'You may delay, but time will not'

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Earlier this week, 2025 clocked up its 183rd day.

Most of eastern Australia would have been keeping one eye on the weather report, given the ‘rain bomb’, while others were reeling from the news an alleged child sex offender had been working at Melbourne child care centres.

Like every day, millions of Australians would have been lost in the life changing and mundane, and many wouldn’t have noted the date at all.

But July 2 mattered. At least for those focused on the battle we have to save the planet and life as we (sort of) know it.

From July 2, we are now closer to 2050 than we are to the Year 2000.

It’s just eight more federal elections away (presuming we continue to have three year terms).

That gives us 293 months to try and keep global warming to just 1.5 degrees.

The global average temperature increase last year was 1.6 degrees.

Spikes happen, and a single year isn’t enough to say it’s done. But we are trending the wrong way.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, you may delay, but time will not. It’s continuing to march on while our government delays taking the climate action every rational thinking person knows is necessary to save the future; putting an end to new coal and gas.

Instead, we are getting another inquiry into the gas industry. We don’t need it. We know the answers. Tax the companies already stripping the land of resources properly and don’t approve any new projects.

We have seen the Albanese government approve the North West Shelf expansion (the equivalent of 12 coal mines in terms of emissions) faster than even Peter Dutton promised to do it. Since coming to power in 2022, the Albanese government has approved 11 new coal mine projects, with another 29 under consideration.

We are closer to 2050 than we are to the year 2000. And yet the commitment to lower our emissions is still not being taken seriously enough for the government to act as it should.

11 coal mine project approved. 2,511 million tonnes of emissions. Visit Coal Mine Tracker for more info.

Humans can be funny creatures. Often, we won’t act on a threat until we, or a loved one, experience it ourselves. It’s one of the reasons Australia is sticking so close to America, despite the cruelty and avarice of the Trump administration, and why so many people seem able to ignore a genocide.

But climate change is already threatening our way of life. An ecological disaster is playing out along the shoreline of South Australia, after an ocean heatwave turbo charged an algae bloom which is choking the local marine life. Experts can’t put a figure on the deaths – which are still happening – but confidently predict it has cost ‘tens of thousands’ of animals and other vital ocean dwellers, their lives.

Hopes that winter would cool the marine heatwave, first identified earlier this year, have been dashed.

Nearly a third of the population of Tuvalu has entered a ballot to relocate to Australia, under an agreement struck with the Albanese government in its first term of parliament. Climate refugees are very real, and it’s starting to play a bigger role in diplomatic relations – Vanuatu is now playing hardball with the Australian government over immigration and understandably – what is the point of a ‘strong and enduring’ relationship, if we just watch water lap at their door?

Australia can not just pretend that it’s business as usual any longer. 2030 is in less than five years and one of the nation’s two ‘major’ parties is still arguing over whether it supports net zero or not.

The LNP in Queensland has watered down the previous Labor government’s climate commitments, and extending the life of the state-owned coal fired power stations.

Politicians can pretend like none of this matters, but we know better. This is not something that can be reviewed away, or delayed until the final year before extension by committee. This is a real and present danger to not just our way of life, but the future. We don’t get to pretend that this is something we can deal with later.

The politicians making the decisions now will not be there in 2050 for the ultimate reckoning. Some of those who have dedicated their political careers to being as big a barrier to action as they possibly can won’t even be alive to see the fruits of their poisonous labour.

But to pretend that this is all something that will only impact us in the future, instead of the changes we are all seeing and experiencing every day, is just as dangerous. You’re always going to have the Barnaby Joyces of the world yelling at clouds. But how many more ‘unseasonable’ weather events, ‘unprecedented’ storms, food shortages, algae blooms, animal losses, rising global tensions, illnesses, ‘historical’ floods and droughts do we have to see before we start realising the future is actually now?