Humanity has a big decision to make very soon about its future on a warming planet, but the federal Coalition is still in denial that human-induced climate change even exists, let alone that the climate endgame is upon us.

The national energy guarantee (Neg) is the latest manifestation of that denial. A third-rate complex, over-engineered policy that will most likely fail to contribute to meeting all three of its main objectives, namely increased reliability of electricity supply, lower energy prices and a long way third, reducing carbon emissions. A compromise upon compromise designed to placate the scientifically and economically illiterate Coalition right wing, which ignores the first priority of any government, to ensure the security of the people. For climate change is now the greatest threat to that security.

The party room’s rapidly disintegrating “agreement” to the Neg yet again sees the Coalition refusing to face up to this reality as we reach yet another low point in Australian government policymaking.

According to conservative Coalition voices, the Neg can only bring reliability to electricity supply by ensuring “dispatchable” power (shorthand for increased coal generation) is readily available to meet extreme demand conditions. Yet “dispatchable” is readily available today from numerous renewable energy and storage combinations.

Claims the Neg can only deliver lower energy prices by massive investment in new high-efficiency low-emission (HELE) coal-fired power stations ignore the evidence that these stations are now more expensive than renewable energy/storage options by a margin that will increase substantially in coming years.

Supposedly the Neg will enable Australia to meet our wholly inadequate, voluntary 26-28% carbon emission reductions under the 2015 Paris agreement, but the bulk of this reduction will occur before the Neg is even implemented. Even so, conservatives demand that any reductions be “backloaded” to the end of the commitment period, or that we should, aping Trump, withdraw entirely from Paris.

Either we act with unprecedented speed or we face a bleak future

The federal government’s denial of climate risk is evident in its failure to even talk about that risk. As a result, climate and energy policy is a shambles, endlessly trying to reconcile the irreconcilable: expanding our fossil fuel-based economy, particularly coal, while pretending to address climate issues.

Excruciating contortions by conservatives to rationalise this nonsense have only highlighted the danger to Australia’s security and people of allowing scientific illiteracy to dominate decisionmaking on critical issues, particularly when the risks are the destruction of human society as we know it.

For climate change is now an existential risk to humanity. That is, a risk posing large negative consequences which will be irreversible, resulting inter alia in major reductions in global and national populations, mass species extinction, economic disruption and social chaos, unless carbon emissions are reduced far more rapidly than proposed under the Paris agreement. The risk is immediate, in that it is being locked in today by the insistence of Australian conservatives and their global kin to expand the use of fossil fuels when the carbon budget to stay below sensible temperature limits is already exhausted.

It is no longer possible to follow a gradual transition path to restore a safe climate. We have left it too late; emergency action, akin to a war footing, will eventually be accepted as inevitable. The longer that takes, the greater the damage inflicted upon humanity.

Those still sceptical of this reality only have to look at the extreme climate conditions in the northern hemisphere now, in the Arctic, Europe, Asia and North America. Such conditions of record heat and devastating bushfires, with severe impacts on crop yields, may well be replicated in Australia this summer.

Our latest report, What Lies Beneath, released on Monday, demonstrates that special precautions going well beyond conventional risk management practice are required if the increased likelihood of very large climate impacts – known as “fat tails” – are to be adequately dealt with. The potential consequences of these lower-probability, but higher-impact events would be devastating for human societies.

The bulk of climate research underplays these risks, exhibiting a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence, although increasing numbers of scientists have spoken out in recent years on the dangers of such an approach.

Climate policymaking and the public narrative are based around the important work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, IPCC reports also tend towards reticence and caution, downplaying the more extreme and damaging outcomes.

While this has been understandable historically, given the pressure exerted upon the IPCC by political and vested interests, it is now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally. What were lower probability, higher-impact events are now becoming more likely.

This is a particular concern with potential climatic tipping points – passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system – such as melting polar ice sheets (and hence increasing sea levels), permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are nonlinear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge.

The extreme risks which these tipping points represent justify strong precautionary risk management. Under-reporting on these issues is irresponsible, contributing to the failure of imagination that is occurring today in our understanding of, and response to, climate change.

A reframing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is urgently required, both in the work of the IPCC and in UN climate negotiations. Current processes will not deliver either the speed or the scale of change required.

In the foreword to What Lies Beneath, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, says that the issue now “is the very survival of our civilisation, where conventional means of analysis may become useless” and that “climate change is now reaching the endgame, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences”.



Either we act with unprecedented speed or we face a bleak future. Australian politicians need to accept climate reality, set aside blinkered ideologies and start working for the people, not destroying their future.

Like an iceberg, there is great danger in “what lies beneath”.

• “What Lies Beneath: The understatement of existential climate risk” is published on Monday

• David Spratt is the Research Director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration

• Ian Dunlop is a senior member of the Breakthrough Advisory Board