Australia fiddles with fossil gas while the country swelters in record heat. It doesn’t make sense | Bill Hare

Sydney’s record October heat; high winds battering both Melbourne and New Zealand, causing death and destruction; the algal bloom caused by South Australia’s marine heatwave wreaking havoc on our marine environment; coral in both the Great Barrier and Ningaloo reefs suffering horrific bleaching. There’s barely an Australian who hasn’t been affected by one extreme weather event or another, some badly. Some have lost their lives, their homes or both. The seas around our country are suffering a marine heatwave. Just a few degrees above normal is causing these climate change-fuelled warmer oceans to put our weather on steroids, intensifying heat, rainfall and wind. And that intense rainfall will lead to increased plant growth, so another record bushfire season is inevitable at some point. But this is really only the beginning: global warming has reached an average of nearly 1.5C, and we’re set to see warming of at least 2.7C by the end of the century if we don’t take more action. How this warming will affect Australia was set out very clearly in the National Climate Risk Assessment report released last month: everything and everyone will be affected. Many sectors assessed are already experiencing moderate to high risk and if global warming is allowed to reach 2C most sectors will face very high to severe risk. Health and social support and natural systems will be severely affected – coral reefs will be all but extinct at 2C of warming. Related: Two dead at Melbourne beach as wild wind batters state, while parts of Sydney hit by record-breaking heat Australians have a clear and obvious interest in the world taking action to peak global warming as close as possible to the Paris agreement’s 1.5C limit. Never has there been a stronger need for rapid global decarbonisation; never has there been a stronger need to rid ourselves of fossil fuels and undertake a global transition to clean, renewable energy. It’s there, and it’s available. Renewables have now taken over coal in global electricity generation. China’s emissions (and therefore the globe’s) may have peaked this year. And the cost of renewables, battery storage and EVs, thanks to a massive uptake in China, is plummeting. It’s never been cheaper. And all the economics point to the cost of a global energy transition costing exponentially less than the ongoing – and building – costs of dealing with devastating climate change impacts. So what’s getting in the way of this energy revolution? The biggest barrier to the global energy transition is the fossil fuel industry and its relationship with governments. When I say fossil fuels, it’s not just coal and oil but also fossil gas, which a number of governments – including ours – have allowed themselves to be convinced is needed for this global transition. But it absolutely is not, and it’s getting in the way and risks locking the world into warming of 2.5C – or more. Gas is a fossil fuel and needs to be reduced rapidly now and effectively out of the energy system by 2050 and the power sector a decade earlier. Yet Australia wants to continue selling more of this gas to Asian markets in the form of liquefied natural gas or LNG all the way through to 2070, having just approved Woodside’s North West Shelf project to carry out this work. And LNG is much more energy-intensive than conventional gas, because of the processing it undergoes to ready it for export. So if Indonesia builds a new gas-fired power station that burns Australian LNG (on-sold to them by Japan), this will keep Indonesia hooked on fossil gas for the 40-year lifetime of that power plant, locking in carbon emissions – or closing it early, leaving furious investors out of pocket. The alternative is renewable energy firmed by storage that’s cheaper and more effective and will be better for the Indonesian economy and better for the planet. But this now risks being locked out by LNG. Related: ‘Summer is coming sooner and it’s lasting longer’: what has the weather got in store for Australia? Across Asia, Australia and Japan are touting their fossil gas wares, trying to convince their potential customers that they can just adopt carbon capture and storage (CCS) to deal with the emissions. Indeed the promised deployment of CCS is being used as a justification for allowing new fossil gas development. But we know – and they must know – that this technology is failing. It is costly, complex and unreliable. It doesn’t work to get emissions to real zero, where they need to be; the rate of emissions capture is usually much lower than industry claims; the cost is very high, compared with clean alternatives, and is unlikely to reduce in cost over time. The costs of renewable energy and storage will continue to reduce substantially over time as this industry scales up. Why spend all this cash buying fossil fuels and trying to bury emissions when renewables are now so much cheaper, and the fuel is both infinite and free? Let’s not forget the fossil fuel industry needs governments to carry the liability for this storage for many centuries into the future. Australia has the know-how and the opportunity to help lead the global energy transition to a clean energy future, we have abundant critical minerals, we could export green hydrogen, and we have an endless supply of sun and wind that could power this future. But first we need to take our foot off the gas. • Bill Hare, a physicist and climate scientist, is the chief executive of Climate Analytics