I say this to you here, Kieran, and when did Scott Morrison go on your program or on Insiders and be prepared to subject himself to a debate about the costs of inaction?
Because I tell you what, we saw a bit of the cost of inaction over the bushfire season, when we lost 33 lives, when we lost over 3,000 homes, when we lost 12m hectares of land – when we have, who knows what the cost is.
What we know is that the cost of that season certainly won’t be $2bn that the government talks about. We know that more extreme weather events, we know the predictions are an increase in droughts. We know the consequences of dangerous climate change are catastrophic for our economy.
Global economists predict that the cost of a greater-than-2C increase in global temperatures will be between 15 and 25% lower economic growth – a greater cost than we saw during the Great Depression.
And one of the things that your job has to be, if I can be so bold, is to hold the government to account, that have Treasury, that have Finance, that won’t meet its 2030 target.
That’s why they went to Madrid and argued for an accounting trick rather than actually lowering their emissions.
