability

I recently attended the Attribution Science and Climate Law Conference in New York, hosted by Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (recordings of the conference should be available soon via the center’s YouTube channel). It was a deeply enlightening conference that generated significant optimism among climate scientists and lawyers alike around potential applications in climate litigation.

The conference served as a strong demonstration of the progress that is being made in the field of climate attribution science, which promises to deepen our ability to quantify and attribute the climate change-related damages for which individual companies, countries, and fossil fuel projects should be held responsible.

Climate attribution science is not a particularly new field. It is the field of science that - using real-world observations and climate models - established the link between a surge in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, starting from the Industrial Revolution, and the observed increases in global temperatures and changes in the Earth’s climate patterns.

Attribution science works to confirm the linkages between five core components of the causes and effects of climate change, these being:

1. The sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions

2. Increases in the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases

3. Changes to the Earth’s climate, particularly increased temperatures

4. Changes to climate-related hazards, including extreme weather events, droughts, flooding, sea-level rise, etc.

5. The damage attributable to changes in climate and weather patterns (property damage, displacement, social and cultural loss)

At the start of the attribution chain are polluters and the producers of fossil fuels. At the other end of the chain are the economic, social, cultural, and ecological damages caused by climate change.

Establishing the links across the full attribution chain with sufficient certainty and higher levels of specificity is often one of the hardest aspects of climate science. We often hear claims that it is impossible to attribute an individual extreme weather event to climate change or the individual contributions of a fossil fuel project to global warming.

But the increasing sophistication of the field promises to bridge any gaps or uncertainties that may remain in the attribution chain with amazing levels of specificity - we are reaching the point of assessing the impacts of emissions from individual countries, individual fossil fuel companies and even individual emitters.

For example, speaking at the Sabin Center’s conference, researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrated how it is now possible - using climate data and models - to trace a year’s worth of emissions from the use of a single private jet. Such as the one owned by Elon Musk, during the year 2022. Researchers were able to calculate the extent to which those emissions would lead to an increase in global temperatures, and then estimate how much economic damage (via reduced aggregate global GDP) the resulting warming would cause (the answer is more than $1 million in cumulative future climate change damages between now and 2100).

Such is the growing sophistication of climate science that responsibility for climate damages will be able to be quantified on the basis of individual countries and regions. It could enable young people to sue fossil fuel companies for future climate impacts, and it could provide the evidentiary basis for countries, like small island states in the Pacific, to seek compensation from major fossil fuel producing countries, like Australia.

Simplifying the complexity of climate accountability

The global climate system is large and complex, and the large number of carbon polluters means each argues they individually contribute only a ‘small’ and ‘trivial’ share of the observed increase in global greenhouse gas concentrations. The ‘drop in the ocean’ argument.

But, as we know, the aggregation of all those ‘small’ sources of pollution adds up to the unprecedented release of carbon and is resulting in measurable changes to the global climate.

Demonstrating the causal link between an individual fossil fuel producer and the damage caused by climate change is also one of the hardest aspects of climate litigation. Courts will readily dismiss claims for legal intervention or financial compensation if the link between a cause and the resulting damage is considered too uncertain, or the contribution of the defendant appears too trivial.

For example, in the Sharma appeal (also known as the ‘duty of care’ case), the Full Federal Court ruled the federal environment minister did not owe young people a duty of care to protect them from climate change in part because of the “the tiny contribution of [the minister’s coal mine approval] to the overall risk of harm… the intermediation of countless other people around the world [and] the indeterminacy of the liability.”

But the number of polluters isn’t actually that large - a landmark study published by Richard Heede in 2013 identified a list of the ‘carbon majors’. A recent update to Heede’s study finds that 70 per cent of historical greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to “just 78 corporate and state producing entities” - including Australia’s BHP, which is responsible for around 0.5% of historic global greenhouse gas emissions.

By arguing that their individual contributions are trivial, these ‘carbon majors’ seek to undermine any argument that they should be held responsible for the resulting damage caused by climate change. But as climate attribution science is increasingly able to demonstrate, while the individual contributions may sound trivial, the causal links can be readily demonstrated and the resulting damages are anything but trivial.

To provide some perspective, a study published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research estimated that 2 degrees of global warming could generate economic losses as high as US$38 trillion annually by 2050.

This would put BHP’s proportional liability for the economic damages caused by climate change at somewhere around US$200 billion annually, or about 60% more than its current market capitalisation. Science will soon be able to pin responsibility for damages on an individual company like BHP, and potentially enable impacted communities to sue for compensation.

A tool to reveal the impact of proposed fossil fuel projects

Another opportunity created by climate attribution science is the potential to quantify the future climate damage of proposed fossil fuel projects.

Just as fossil fuel companies seek to avoid responsibility for climate change damages caused by historical emissions, companies also work to trivialise the future contributions of new coal, gas, and oil projects when seeking development approvals.

These arguments, unfortunately, are too often swallowed and regurgitated by regulators. This includes the current federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek, who sought to trivialise the climate change impacts of the expansion of the Mount Pleasant coal mine, when approving the project under the EPBC Act.

The Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion will result in an increase in coal production of as much as 21 million tonnes annually to 2048. According to the federal climate change department, the resulting emissions from the use of the coal would lead to an additional increase in global temperatures of 0.00024°C. Plibersek cited this figure in her reasons for approving the coal mines’ expansion. She said:

“I found that the amount of coal to be combusted from the proposed action, and the possible increase in net global GHG emissions and global average temperature that would result from combusting this amount of coal, are very small. I concluded that the proposed action would not be a ‘substantial’ cause of the physical effects of climate change on World Heritage properties.”

- Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek

But in the context of massive potential economic damages - returning to that $38 billion figure - a rough estimate the proportional share of economic climate damages attributable to the Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion results in a figure that is no longer trivial. The share of climate change damages for which the expansion would be responsible could be as much as $4.5 billion annually.

The growing sophistication of climate attribution science will allow more detailed and more accurate assessments of the future economic damages that may be caused by a proposed project in the future, and would present a compelling case that such damages - and the climate change significance of individual projects - are not trivial and, crucially, not acceptable under environment and planning laws.

Further reading

• An informative paper by Georgetown University’s Associate Professor of Law

  Aisha Saad on using climate attribution in tort law

• An article by Vishal Yashoda Manve - From Wildfires to Courtrooms: How Attribution Science Fuels Climate Justice

• The working draft of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s paper on climate attribution (including initial estimates of climate damages caused by private jet use)

• A paper co-authored by conference speaker Jessica Wentz on The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution

  Leave a comment

This is a quick message to say thank you to everyone who subscribed and supported Tempests and Terawatts over the last year and to wish you all a very happy holiday period.

The number of subscribers to Tempests and Terawatts almost tripled over the course of the year and it is highly encouraging that so many people are seeking out commentary and analysis of Australia’s response to the climate crisis, the energy transition and developments in the rapidly evolving field of climate litigation.

I would love to know what topics in particular you would like to see featured in Tempests and Terawatts in 2025 - Critiques of election policy platforms? More energy data breakdowns? Scrutiny of corporate climate engagement? Let me know in the comments.

To that point, the most read post of 2024 was this breakdown of 11 fatal flaws of the concept of nuclear power in Australia - a post that remains entirely relevant as we head into 2025 and towards a federal election that will yet again feature a tortured relitigation of Australia’s climate and energy policies.

The support is super affirming and will serve as encouragement as I endeavour write and publish with more regularity, and delivering a broader range of analysis from a range of additional voices. 2025 will be another important year for breaking through the spin and puffery that comes from both governments and corporates on climate. It is a privilege to have a platform that plays a small part in that.

Wishing you all safe and happy holidays, and a big thank you to those who keep on working.

- Michael

A US-government commissioned report has delivered a striking take-down of the fossil gas export industry - concluding that ‘unfettered’ growth in gas exports leaves consumers facing higher energy costs, contributes to surging greenhouse gas emissions, and potentially exacerbates geopolitical tensions.

The report has major relevance for Australia - raising the same concerns cited by many Australian energy analysts and climate advocates - that surging gas exports have merely worked to enrich fossil fuel companies while leaving local communities, consumers and the climate to carry the costs.

The new report - published by the US Department of Energy (DoE) - sets out how growth in US liquified natural gas (LNG) exports impacts a range of public interest considerations, challenging fossil fuel industry arguments about whether there is any net benefit in issuing new approvals for increased LNG exports.

As outlined by US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, the report reaches five key conclusions when assessing the ‘public interest’ in issuing new approvals for LNG exports; these are:

1. Previously issued approvals for LNG exports are already more than sufficient to meet the forecast demand (i.e. the global market demand for US gas is already saturated).

2. Further increasing the volume of US LNG exports will work to enrich fossil fuel companies but at the expense of higher gas prices for domestic consumers. The DoE describes a “triple-cost increase” for American homes and businesses, with increased gas exports leading to higher costs for domestic gas supplies, higher electricity tariffs and increased costs of locally manufactured goods.

3. Increased gas production will further exacerbate the impact of pollution on communities located near gas extraction and processing facilities.

4. Increased gas exports mean higher global greenhouse gas emissions, with the DoE determining that gas exports lead to higher overall emissions as they are more likely to displace global investment in renewable energy rather than replace coal.

5. The global market for exported gas has changed dramatically and now presents geopolitical challenges. Demand for gas in Europe, South Korea and Japan is declining, and China is emerging as the major buyer of LNG.

A government-sourced fossil fuel industry take-down (or not)

The report found that allowing for “unfettered exports of LNG” out to 2050 would result in an increase in US wholesale domestic natural gas prices of more than 30 per cent - increasing costs for both households and businesses. Having opened up its gas market to exporters, US domestic energy users are now in competition with international buyers for the same gas, pushing prices higher.

At the same time, allowing “unfettered” growth in LNG exports would increase annual global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 1.5 gigatons of CO₂ equivalent each year - an amount roughly triple Australia’s annual emissions.

“While some tout LNG as a means to reduce the use of coal overseas (and to date, that has been the case with some importing countries), the study put forward today shows a world in which additional U.S. LNG exports displace more renewables than coal globally,” Granholm said in a statement.

“In every scenario, increases in LNG exports would lead to increases in global net emissions – despite very aggressive assumptions in the model regarding deployment of carbon capture, utilization, and storage.”

Acknowledging the extent of the negative consequences that come with growing gas exports, the Biden Administration implemented a pause on issuing new LNG export approvals pending the findings of the DoE’s report. While that pause is set to be dispensed by the incoming Trump Administration, the report effectively dismantles the arguments for facilitating the growth in fossil gas production.

Unfortunately, the political situation in the United States means the findings of this new report may ultimately fall on willfully deaf ears. Granholm has about a month left in her role as Energy Secretary and is set to be replaced by incoming US President Donald Trump’s pick for the role, Chris Wright.

Wright currently serves as CEO of one of America’s largest fracking companies, Liberty Energy, and has been an outspoken advocate for the fossil fuel industry. There is zero chance that Wright will seek to curtail US LNG exports, having led one of the firms that has profited from the growth of fossil fuel production.

A shared Australia-US gas export story

From an Australian perspective, the preparation and release of such a report by a federal energy department is almost unfathomable. Australia’s political environment has been beset by two major parties that work in large alignment in support of a bigger gas industry, and Australian government departments have worked to reinforce that position.

Despite having a much smaller economy, Australia’s experience with exporting gas largely preceded that of the United States - Australia grew its LNG export industry much earlier, much faster and to such a large scale that - up until last year - Australia regularly exported much more LNG than the United States.

This means the current situation with respect to US LNG exports has significant parallels to that of Australia. The difference is that the United States was willing to ask the simple question: ‘whether authorisations for the export of liquefied natural gas… is consistent with the “public interest”’.

But we already know the answer to that question for the Australian context - Australians have regularly been victim to the ‘triple-cost’ burden of gas exports described by the US DoE, and the impact on greenhouse gas emissions in Australia and internationally is plain to see. The story has been repeated ten-fold - just like the US experience, growing Australian gas exports have led to higher prices for consumers and higher emissions for the planet.

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The bipartisan nature of support for the gas industry has stymied any real consideration of whether it serves the interest of the Australian public or the planet more broadly.

Neither Labor nor the Coalition has been willing to ask the ‘public interest’ question in Australia. Successive Australian governments have waved through new gas projects, new gas exploration permits continue to be issued, and gas export infrastructure is being constructed, often with the aid of significant federal funding.

Dutton’s pro-fossil fuel nuclear gambit

As the next federal election looms on the not-too-distant horizon, it is perhaps a good time for voters to ask both the Albanese government and the Dutton-led opposition to assess whether the ongoing expansion of the Australian gas industry is in the ‘public interest’.

National energy policies will, yet again, feature heavily in the forthcoming election cycle, with Dutton’s plan for nuclear energy already dominating debate. I’ve previously published a breakdown of why nuclear energy is a bad choice for Australia, and that analysis remains relevant in the wake of the recent release of modelling from Frontier Economics.

Dutton’s nuclear energy gambit is really a pro-coal and pro-gas agenda in a not-so-subtle disguise. I - along with many others - confidently predict that no nuclear power stations will ever be built in Australia. But if the debate about nuclear power is allowed to rage for too long, then it will have a real impact on the pace of Australia’s decarbonisation and the phase-out of fossil fuels (arguably, this is the point of Dutton’s nuclear policy).

Dutton has already flagged an intention to revive Scott Morrison’s ‘gas-fired recovery’ policy, and his stance on fossil fuels is where attention and scrutiny really should be focused during the election campaign.

The Coalition already lost the argument about the ‘gas-fired recovery’, yielding almost a dozen seats to ‘teal’ community independents at the 2022 election. The US DoE has just delivered a useful piece of analysis to litigate that argument again.

History will view Twitter’s death as another version of the same story that has afflicted most failed social media platforms - a downfall that was almost entirely self-inflicted and caused by a failure of vision by its leadership.

Twitter will take its place in a social media graveyard next to platforms like MySpace, which died from a failure to innovate, causing it to haemorrhage users to competitors like Facebook (and Twitter). Twitter will also join Google+, which died because it sucked.

I write this post as a farewell to Twitter, and specifically Twitter. A farewell to the platform that once was, and not the platform that it has since become. Much like how the persona of Anakin Skywalker ceased to exist once he became Darth Vader - I do not think of X as the ‘Twitter’ that I knew and generally enjoyed. I also write this farewell as a way to hold myself accountable - I need to say goodbye. We all need to say goodbye.

As a platform, Twitter was designed to provide a lot of direct interaction between users - for good and for bad. Twitter facilitated interactions between people who would not normally interact in the ‘real world’. It allowed information to be shared rapidly and, at its best, actively facilitated the holding of power - governments, politicians, police, et al. - to account.

On balance, I benefitted from Twitter. Twitter had been an amazing conduit for connecting with people, and for sourcing and sharing information quickly. It was a place that fostered journalism, and I particularly experienced its benefits during my time as a journalist writing for RenewEconomy.

It was via Twitter that - as a journalist who did not work within the federal press gallery - I was able to exchange direct messages with federal parliamentarians, including a former prime minister. It was through Twitter that I was once asked to appear on ABC News with literally just five minutes’ notice to provide commentary on the Coalition’s infamous modelling of its net zero emissions plan.

I had a verified account (before verification was something you paid for). I got job offers through Twitter. I made real-world friends through Twitter. I even once secured a date through Twitter.

With more than 10,000 followers, Twitter provided an audience that helped to foster and encourage my own propensity to seek out and share information that others often didn’t want known.

One of the most enduring examples is probably this tweet with a clip from a senate estimates hearing in 2020, of Queensland LNP senator Gerard Rennick quizzing the head of the CSIRO about whether the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle disproves climate change (it does not). To this day, people still find and reshare the clip, which has now been watched almost 200,000 times.

Twitter was also a source of some very funny moments that often took on a ‘bird loose in the classroom’ type energy that derailed productivity on many workdays while we were collectively distracted. Such as when baboons got loose in Sydney’s Inner West, with one of them on their way to get a vasectomy, just as the world was on the precipice of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The problems with Twitter have, however, been long evident and persisted long before its purchase by Elon Musk. As someone who predominantly writes about climate change and politics, I also received regular floods of abuse and hate through the platform, including physical threats.

I said that I benefitted from Twitter - but I say that as someone who is white and a man.

I saw the targeting and abuse that spread on the platform replicated on a much higher level against others, especially against women and people of colour. The platform has long allowed largely unfettered racism and was notoriously poor at cracking down on the racist slurs used against Indigenous Australians.

Musk’s vision for X is one where such activity is even further unrestrained on the platform. The commodification of the verification system, the removal of the ‘block’ function, and Musk using X as a platform for self-promotion and self-gratification have fostered and amplified the worst parts of what was Twitter, while undermining its best parts.

It is clear that what Musk is doing to X isn’t motivated by a genuine desire for ‘freedom of speech’ or ensuring it serves as the ‘de facto public town square’ - Musk has used the platform for his own partisan desires to help elect Donald Trump, to serve his own business interests and to provide a megaphone for alt-right conspiracies and harassment.

Musk has largely succeeded in that quest, and as the world braces for a new four-year presidential term under Donald Trump, it is now imperative that we actively rebuild the spaces that will allow us to resist and repel the threats to democracy, health, safety, the rights of women, migrants etc. that will emerge within the United States and will likely spread to its peer nations like Australia.

Crucially, this includes the climate crisis - which, even before Trump’s return as president, remains a dangerously unmitigated and growing threat to humanity.

The time to say farewell to Twitter has come. Many, to their credit, reached that conclusion a long time ago and started rebuilding communities in places like Bluesky. But the re-election of Trump, with Musk’s backing, has underscored the need to accelerate the exodus from X.

Much of ‘climate Twitter’ has already shifted over to Bluesky, which has the vibe of early Twitter without the inane trolling and the owner’s expression of openly fascist views that have plagued X.

Time will tell whether the fresh, friendlier vibe that Bluesky offers will last. Trolls and bad-faith actors may still come to take up the space they occupied on Twitter. But there does appear to be much less appetite - from users and the owners of Bluesky alike - to allow the platform to fester into a place where abuse is rife.

For those who have recently made the switch, or have yet to do so, Bluesky allows the creation of ‘starter packs’ that make it much easier to bulk follow a list of accounts collated based on a theme that may be interesting to you. It is an ingenuous feature that dramatically reduces the fear that switching to Bluesky will mean starting again from scratch, and smooths the transition between platforms.

For those interested in climate, I would recommend the following starter packs:

• The list of climate journalists and editors collated by Amy Westervelt

• Any of the multiple starter packs created by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe

• Jack Ryan’s starter pack of Australian science journalists

• Ketan Joshi has also amassed a huge list of climate and energy people on Bluesky in the GreenSky list

• Tim Baxter also created a feed of Australian-specific climate and energy people

Many good writers are also active here on Substack, which (despite its own flaws) is also a good platform to source credible information about climate change. Some I would recommend:

• HEATED by Emily Atkin

• The Crucial Years by Bill McKibben

• Raising Hell by Royce Kurmelovs

• Talking Climate by Katharine Hayhoe

• Currently Speaking by Alex Leemon and Declan Kelly

• Drilled by David Roberts

Thank you for reading Tempests and Terawatts. If you haven’t already done so, you can subscribe below.

You can also find me on Bluesky.

Well, Donald Trump is back.

The re-election of Trump as the President of the United States is a shocking and disturbing result for many and for many reasons - particularly given the strength of his election win. There is perhaps little value in adding to the flood of opinion pieces and hot-takes seeking to explain how Trump won and why Kamala Harris lost.

They are all a bit like this:

There is value, however, in taking stock of where we now stand with regard to the political environment, with respect to future policy directions and the challenges that now lay ahead of us for the next four years.

The Trump victory will have broad and profound ramifications for many people and on many issues. On climate change, Trump’s return will no doubt serve as a disruptive force committed to derailing the global momentum towards ending our use of fossil fuels and taking action to protect the health of our planet.

However, there is a strong case to be made that the second Trump presidency will change very little regarding the scale of the climate crisis we face and how we need to respond to it.

Trump’s future impact

Undoubtedly, a second Trump presidency will make solving the climate crisis more difficult. Trump will move to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, and potentially the UNFCCC altogether. He will also seek to redirect billions of dollars of government support away from investment in clean energy infrastructure and towards the fossil fuel industry.

Carbon Brief has estimated that Trump’s announced policies would lead to an additional 4 billion tonnes of CO2-e emissions by 2030. That’s approximately nine years’ worth of Australia’s total annual emissions.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the landmark policy implemented by the Biden administration that has stimulated hundreds of billions worth of investment in new, lower emissions infrastructure, will be a target for Trump. The Biden administration has, thankfully, dispersed the vast majority of the almost US$400 billion in funding allocated to clean energy technologies under the Act.

Representatives of US clean energy sector spoke glowingly of the IRA and the positive impact it has had on America’s growing clean technology sector throughout events at the recent New York Climate Week. It has proven popular in many Republican-held regions, and while that did little to help Kamala Harris’ electoral performance, it may quell Trump’s desire to repeal it completely.

Of more consequence is Trump’s commitment to support a resurgence in the United States’ fossil fuel industries across oil, gas and coal. Trump has stated ambitions to grow US fossil fuel production by as much as five times the current level, which would slow the global energy transition.

Likewise, Trump’s victory could provide momentum for other anti-climate action political movements in other countries. Australia is a prime candidate. I’ve written about Trump’s potential to influence Australian climate policy previously, and his agenda could soon be parroted in Australia and elsewhere.

Trump will be bad for the climate.

But we were already in major trouble.

We already need to dramatically ramp up climate action

In late October, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) published the latest edition of its annual Emissions Gap Report, which details the ‘gaps’ between national climate commitments - including targets (known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or ‘NDCs’) and policies - and the level of action that is necessary to keep global warming to below 1.5 degrees.

The UNEP found the emissions gap remains substantial. Stronger targets and stronger policies are needed.

The UNEP warns that current climate policy commitments have us on track for a “catastrophic temperature rise of up to 3.1°C.” Discouragingly, the UNEP found the action gap remained unchanged throughout the 2023 year and that “global greenhouse gas emissions set a new record of 57.1 GtCO2e in 2023.”

Chart 1

At that level of global emissions, we will exhaust the remaining carbon budget that would allow us to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees in less than four years. It is clear that on a global level, we have long been failing to bend the emissions growth curve.

Under Biden, the United States has not been undertaking its ‘fair share’ of climate action and - according to Climate Action Tracker - neither has Australia, Canada, China, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Virtually all major industrial countries are not meeting the level of action needed to ensure we have a safe planet.

This challenge existed before Trump, and the urgency and scale of the threat before us was already substantial. As a ‘State of the Climate Report’ published in October warned:

“For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies. Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024, and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100. Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage.”

- The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth

We already have bigger threats to fight

Just as runaway global warming poses an existential threat to life on Earth, the action needed to prevent runaway global warming presents an existential threat to the fossil fuel industry.

We need to stop using coal, gas and oil as soon as possible. The equation is that simple. Measures like carbon offsetting and technologies like carbon capture and storage have failed to deliver on their promise, and there’s no genuine prospect that any continued use of fossil fuels is compatible with a safe planet.

Unfortunately for the planet and for us, fossil fuel companies have in recent years reaped heavily inflated profits - largely thanks to the disruption to energy markets caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - with many oil and gas majors recording historically high profits in 2022.

The five largest fossil fuel companies recorded a combined US$281 billion in profits in the year following the Russian invasion. Inflated profits continued into 2023.

Chart 2

So, the fossil fuel industry is now cashed up and well-resourced to fight for its own continued existence, and fossil fuel companies are deploying these amassed profits to influence politicians, fight opponents in the courts, and support efforts to ramp up criminal sanctions against climate activists.

Fossil fuel companies are abandoning previously announced commitments to pivot their businesses to clean energy and instead re-investing their profits into increased fossil fuel production.

We have also long observed the extent to which fossil fuel interests have been able to permeate into offices of power - using money to influence climate and energy policy.

As one recent example, on Friday, human rights organisation Global Witness revealed the results of an undercover investigation into key representatives of COP29 host Azerbaijan. The investigation exposed the chief executive of the COP29 talks, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister Elnur Soltanov, as eagerly seeking to facilitate fossil fuel deals among the events of the next round of international climate negotiations.

The White House isn’t the only place fossil fuel companies will continue to exert influence, and we will need to remain vigilant of their ability to stymie climate action, particularly now that they have made substantial profits off Russia’s war.

Our ability to act remains in place

As comedian Dan Ilic said on the latest episode of the A Rational Fear podcast, Trump’s re-election is an “event that can only be described as ‘precedented’”.

We’ve been here before. We’ve had conservative leaders in other major economies, and yet the economic fundamentals of the clean energy transition remain in place - in fact, they continue to improve.

Trump’s election doesn’t change the maths: the use of fossil fuels is costly in the short term and economically damaging in the long term, and switching to clean energy technologies provides a cheaper and safer alternative across both timescales.

As this chart from BloombergNEF shows, growth in clean energy investment largely continued uninterrupted despite climate deniers coming in and out of power across governments worldwide, including the first Trump presidency. This is because the economic fundamentals continue to work in favour of climate action.

Chart 3

The challenge we face

While it is true to say that growth in clean energy investment has remained strong in the face of headwinds (such as the first Trump presidency), it is also true to say that the pace and scale of investment need to be dramatically higher than current levels.

The forthcoming second Trump presidency doesn’t change the fact that we need to push on all levers available to drive greater climate action. Crucially, those levers will still exist. This includes taking action at a sub-national level, organising within our local communities and using our powers as citizens and consumers to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their efforts to block the phase-out of fossil fuels.

We must demand that all governments adopt stronger climate targets and policies to deliver a rapid and just transition to zero emissions - bridging the ‘emissions gap’ - and demand corporate action that has meaningful outcomes for the climate.

The climate crisis emerged long before Trump first entered the White House, and it will continue to be a challenge we must confront for years after he has left it for the last time. His victory doesn’t change the work that needs to be done to save the planet.

We’ve always known the climate challenge that is before us, and we still have the means to tackle that challenge. Trump doesn’t change that.

I have an article in today’s The Saturday Paper: ‘How Santos targets climate activists with ‘lawfare’.

The article explores the SLAPP tactics (‘Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation’) being deployed by fossil fuel giant Santos’ legal team - lawyers from aggressive American law firm Quinn Emanuel - against the Environmental Defenders Office and several Australian environment groups in the wake of the unsuccessful Munkara case.

The story is the product of conversations with many concerned members of Australia’s climate movement - who view Santos’ heavy-handed tactics as an attempt to crush opposition to fossil fuel projects - and a deep dive into the case's procedural history.

Please check it out:

Read the Saturday Paper article

A lost year of climate action

This week, the United Nations Environment Program released its annual Emissions Gap Report, detailing the divide between current climate targets and policies and what needs to be done to limit global warming to ‘safer’ levels.

The 2024 edition of the report provides a pretty damning assessment of global climate progress. It found that we must achieve emissions reductions of 42 per cent by 2030 and 57 per cent by 2035 to remain on track to keep warming to 1.5°C. 

And yet:

“The emissions gaps in 2030 and 2035 have remained unchanged since last year’s assessment, as there have been no submissions of new NDCs [climate targets] with significant implications for global emissions, no updates to the quantifications of their implications, and no updates to the least-cost pathways.”

and

“Global greenhouse gas emissions set a new record of 57.1 GtCO2e in 2023, a 1.3 per cent increase from 2022 levels.”

There has never been more urgency in calls to act on the climate crisis. Scientists continue to warn people about the rapidly closing window to act. And yet, we achieved net-zero progress in 2023.

According to the report, if all countries meet their current emissions targets, the world will warm by a ‘debilitating’ 2.6 to 2.8°C. However, because the policies currently in place are insufficient to meet those targets, the UNEP says that “current policies will lead to a catastrophic temperature rise of up to 3.1°C”.

Countries must set stronger targets and implement stronger policies to meet those targets. This includes Australia, which the UNEP found was at risk of missing its existing 2030 emissions reduction target.

A Tempests and Terawatts milestone

This past week, Tempests and Terawatts passed the 500 subscriber mark, marking a milestone that exceeded my expectations when I first started the Substack. Unsurprisingly, growth is higher when I post more consistently, which is doubly encouraging.

If you’re a subscriber - thank you!

Subscribe now

Please consider supporting these other excellent sources of analysis on all things climate and energy.

• Heated by Emily Atkin

• Talking Climate by Katharine Hayhoe

• Drilled by Amy Westervelt (and a whole bunch of excellent climate journalists)

• Renew Economy

• Ketan Joshi’s blog

• Currently Speaking by Alex Leemon and Declan Kelly

• Raising Hell by Royce Kurmelovs

  Royce authored the recently published book Slick, a deep dive into how Australia’s oil companies tried to block climate action.

This piece was previously published in The Saturday Paper on 26 October 2024.

Major Australian oil and gas company Santos is deploying “scorched earth” tactics in contentious legal proceedings that could silence future opposition to the fossil fuel industry’s expansion plans in Australia.

The proceedings are the aftermath of Munkara v Santos, an unsuccessful attempt by a group of Tiwi Islanders to protect areas of claimed cultural significance for First Nations people from a new gas pipeline being constructed by Santos.

After winning the case earlier this year, Santos is now using the “world’s most-feared law firm” to pursue lawyers from the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) and several Australian environment groups in a bid to recover its substantial legal costs. Santos’s legal actions could also expose the inner workings of Australia’s climate movement, putting activists personally at risk of retribution.

If successful, future efforts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable through the courts could be incapacitated. The ramifications include the potential to force any “third-party supporter” of unsuccessful climate litigation – such as donors, campaigners or environment groups that provide logistical or funding support – to pay the legal bills of fossil fuel defendants.

In January, Santos successfully defended a challenge to the Barossa Gas Export Pipeline that will transport gas from the Barossa gas field in the Timor Sea to a gas processing and export terminal at Middle Arm near Darwin.

The pipeline is critical to Santos’s plan for a $5.7 billion gas extraction project in the Timor Sea. Once fully operational, it is expected to produce 3.7 million tonnes of LNG annually – along with 15.2 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. The Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility has described the project as a “carbon bomb”.

The challenge – led by Simon Munkara, Carol Puruntatameri and Maria Tipuamantumirri from the Tiwi Islands – stated the construction of the pipeline, and its presence on the seabed, would have a negative impact on First Nations cultural heritage.

Evidence presented to the Federal Court suggested the site of the pipeline was an area with significant value and history for First Nations communities, and construction would disturb cultural songlines and the ancestral beings Ampiji (rainbow serpent) and Jirakupai (Crocodile Man).

Represented by the EDO, the group aimed to halt construction until the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) reviewed the licences issued to Santos and considered the potential cultural heritage impacts.

Despite initially winning a temporary injunction, the Tiwi Islander group was ultimately unsuccessful and the construction of the pipeline is proceeding.

In a damaging judgement for the EDO delivered in January, Justice Natalie Charlesworth determined that some evidence relating to the location of the sites the group declared culturally significant had been “confected”, and that members of the Tiwi Islands community had been “coached” to tell “their cultural stories in a way that would extend them to the area of the pipeline”.

They are serious findings by the court and they reflect poorly on the EDO. Following the judgement, the office’s board commissioned a review of its processes to be conducted by Tony McAvoy, SC. In a letter to Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek in March, EDO chief executive David Morris wrote, “We take this decision seriously, as we would any decision that includes judicial comment about our lawyers” and that “the review will examine and make recommendations on best practice when working with First Nations clients and communities, including in Court processes involving cultural heritage”.

Seeing an opportunity to financially punish the EDO and “unmask” the climate movement, Santos has engaged the American law firm Quinn Emanuel, which openly boasts about its status as the “most feared law firm in the world” and has a reputation for its aggressive approach.

Santos is engaged in a form of “lawfare” that seeks to scare off future challenges to its oil and gas expansion plans. It has turned the Munkara case into what can be characterised as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or “SLAPP”.

In response to the Munkara case, Santos is seeking retribution against the EDO – and four environment groups that Santos alleges may have worked with the EDO – using tactics designed to silence future opposition to the fossil fuel industry’s expansion plans, including the threat of cost orders.

It is an established principle in litigation proceedings that “costs follow the event”, meaning the losing side pays the legal costs of the winning side. This is always a risk for those commencing litigation. In rare cases, a court may order legal costs be paid by the lawyers representing the losing side. This may occur in cases where a court determines that the conduct of the lawyers contributed to their side incurring unnecessary costs, including through poor conduct during the trial.

In even rarer cases, a court may order that the winner’s legal costs be paid by a third party not directly involved in the legal proceedings, but which the court decides should be responsible for the winner’s legal costs because they supported or funded the unsuccessful side.

In the aftermath of the Munkara case, Santos is seeking to have its legal costs paid by the EDO directly. Santos argued the EDO had gone beyond acting as a firm in a traditional lawyer-client relationship and had begun the litigation as an “environmental activist organisation”.

Justice Charlesworth has sided with Santos throughout the bulk of the litigation and the EDO has effectively conceded it will be required to pay “indemnity costs”, meaning the office would pay almost every cent of Santos’s legal fees – a bill that could be upwards of $8 million.

The court also ruled that Santos could subpoena internal documents from the EDO, including its correspondence with the Tiwi Islander plaintiffs and representatives of four environment groups that supported campaigns to stop the Barossa pipeline: the Sunrise Project, the Environment Centre NT, Jubilee Australia Research Centre and advocacy group Market Forces.

In an effort to accumulate evidence to justify its claims against the environment groups, Santos also sought subpoenas that would compel the environment groups to hand over documents detailing their correspondence with the EDO and any financial support they may have provided towards the Munkara case. Santos could use the information in the documents to argue that any or all of these groups should also be held responsible for its legal costs.

The correspondence would likely detail the relationships between the EDO and the environment groups, exposing the work of the broader Australian climate activist movement – fodder for detractors beyond the fossil fuel lobby. The release of documents sought by the Santos subpoenas would potentially allow individual climate campaigners to be identified and scrutinised, enabling personal attacks.

Fossil fuel lobby group Australian Energy Producers is already using the findings of the Munkara case to demand the EDO be stripped of government funding. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has promised to do so, if elected.

Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s general counsel, Katrina Bullock, says Santos’s efforts could scare off future legal challenges to fossil fuel projects. “It has aggressively targeted the Tiwi Islanders’ legal team, relentlessly seeking costs against them. These actions risk discouraging communities from using legal avenues to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their harmful practices.”

Principal solicitor from the Justice and Equity Centre, Ellen Tilbury, says the case could have significant consequences for broader public interest litigation.

“Community legal centres attract smart, passionate lawyers but operate with limited resources. We are often challenging government or big corporations, who have large legal teams with deep pockets,” Tilbury told The Saturday Paper.

“The decision we saw in the Santos case could act to silence individuals and organisations who support a cause, significantly undermining effective public campaigning. And it could scare off potential allies who would otherwise offer practical and moral support to small legal organisations that are fighting in the public interest.”

It is not the first time a fossil fuel company has deployed such heavy-handed tactics in Australia. Queensland environmental campaigner Ben Pennings is still battling Adani in the state’s Supreme Court. Adani had initially sought $600 million in compensation, alleging Pennings unlawfully disrupted operations at its Carmichael coalmine. As part of the litigation, Adani sought to have Pennings’ home raided and hired a private investigator to stalk members of his family. The campaigner has described Adani’s efforts as an abuse of process.

The use of SLAPP tactics is indicative of an industry that is becoming increasingly desperate to protect its own business models and interests in the face of mounting evidence of the emerging impacts of climate change and the increasing urgency of the need to phase out oil, gas and coal.

The EDO and Santos declined to provide comment for this story.