SNA (Melbourne) — The climate crisis has forced most nations to accelerate their clean energy transitions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released this week underlined the urgency. However, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has never moved off his position that his nation’s coal industry will remain in place for decades to come.

Ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) scheduled to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November, most nations are now strengthening their climate commitments. The landmark so far is the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which nations pledged to limit global warming to below 2 degrees celsius from preindustrial levels, and preferably 1.5 degrees.

The United Kingdom, for example, which is hosting COP26, has pledged to reduce its economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by at least 68% by 2030 (compared to 1990 levels) and other nations are setting similar goals.

Scott Morrison’s Australia, however, is now understood to be one of the most recalcitrant governments in the world when it comes to climate change issues, standing out for its unwillingness to abandon fossil fuels along any reasonable timeline.

Australia has so far pledged a greenhouse gas emissions cut of only 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030.

Tony Abbott, the prime minister at the time of the Paris Agreement, who shares the incumbent’s unwillingness to tackle the climate crisis, stated in 2015, “Our policy doesn’t depend upon the demise of coal. In fact, the only way to protect the coal industry is to go with the sorts of policies that we have. That’s why I think our policies are not only good for the environment but very good for jobs.”

Morrison made his own view on the subject perfectly clear in February 2017 when–as the nation’s then-Treasurer–he appeared in Parliament brandishing a large lump of coal and taunting opposition lawmakers by saying, “This is coal. Don’t be afraid! Don’t be scared!”

He then declared, “It is coal that has ensured for over a hundred years that Australia has enjoyed an energy competitive advantage that has delivered prosperity to Australian businesses.” He denounced opposition lawmakers who were calling for cleaner energy as people having “an ideological, pathological fear of coal.”

As of 2017, when Morrison pulled this stunt in Parliament, the coal industry in Australia, including both domestic consumption and exports, was responsible for about 5% of global fossil fuel emissions. It ranks as one of the highest per capita CO2 emitters in the world.

Morrison has also played down climate change as a global threat. When pressed at the beginning of 2020 over the apocalyptic wildfires which were then ravaging his nation, he stated, “They are natural disasters. They wreak this sort of havoc when they affect our country as they have for a very long time.”

It is this same man who, as Australia’s national leader, is now being called upon by environmental groups as well as representatives of foreign governments to quickly phase out fossil fuels.

As of this January, he made it clear that he still feels there’s no need to hurry, telling the media, “These [coal] mines have got, you know, ten, twenty, thirty years to run… What’s important is that we continue to extract and get the value from the opportunity and wealth that’s there that really benefits the rest of this country.”

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