Sometimes I fear Australia has decided to go backwards just as the rest of the world has decided to go forwards. Take climate change. If the repeal of the carbon tax gets through the Senate this week there will probably be celebrations in the boardrooms of all the business groups that lobbied so hard for its removal.

But if they imagine the lifting of this supposedly great burden on them and the economy will mean it’s back to business as usual, they’ll soon find out differently.

Illustration: Simon Letch.

They may have rolled back the economic cost of doing something about climate change, but now they’ll face the increasing cost of not doing something about it. As Martijn Wilder, an environmental lawyer with the Baker & McKenzie law firm, finds in a new report for the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia, we’re going to be hit from all sides.

There are the costly physical effects of climate change we’ve already started experiencing, there are the consequences for us of measures our trading partners are starting to take to limit their greenhouse gas emissions, there’s the growing reluctance of foreign institutions to fund new coal mines and power stations and there’s the threat to our fossil fuel industries from ever-cheaper renewable energy.