Nannas Claudia and Kathy attended The Australia Institute’s Climate Integrity Summit at NSW Parliament House on 15 September.
The event was held in the unwelcomingly named Strangers Room. The people in the room felt like strangers to most of the people who work in that place, as our views on the climate crisis are so different.
Co-CEO Richard Dennis said, ‘integrity is the opposite of hypocrisy’. Integrity was on display from the speakers and audience in the Strangers Room. Hypocrisy abounds with the people in power in the rest of the building.
Governments cover things up, confusing us ‘strangers’ with complicated policies, e.g. safeguard mechanism, carbon offsets, carbon credits — false solutions when the only solution is simple. Stop approving fossil fuels and end native forest logging.
See our written report below or watch speakers on Bluesky here.
Opening Remarks
Leanne Minshull — Co-CEO, The Australia Institute
‘Time for our parliamentarians to stop behaving like frogs (in a pot of heating water) and start leading like heroes.’
Sydney’s average summer temperature is 26.4°C degrees. The first week of Spring exceeded that!
The warming climate is already changing the way we live:
- We wait to see the weather before booking camping holidays.
- Music festivals have become too risky.
- Insurance premiums have increased — 1 in 20 houses are uninsurable.
- Libraries are full on hot days because they are air conditioned.
It’s too late for an orderly transition — we need to out organise the fossil fuel industry.
Keynote: Australia’s Climate Contradictions — Where to from here
Richard Dennis — Co-CEO, The Australia Institute
Richard acknowledged that Polly Hemming was the instigator of the Integrity Summit to bring together science and reality — the truth, being honest about what Australia is doing.
“The number of solar panels on domestic roofs is irrelevant.” Richard stressed.
The government covers things up with complicated policies, e.g. safeguard mechanism, carbon offsets, carbon credits — false solutions when the only solution is to stop approving fossil fuels and to end native forest logging.
We currently pay $16 billion in fossil fuel subsidies per year. We give away most of our gas when we could be receiving $17 billion a year in tax revenue.
By delaying the transition, it will be more difficult and destructive.
Transition Away from Fossil Fuels: From Santa Marta to Tuvalu
Background information
The UN’s first annual climate summit, COP1, was held in 1995 in Berlin. Last year’s COP30 concluded without mentioning fossil fuels in the final document. This year COP31 will be held in Antalya, Turkiye in November. Australia’s Energy and Climate Minister, Chris Bowen, holds the COP 31 presidency for negotiations.
Governments from many countries are fed up with the fossil fuel industry taking over the UN’s climate summits. The First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels (TAFF) was held in Santa Marta, Colombia, in February 2026.
The next TAFF Conference: Securing a Global Framework to End the Fossil Fuels Era has been organised for Tuvalu in April 2027, sponsored by Tuvalu and Ireland. People, organisations, politicians and governments are asked to support a fossil fuel treaty.
Dr Maina Vakafua Talia — Minister for Climate Change and Environment in Tuvalu
The spirit of a good neighbour has a moral dimension. What we need now is honesty, solidarity and result-driven implementation. The TAFF process is indispensable for this, as it is constructive and complementary to the COP conferences.
We need to plan for and finance the transition, remove barriers and develop practical, scalable solutions, including debt relief and the design of just, equitable and sustainable financial instruments to support the transition.
Global warming is a life-and-death scenario for Pacific nations. Pushing people to leave their homes is not a solution, and trading life for migration is immoral.
Senator Rosa Galvez — Canada
Infinite growth is in contradiction to finite resources. The floor we should aim for is equitable opportunities, dignified work and security (at all levels), social justice. The ceiling is set by the nine planetary boundaries.
Use the science-based term ‘global’ or ‘planetary warming’ instead of climate change, as ‘change’ can have a positive connotation. [This is inline with our Nanna song “Global Warming Dreaming”.]
Today’s environmental, social and economic challenges are interconnected and, at times, reinforce each other to create risks to our entire system as we know it. However, government tends to respond to these challenges in isolation rather than addressing them holistically.
Nature-based solutions are effective and produce high returns.
Indigenous knowledge is essential for reaching Paris Agreement goals.
Discussion:
The latest UN Environment Programme Overshoot Report says “Exceedance of 1.5°C is now widely assessed as unavoidable.”.
Carbon offsets and carbon capture and storage (CCS) are false solutions. These carbon abatement schemes allow fossil fuels to expand.
Once in 100-year scenarios can happen within a decade, ten-year scenarios can happen at any time, so we need to be proactive, but this comes with a cost. Our priorities must be to reduce energy use, then increase renewables, then electrify as far as possible, then increase energy efficiency. Offsets must be used as a last resort.
We need transparency and accountability in regards to what is transition and what is abatement. Global warming presents a huge range of corporate risks — stranded assets, reputation — that companies are not disclosing. We should bring in unexpected allies, especially from areas like finance, insurance, actuaries and accountants.
Between 2020 and 2025, the Australian government gave A$62 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel industries. So-called free markets are severely distorted by these subsidies, and we could choose to give this money to other sectors.
Panel: Fossil Fuel Endgame
Alison Reeve — Grattan Institute
Gas production is responsible for 25% of Australia’s emissions, but gas is an industry in decline: use has dropped 16% since 2020. However, this is not fast enough to meet targets.
In domestic use, we see natural attrition due to appliance breakdown and replacement with electric appliances. We need different pathways for industries that can electrify relatively easily and industries that need very high temperatures, e.g. aluminium, and therefore will continue to depend on gas. Models predict a very small but persistent use of gas.
Bruce Robertson — Energy Finance Analyst
We’re at a global turning point in gas demand. Gas has a rising cost curve, as the cheapest and cleanest gas has already been extracted. New extraction is expensive and much more carbon-intensive — as high CO2 content is costly to remove. Renewable energies, on the other hand, have decreasing cost curves.
Gas is also a geopolitical disaster:
- Qatar, the world’s third largest producer/exporter with 18% of global gas, halted LNG exports after an Iranian drone strike in March.
- Russia has decreased production.
- China’s demand is falling. They have a domestic supply and import from Russia.
- Demand is falling in India. India and Pakistan used to import gas from Qatar.
- Japan buys gas under contract from Australia but demand has fallen so they sell our gas at a profit.
- South Korea is intensifying its transition efforts.
- The US is still expanding, but gas use in the power system has declined by almost 50% in the past 3 years as renewables increase.
- Europe has seen a 143% increase in gas prices and is now dependent on the US, rather than Russia.
According to forecasts, gas will account for less than 5% of the power system by 2040. We therefore need better policy responses adapted to a shrinking, rather than a growing industry.
But the story we hear is not of a market in decline, as the gas industry spends vast amounts of money to advertise its continued relevance. Gas may play an important role in firming the power system, but this does not require large amounts of gas. Decoupling ourselves from gas means decoupling ourselves from the huge volatility of gas prices, which has been driving inflation.
Gas shrinkage inequitable and unfair
Industry shrinkage can be inequitable and unfair if not controlled. As more people come off gas, there are fewer people to pay for gas extraction, gas pipelines and other infrastructure. The fewer people on gas, the more the price rises. This effects the most vulnerable in the community — people who rent or have a body corporate — unless the government intervenes to help them to get off gas.
Companies need to accept their responsibility for the costs of writing down assets.
Currently our Councils are not allowed to remove pipelines from the network in areas with little use. In Germany, there’s a scheme where people are advised that their gas supply will be turned off in five years’ time, so they can plan for electrifying.
In some countries, it’s mandatory for landlords to replace broken-down gas appliances with electric.
Panel: Low Integrity Offsets: Greenwashing Climate Pollution
Dr Kirsty Howey — Wilderness Society
There’s a symbiotic relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the offsets industry, and we’ve seen a clear increase in offsets being generated over the past ten years. However, cheap and easy land-based offsets have already been snapped up, hence the idea of creating the Improved Native Forest Management (INFM), which could generate 5 million Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) per year in NSW alone and could be rolled out across the country. The NSW ACCUs from the INFM are enough to offset Woodside’s North West Shelf project, one of the country’s most polluting projects. This is unlikely to be a coincidence…
Dr Kate Dooley — University of Melbourne
High integrity offsets are offsets that pass three tests. The climate benefits must be:
- Real — 85% of offset credits are not real,
- Additional — difficult to prove, as this relies on a counterfactual analysis,
- Permanent — emissions from fossil fuels remain in the atmosphere for millennia. Offset accounting defines ‘permanent’ as 100 years (gold standard) or even less, which is a much shorter time than fossil fuel emissions persist.
The fossil fuel and soil carbon cycles are slow — the atmosphere, water and vegetation cycle is fast. Allowing unlimited land-based (vegetation) offsets means Australia has no effective climate policy.
At the same time, over-crediting of offsets is systemic. In the EU, there are discussions about limiting offsets to like-for-like offsets — this is very difficult to achieve for coal and gas but could potentially work for agricultural emissions. Most countries do not rely on offsets. In fact, the only other country allowing 100% offsets is Kazakhstan.
Australia has around six big and powerful ‘carbon service providers’, selling offsets to industry, which we should work to crush.
Thanks to greenwashing and political messaging, most Australians believe we have a robust climate policy. The safeguard mechanism is deliberately complex and abstract.
The opportunity now is to create more public awareness about the tangibility of offsets that has evolved from the INFM debate, and the pressure to dismantle our failing climate policy. People need to be made aware of the cascading, existential effects of global warming and how this environmental problem is also an economic problem.
Panel: Frontline Fossil Fuel Phase-Out
James Shelley — Jubilee Australia Research Centre
The Jubilee report, ‘Resisting the gas empire’, on five case studies of frontline communities, paints a harrowing picture of the legacy of Australian gas exports — health effects, systemic violation of human rights and the degradation of natural environment.
Dr Kate Wylie — Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA)
DEA emphasise that climate change causes death and disease right now — more than 1500 dead in Nepal, thousands still missing; more than 35,000 additional deaths in Europe this summer.
‘Sacrifice zones’, areas that have been permanently damaged by industrial pollution, exist in Australia today. Communities need clear, comprehensible information about what this means. Ultimately, the whole planet may become a sacrifice zone. Rising water levels threaten 265,000 homes in Australia.
DEA lost their court case to overturn the approval of Woodside’s environmental plan, but the judge recognised the dangers stating that, “It is not for this Court to adjudicate on the existential threat posed by climate change caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere.”
DEA has written an open letter to Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and Minister for Health and Aged Care, Mark Butler, re the health risks of gas, which we all can sign.
There is still a lack of understanding of how serious and urgent a threat global warming is — denial is very powerful and pervasive.
Rowan Hanley — Surfrider Foundation
It took seven years to stop PEP11 and prohibit all offshore gas projects off the coast of NSW.
Panel: Funding the Future — Can We Out-Organise the Fossil Fuel Industry?
Sue McKinnon — McKinnon Family Foundation
‘If what you’re doing isn’t upsetting powerful people every day, you’re not doing the work’, said Sue. There’s a moral imperative to act; identify the pillars of support that prop up power and address them.
Arielle Gamble — Groundswell Giving
Groundswell Giving funds climate action. Activists generate social and environmental wealth and value that flows back to society. Giving is an act of solidarity — look at it not as charity, but as an act of redistribution. Ask yourself how you can contribute — if not through action/activism, then maybe through donations.
We have seen immense accumulations of wealth by just a few, and the widening gap between a tiny, but absurdly rich minority and a growing number of people experiencing financial insecurity undermines our society.
Panel: Strange politics: climate action in a changing Australia
Oscar Kaspi-Crutchett — Victorian Trades Hall Council
Oscar recently published the Antidote: trade unionism as a vaccine against far-right politics report. He clearly said that fact checking is no effective way to counter disinformation. The offer of the far right is much more psychic/emotional than political: they tell people that they’re part of a group that has been taken advantage of, and right-wing populism listens to them.
The far right is the product of a system that has failed to live up to its promise of continued growth and ever-increasing standards of living. Today, the far right and left are competing for the votes of the workers in services and production. There’s no place for parties like the Coalition any more. That’s why it’s essential that the left and independents don’t abandon the outer suburb workers, don’t cower to the framing of the far right and try to engage the masses.
The far-right coalition comprises people whose interests don’t overlap, so they need to provide the people with a faux devil to keep them united. In response, we need to identify the real enemy and find what unites people. Demolish the idea that Senator Hanson is a disruptor — use her own statements on how she intends to harm working people.
Amy Remeikis — Australia Institute
Fascism no longer looks the way we’ve been trained to perceive it. Collective action and prebunking (proactive debunking) are the only ways to push back. We need to inoculate people against the bullshit we can see coming towards us.
The era of neoliberalism is over — we’re entering a prolonged downtime and democracy may not survive it. We need to address the climate threat with the seriousness it deserves.
We have an ageing working-class population that sees their kids and themselves falling behind, so they’re angry. Today’s battlers are no longer the tradies; they include students with a HECS debt, families who have done everything right and sandwiched millennials supporting parents who don’t have enough super.
When we talk about climate policy, we need to talk about how climate policy will make their lives better and cheaper and how past policy failures have got ourselves into this position.
No progressive movement ever knew they were going to win when they started. Change the narrative to ‘it’s not fair and we’re going to fix it’. Give people a reason to unify.