Illustration: John Shakespeare Australian public opinion has been moving in the same direction, as the Lowy Institute poll last week revealed. The other is the right wing of Abbott's party. This refuses, still, to admit that there is a problem to be solved. Abbott himself mightn't hold deep personal conviction on this. In opposition, he said that he was a "weathervane" on climate change. But, as Malcolm Turnbull said after losing the leadership to Abbott: "The fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming."

Carbon-belching coal fired plants are the bugbear of global efforts to rein in climate change. Credit:Bloomberg Most of them have not gone away; many were promoted into Abbott's cabinet. One symptom: with renewable energy worldwide gathering pace, the Abbott government has gone in the opposite direction to cut Australia's level of renewable energy mandated by law. The result: "We are alone in the world, in a domestic political discussion that's quite discordant with reality of political and scientific discourse" in the wider world, says Ross Garnaut, one of Australia's most eminent economists and author of a major report on the economics of climate change. So the calculation for Abbott, as one of his ministers puts it privately: "Tony will do as little as he thinks he can get away with – he thinks that's rational".

What's the least he can get away with? As countries announce their new targets in the approach to the Paris climate conference set for December, the "little as possible" task keeps getting bigger. "No one is remaining at the speed they were at for the period to 2020," says an ANU economist specialising in climate change, Frank Jotzo. "The new US target is doubling its annual average rate of change implicit in its target for cutting greenhouse emissions, and in the case of the European Union it's trebling. That's the defining difference." For the years 2005 to 2020, the US pace averaged a cut of 1.2 per cent a year, and the EU 0.8. In the new targets they've announced, the US will need to accelerate to 2.5 per cent a year and the EU 2.8, says Jotzo. Yes, but what about a country more comparable to Australia? A resource-rich, medium-sized economy governed by a conservative leader, Stephen Harper, a man Tony Abbott once described as "almost a brother"?

"Canada is seen as part of the recalcitrant camp with Australia," says Jotzo. But: "It's now got a target quite close to the US target; there's really nowhere left to hide for Australia." These countries are expressing their targets for emissions cuts for 2025 by using the starting point of 2005: the US is pledging to cut by 26-28 per cent, the EU by 23 per cent, Britain by 41 per cent and Canada by 24 per cent. Australia's Climate Change Minister, Greg Hunt, has said that Australia will announce its target by mid-July. To be comparable with the US and Canada, Australia, too, would need to set a target of around 20 to 25 per cent. This seems to be the likely outcome at the moment. Ross Garnaut tells me that something of the order of the US cut would be "sort of respectable" for Australia. The biggest emitter of them all, China, could yet influence the equation. Beijing has yet to announce its post-2020 target. An announcement is imminent. So far China has pledged only that it will stop increasing emissions by 2030.

But already there is evidence that China could be helping rather than hindering, sooner than its existing pledge suggests. From 2005 to 2011 China increased its annual average carbon emissions by 7.4 per cent. In 2012-13, that rate halved, to 3.8 per cent, says Jotzo. "They will get their rate of emissions growth close to zero for 2020-30," he projects. At the moment, the global negotiation is based entirely on voluntary commitments, all carrots and no sticks. This could change. Frank Jotzo reports that, at a recent Shanghai workshop, "Chinese research institutes that advise the government were considering how China could apply a tariff to imports from countries that don't have equivalent policies. "That's a big stick sitting in the background." In any case, weaning Australia off carbon-intensive coal-fired power plants shouldn't be as hard as it looks. The existing plants are all due to retire within ten years. The cost of new solar energy continues to fall at a rapid rate.

Garnaut sees a bright future for Australia once it gets past its political myopia: "Australia's natural endowment makes it a developed country superpower of the new energy economy. "It's likely these realities will eventually shine through – despite our doing our best to damage our advantages." Rather than dwell on the past advantage of cheap coal, Abbott would do Australia and the world a favour by emphasising its future edge in renewable power. It's the least he could do. Peter Hartcher is the international editor.