Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

When are we going to get serious about the climate crisis which is facing the planet and every single person and species—every single living creature—on this planet? It is absolutely irrefutable that we are in a climate crisis. The massive impact of the climate crisis, the extinction crisis, that we are currently in is an existential risk to the future of humanity on this planet—the future of life as we know it.

We know what's causing it. It is the ongoing burning of fossil fuels. This is what is causing it. There is no doubt about the science. The science has been clear for over 100 years. We know that the heating of the planet is being caused by the burning of coal, gas and oil. The science is equally clear as to what needs to happen to try and mitigate and pull back from the existential crisis that we are facing. It's very clear what we need to do. We need to stop the burning of coal, gas and oil. At the very least, we need to stop expanding the burning of coal, gas and oil.

So why is it that, in 2023, we are in this place debating a bill that is going to allow for the massive expansion of new fossil fuels? It is just totally unbelievable when everybody, from the Tiwi Islands to New York and from Kiribati to the people who are suffering from fires in Queensland at the moment—anyone who has got any ounce of understanding of the crisis that we're currently facing—knows that what needs to happen is that we stop the burning of coal, gas and oil as quickly as possible. We need to be getting out of fossil fuel use and replacing it with a rapid shift to clean, renewable energy.

Yet what we are doing today, with the support of the government and the opposition—hand in hand, total cahoots—is debating a bill that is going to allow for the massive expansion of new gas. And don't give me any garbage about how this is somehow about reducing the impact of climate change, that it's somehow going to be a magic bullet that means we can just keep on mining and burning this gas as much as we want. We know the reality about carbon capture and storage. It is a technology that has been touted by the fossil fuel industry for decades now. It is pseudoscience, as the UN have said. It is not going to allow us to continue the burning of coal, gas and oil and to expand that burning, and it is a complete fallacy—a lie—to say that it is.

Maybe sometime in the future—look, I'm happy for scientists to keep on doing the work on carbon capture and storage, as long as they don't actually destroy the ocean environments with the seismic testing that's required for it and destroy the lives of sea creatures that are massively impacted by the seismic testing—there will maybe be a small future for carbon capture and storage for, as Senator Grogan said on behalf of the government before, hard-to-abate sectors. We know we need to be sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. We need to be doing everything we can to reduce the carbon levels in our atmosphere if we're going to have a future. So maybe there is a tiny role for CCS in the future. But it is totally unproven now, and it is certainly not something to be legislated for now, to be giving the green light for, to allow massive expansion. We know that if this goes ahead and if the Barossa project and the associated projects go ahead it is going to result in more carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. It is going to result in more global heating. It is going to result in intensification of the climate crisis that we are currently in.

I want to spend my time here today just reminding everybody of how serious this is. It's not a minor thing that we are facing. It is the No. 1 existential crisis facing the world now. It's been facing the world for decades, and it's getting worse. When I started in this place, in 2014, I said I wanted to be able to look my grandchildren in the eye and say that it was during my time in the Senate that we made the shift towards tackling the climate crisis and the shift towards a safe climate. Sadly, almost 10 years on, we have made next to zero progress. But in that 10 years, what has changed is that we've gone from talking about the climate crisis that we are going to face in the future to talking about the climate crisis that we are facing now.

The fires in Queensland are the latest example, after the fires of 2019-20—the Black Summer—and the fires being experienced in the US and Canada. These are places that have never burnt before in the history of humans on this planet. There are fires across the world, and they are continuing, because the world is getting hotter. I weep when I think of the lives that are going to be lost. Four years on from the 2019-20 fires we are facing what it looks like is going to be another pretty awful summer, and the Queensland fires are a foretaste of what that's going to look like. There will be much more loss. More people will die. Many more animals will die. Many more environments will be pushed to the brink—forest environments that are not going to recover from it. I look at the wonderful tall, wet forests that I know so well and love, and I think, how long are they going to be in existence? I think of the threatened ecosystem of the mountain ash forests in Victoria's central highlands and all the creatures that depend upon that ecosystem. If we have yet another fire season like we had in 2019-20 that rips through those forests at increasing frequencies those forests are not going to be there. It will be a huge loss.

Just think about the heat that the climate crisis is bringing upon this planet. Think about the people who are living in poor-quality housing without air-conditioning and with poor-quality insulation in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, where we're looking at a trajectory of having heat in summer hitting 50 degrees. People can't live in that heat. People will die. It will be the most vulnerable people. It will be older people. It will be people with pre-existing health issues who are going to die. We know in the Black Summer fires that many more people died from heat than died from the fires.

That's just in Australia. Think of the heat in the tropics. In the last European summer, the heat that was experienced was on the verge of hitting levels that people just cannot survive. When you get that combination of heat and humidity, human beings just can't survive in those environments. Think of people who live in outback Australia. When you've got temperatures reaching 50 degrees, you don't survive. You die. This is what we are bequeathing to the future.

Think about the huge impact on our water supplies that global heating is having. Think about our ability to grow food. The climate of our major wheat-growing areas in Australia under three degrees of warming is forecast to become the same as the climate of the central deserts. You don't grow wheat in the central deserts. The increasing temperatures of the planet is going to have a massive impact upon our ability to grow food. Again, look at people in the tropics. Currently billions of people rely upon the ability to grow food in the tropics. The climate of the tropics is going to mean they will not be able to grow food there. This will impact on billions and billions of people. This is what we are staring down the barrel at. This is why every Green in this place is getting up here and speaking to this bill today.

This is not the legislation that we should be introducing and debating in this place today. It is not legislation that should have the government, the Liberal Party, the National Party and others joining together to be pushing through this parliament. This is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. We know we should be debating how we can quickly transition to getting out of fossil fuels altogether. We know that's what we should be doing and that that's the sort of legislation that would be giving us a future. But it's not. That shows where the power really lies in this place, when we've got the government, the Liberals and the Nationals teaming up to be passing legislation like this. It shows that they are puppets of the fossil fuel industry. They are puppets of the industry that is destroying life on this planet as we know it. The fact that this legislation that is going to increase our carbon pollution is being pushed through by this government shows that's where the power lies. Forget about democracy. Forget about the fact that you've got the majority of Australians wanting to see us drastically reduce our carbon pollution. The government are not listening to all of those Australians that want to see a drastic reduction in our carbon pollution. They are listening to their donors and they are listening to their mates. They are in cahoots with the fossil fuel destroyers. There's a revolving door. The same people who one day are a member of parliament are the next day a mining company executive.

We know the fossil fuel industry makes a motza out of destroying the planet. They are making a huge amount of money out of it. We know that they're not going to give it up in a hurry. That's why we need to have governments to actually say: 'No. This is not in the interests of humanity. It is not in the interests of life on the planet.' When you have the UN, the IPCC and every reputable organisation on the planet saying, 'Stop new coal, gas and oil,' you would think that we could have a government that is responsible enough to be taking that to heart. But, no. Why should I be surprised?

I was one of the founders of the Greens in Victoria 32 years ago because I saw that Labor and the Liberals weren't listening when it came to these existential threats. In fact it was about climate. Having studied climate science, having learnt about the science of global warming, global heating, the greenhouse effect—I learnt about that at university when I was 20, studying climate science, 43 years ago. And when I learnt about it, I said: 'This is really serious! The world needs to be doing something about it.' At which stage I finished my science degree and I set out on a career as an activist.

I had a partner who ended up being one of the world's leading climate scientists, who kept me on track in terms of what the science was actually saying. And so we founded the Greens because we knew, we could see then, over 30 years ago, that the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the National Party weren't going to be listening to the people on this issue. They were going to be listening to their corporate vested interests, to their puppetmasters.

Don't despair, folks, because it's very clear. This bill is laying that clear today. It's very clear what the role of the Greens is, and the crossbench who are speaking up and the teal independents who were elected at the last election. The Labor and Liberal parties are not listening to the people, they are not listening to the science, they are not looking at the disaster that's coming towards us, so they need to be chucked out. They need to be replaced. They are not going to change. It is very clear they are not going to change. The power of the fossil fuel industry has got their tentacles into them and they are not going to change, so chuck them out.

Vote for people who are going to listen. Vote so that we would have a government in this place that would be respecting the science, that would not be bringing legislation like this into this parliament today. That's what we need to be doing. Chuck them out and vote for people who are actually going to be listening.