Does anyone care that we crossed the line we agreed not to cross?

We had fifteen years to stay below 1.5°C. We crossed it in ten. Now what?!

Buried well beneath the fold, under headlines about Tesla approving a $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk, Liberal party infighting, and sports drama, tucked under a tab marked “more news,” sat this headline: “Missing 1.5°C climate target is a moral failure, UN chief tells COP30 summit.”

It was just sitting there. The thing the world agreed would be catastrophic. That line we agreed we must not cross? We’d crossed it. Deemed less important than Reece Walsh taking selfies in budgie smugglers.

I felt like I was going crazy. This was the threshold between a difficult future and an impossible one. The world’s governments had looked at the science, calculated human survival, and declared: This is the line. Do not cross.

We were supposed to do everything we could to avoid crossing 1.5°C. We had fifteen years to stay behind that line. We crossed it in ten. Instead of slowing, we accelerated. The world is now warming at roughly 0.3°C per decade, nearly twice the rate at the end of the 20th century.

What the actual fuck are we doing?

Furious, I started typing, spurred by a volatile mix of nausea and rage. Before too long, that fury soured into despair. The word count slowed to a halt. I had to go outside, let the breeze hit my face, and try to convince my nervous system it wasn’t the end of the world… yet.

Two weeks passed. COP30 came and went.

But I’m back typing away now, not despite the despair, but fuelled by it.

In those two weeks, the failures kept on comin’ and they didn’t stop comin’. COP30 ended with yet another signature Albanese captain’s call, ceding Australia’s (and our Pacific neighbours’) three-year bid to host COP31 to Turkey, without consulting his own Climate Minister. The ice we skate is getting pretty thin, the waters getting warm so they might as well swim?

The UN Secretary-General called our collective global failure a “deadly peril,” and governments responded with “DRILL BABY DRILL!”

Meanwhile, the Nationals formally abandoned net zero. Then the Libs followed suit. Then they abandoned it together. Heartwarming.

Planet warming.

The government looked at this negligence and thought, “dayumm, that’s exactly the kind of party we want to write nature laws with”, signalling they’re more willing to negotiate with climate deniers than with the Greens. These are the same proposed laws that could have been actual laws by now if Albo hadn’t killed a deal with the Greens last term. But why would you include protecting native forests in nature laws anyway? That’s so random.

Our shiny new Environment Minister now positions himself as a man bravely forging a “sensible centre” between the fire and the corporations fuelling it. Australia is warming faster than the global average (making it one of the fastest-warming countries on Earth), meaning we hit tipping points earlier, harder, with fewer buffers. His response? Nature laws weak enough to enrage environmentalists and strong enough to annoy business… just a little bit.

There is no sensible centre between plundering and protecting the environment.

The centre between extinction and survival is mass death.

The centre between ecosystem collapse and preservation is famine.

You can’t split the difference between a habitable and an uninhabitable planet.

But maybe I’m overreacting.

After all:

“This debate is not predicated on science. It is predicated on economics,” — Nationals leader David Littleproud.

Ah yes, soothing.

Perhaps we should make this debate about economics, since these maniacs don’t give a flying fuck about flying foxes frying in the trees. Nor algal blooms turning beaches into toxic soup. Nor coral reefs bleaching past recovery, threatening the food security and livelihoods of around 500 million people who depend on them. Nor the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, parts of which have likely begun a melt that locks in metres of sea-level rise. Nor the Amazon edging toward a tipping point where it flips from carbon sink to carbon source and starts actively fuelling the crisis it’s supposed to slow.

“Pull it together, Jack, and show them the money,” I mutter to myself as I open a new tab to figure out the cost.

Hmm, what’s this I read? The Climate Council estimates abandoning net zero will cost Australia an estimated $4.2 trillion over the next 50 years. Extreme weather disasters already cost Australia around $35 billion in the decade to 2019, and the annual bill is rising. Like our energy bills, which Susan with two S’s says is thanks to renewables, while the CSIRO (you know, the people who invented Wi-Fi so we could stream politicians lying through their teeth) shows renewables are the cheapest new energy.

So there it is. By their own sacred rules of economics, this is still a catastrophic own-goal. Not just morally bankrupt, but fiscally deranged.

Won’t someone think of the poor insurance industry for once?!

The Coalition gets an F for economics and an FU for science. You know, it’s said that economics is more of an art than a science, but you know what is more of a science than an art? Science.

This is a physics problem.

In Paris, in 2015, every government agreed that 1.5°C was a physical boundary for the Earth. Cross it and the planet’s operating system (the one that makes life possible) begins to beachball of death. We crossed it. The tipping points aren’t coming. They’re here. And there is no restart button. We can’t turn the earth off and on again.

While the planet warmed and warmed, Australia’s government, proudly declaring the climate wars “won”, spent three years lobbying to co-host COP31 with Pacific nations. The very nations drowning because of our fossil fuel approvals. Pacific leaders begged us to stop opening new projects. We responded by opening more.

The Beetaloo Basin alone locks in up to 1.4 billion tonnes of lifetime emissions. The North West Shelf expansion adds another 4.4 billion tonnes over its lifetime. In raw physics terms, that 5.8 billion tonnes translates to roughly 0.003°C of extra warming. Which doesn’t sound like that much until you learn that one recent estimate suggests that every 0.1°C of warming from here could mean around 100 million additional deaths. Which puts these two projects alone in the realm of THREE MILLION LIVES.

Real people (alive today or yet to be born) pushed into lives cut short by deadly heat, crop failure, and displacement.

They are not rounding errors.

We are not rounding errors.

But sure, Anthony. The climate wars are over.

No. They’re only just beginning. And you are not our ally.

Australia’s own climate risk assessment, conveniently buried before the election, paints the same picture. By 2030, around 597,000 people are projected to live in areas exposed to sea-level rise, rising to 1.5 million by 2050. Under a 3°C scenario, 40–70% of species will need to move, adapt, or die.

The minister’s response? Australians may find this “confronting.”

Translation: “We chose this outcome for you. Deal with it cunts.”

Meanwhile, we remain one of the highest per-capita emitters in the world, higher than Europe, the UK, Japan, China, or India. We didn’t “fail” to stay below 1.5°C. Those in power chose not to. Expansion over science. Profit over survival.

And our information system is just as cooked.

Yesterday, when I counted 256 homepage stories across major Australian outlets, only 11 were about climate. That’s 4.3%. The Guardian hit 6.3%. The ABC hit 1.6%. The Sydney Morning Herald’s most popular story was about Glenn McGrath not getting a commentary gig for the Ashes. Ooh ah Glenn McGrath! Because apparently that matters more than the fact that the Ashes themselves will soon be literal.

And news dot com dot au? Zero.

Not one story about the likely collapse of our civilisation, but 52 headlines about reality TV, Black Friday sales, and Jeffrey Epstein’s weird, tiny dick.

We are cooked.

But we could be more cooked.

The difference between 1.5°C and 2.7°C is the difference between hardship and catastrophe. Between adaptation and uninhabitability. Between the planet burying some of our children and cremating all of them. That gap is malleable. And it’s still worth fighting for.

So yes, damage is unavoidable. But collapse is not inevitable.

The most dangerous narrative now is the calm yet defeatist one. Bill Gates has suggested shifting more focus from cutting emissions to “mitigation”, in practice telling us to manage the symptoms rather than cure the cause, which is genuinely one of the dumbest things I’ve heard a supposedly intelligent person say, given that every tenth of a degree multiplies both suffering and cost by millions.

It’s victim-blaming on a planetary scale from the same billionaires with the most to gain from the status quo, hedging their bets while they build bunkers and hire bodyguards who will shoot them in the head the second the social fabric begins to tear.

What happens next depends on whether we cooperate with a future we did not choose.

The machinery driving this crisis isn’t mysterious: approvals, subsidies, lobbying, donations, media silence. We know how it works. It’s visible. It’s tangible. We have to disrupt that system in every way we can, and encourage as many people as possible to do the same. We need a mass-scale climate movement with momentum, resolve, and teeth.

This is not a job for individual heroes. It’s a job for everyday punters in every street and every town in the country. People who are done accepting the unacceptable.

We crossed the line early. The tipping points have begun. But there is still hope in action.

Time is running out. And we have been so thoroughly, unforgivably let down.

But we are not powerless to change this.

Not yet.