Last week, Pope Francis said "the bulk of global warming" is caused by human activity, and called on the world's rich to take steps to mitigate the damage by reducing consumption and reliance on fossil fuels. There is concern Australia is increasingly "locked-in" to a high-carbon economic structure that threatens the development of new green industries and ultimately jobs. A study by the Australian National University and WWF Australia estimates that delaying action on climate change by 15 years will triple the cost of necessary emission reduction by 2050 in comparison to beginning action this year. It says the push to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius will require "huge quantities" of installed coal capacity to be prematurely retired between 2030 and 2050. "Such a vast global write-off of capital would be unprecedented in scale," the report says. Co-author and economist Dr Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at Australian National University, said it is now likely that Australia will be left with stranded assets. "It is just a question of the extent," he said. Economist and climate change adviser Professor Ross Garnaut said a substantial part of the massive investment since 2011 to expand Australian production and export capacity for resources will never return the investors' cost of capital. "Much less capital would have been wasted if attention had been paid to analysis of what was happening in environment and economic policy in major consuming countries, especially China," he said.

In a recent submission to the government on future emission reduction targets Professor Garnaut said the cost of recent over-investments in the resources sector "may already exceed what would have been the cost to the middle of the century of timely implementation of Australia's share of a global mitigation effort directed at holding temperature increase to two degrees." The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has expressed strong confidence in the future of fossil fuels and predicted coal will be the world's principal energy source for "many decades to come." He's also labelled coal "good for humanity" and "essential to the prosperity of Australia". But this month, members of the powerful G7 groups of nations committed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to 40-70 per cent below current levels by 2050, and to eliminate the use of fossil fuels altogether by 2100. University of Queensland economist, John Quiggin, says that if those commitments are to be met Australia's fossil fuel exports will peak "in the relatively near future" and then decline to zero within a few decades. "The government is clearly backing a losing horse," he said.

Dr Jotzo said many countries were "drawing ahead" of Australia in the transition to a low-carbon economy. "The thing is not to miss the boat and to avoid locking in the old-style industries," he said. This warning follows the release of Bureau of Statistics figures showing that uncertainly in the renewable energy industry has caused a sharp fall in employment in the sector. The number of jobs in the renewables sector peaked at 14,890 in 2011-12 but slumped by 15 per cent to 12,590 last financial year. Last week, the International Energy Agency, of which Australia is a member, proposed a global "bridging strategy" that would deliver a peak in global energy-related emissions by 2020. One of its key recommendations is "putting a brake" on growth in coal use within five years, to impose a ban on the construction of coal-fired power stations and to phase out of many existing coal-fired plants.