No More Need For Greenwashing
In 2018, we pedalled our bikes across the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge in Canberra in the burning sun to stand on the red bricks outside Parliament House. Thousands of school kids and well-meaning parents armed with pump-top Banana Boat sunscreen, side by side in a cacophony of noise and colour with one demand: Climate Action. Now.
After my arms began to ache from holding up a brightly painted sheet of cardboard, the doors of parliament finally swung open and our selected student representatives marched into the air-conditioning to discuss our demands. Amongst the crowd there were cheers, another round of chanting, and sweaty arms linked together as we left in pursuit of Calippos from the Local IGA.
But by the next summer, the air was filled with smoke. In their dying throes, the burning trees brought tears to our eyes, so our vision was clear even as our lungs filled with ash. The bike path I took to get to the march was made from dirt. I rode over the cracks with abandon and took no note of the way in which my hope slowly began to slip into the fissures in the packed red earth.
The Nationals abandoned support of net zero targets in their federal platform last year. Early this year, One Nation—no longer a laughing stock of the mainstream but a party with a considerable primary vote of 23% as per January’s Freshwater poll—took to social media to double down on their longstanding approach to climate (in)action. The party posted that they would withdraw Australia from the Paris Agreement “immediately” if they were in power. A promise of action for climate change, once crucial to assuage public anxieties and win traction in Australian politics, now seems to limp far behind home ownership schemes and the cost of living. These issues feed off and contribute to deeply entrenched cultural debates i.e immigration in a positive feedback loop, solidifying voter loyalty on either side of the political spectrum.
The 2010s were a notable window for climate discourse, as Australia committed to successive international climate targets. Australia pledged commitment to the Cancun Agreement in 2010, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 5% below 2000 levels by 2020. The Paris agreement of 2015 followed on its back, increasing this target to a 28–29% reduction by 2030. This promise of change thrived in the vacuous gap between speech and action. The nature of the carbon credit counting itself is misleading, generously enabling offsets and carrying over a surplus of credit—the tonnes of emissions which Australia could have produced based on the Cancun emissions budget, but didn’t—to later targets. In the 2019 climate stock take, the Federal Government acknowledged the findings of the OECD’s review of Australia’s poor environmental performance:
Australia is one of the most carbon-intensive OECD countries, has adopted a
piecemeal approach to achieving emissions reductions and should strengthen
its climate change policy.
Now, there is a fresh blatancy of disregard for climate change mitigation that can be viewed amongst a kaleidoscope of other events and changes in the world: the radicalisation of nationalist right wing movements in the West, a media landscape which platforms sensationalist political rhetoric, an increasing wealth disparity which politicians often address with a logic of economic expansion rather than redistribution. I see this woven into my social interactions, nestled in a nook between then and now. When I chuck my wax-lined takeaway coffee cup into the recycling bin, I am no longer arrested by the voice of a plaintive sixteen-year-old—“you can’t recycle that!”—but a conciliatory “Australia doesn’t recycle anything anyway.” While climate change still feels existential, the narratives I consume have changed. They do not place the weight of the world on my shoulders, as popular discourses often did in the past. Instead, they paint me as powerless and send me spiralling into inertia.
Privately-owned media giants, major corporations and politicians walk hand in hand, their financial and influential growth capitalises on each other's success. Media empires in Australia are enabled by relaxed competition laws which facilitate the concentration of media ownership. Meanwhile, politicians generate political capital from lobbying and the financial support of corporations. In 2024, Senator Larissa Waters highlighted that Labor had received over $100,000 in donations from oil and gas giant Santos alone. Waters also pointed out that Adani and its subsidiaries donated $250,000 to the coalition in the same year as it received approval for its then-new Queensland coal mine. In this landscape, narratives of climate change in mainstream media have always been geared to the interests of the major corporations. As early as the 2000s, political momentum for climate change was obfuscated by false equivalence in media narratives which debated the existence of climate change, despite resounding acknowledgement in the scientific community. A clip from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver featuring Bill Nye satirised this mirage perfectly, with a single unqualified person denying climate change to 96 experts representing the scientific community. In 2004, a PR representative working for BP invented the carbon tracker, which turned out to be a stroke of genius for the anti-climate change movement. The focus of climate action was neatly shifted from corporate extractivism and consumerism to individual behaviours. While I was crippled with consumer-guilt over the mega pack of palm-oil ridden two minute noodles I had just purchased, major corporations were extracting massive amounts of oil from the ground, protected by narratives which aimed to dissolve a unified front for collective action. The school strikes in 2018, despite being frequently lamented for motivating little structural change, solidified climate change as a relatively indisputable fact in Australia’s mainstream media and applied pressure for promises of climate action to become a priority in political platforms—think of the 2019 Climate Solutions Package, Snowy 2.0 or green energy more generally.
Today, we feel the spectre of past inaction viscerally. Here in Sydney, the year is early in its life and smoke from Victoria covers our heads like a burial shroud. I think back to the summer of 2019, when politicians reinforced the stories of fires begun by arson, when media reports emphasised the precise action and moment at which a fire was started. Our eyes were often drawn to the individual, localised thread of fire instead of the greater tapestry of global warming which ignited them. Now, I read about fire warnings in relation to heat waves and climate change but the transparency does not feel like a concession.
We hear the message that we are not on track, we have missed the deadline, there is no turning back. These ideas build on a narrative which is cloaked in familiar rhetorical patterns and continues to serve corporate interests, centring on the idea that technological innovation will shape our future, somehow transcending the bounds of the planet’s finite resources. In the recent electoral campaign, the Liberal Party drew on a tech-solutionist ideology, with a climate and energy plan that proposed to reform the energy industry through nuclear power. The shadow of AI is inserted into almost every discussion of our general future, politicians refusing to detail its form even as they praise its power to shape our future. Recently, Albanese struck a deal with Amazon Web Services, who are investing $20 billion into data centre infrastructure in Australia. Preemptively addressing public concern over the impact of data centres on the climate, the accompanying parliamentary media release states that
AWS matches 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable energy across its
global operations, including Australian data centres, as part of its plans to achieve
net zero by 2040.
The idea of ‘sustainable AI’ is an oxymoron, a sister to the idea of ‘clean-coal’, ‘safe-extractions’ or carbon offsets that can make air travel carbon neutral. Matching electricity consumption with renewable energy does not replenish the initial instance of resource consumption or reverse environmental damage caused by emissions. The government has not responded to public outcry over the water-intensive operation of data centres in a parched landscape. The government's backtracking from previous regulatory guidelines for high-risk AI, while not directly implicating climate action, are indicative of a laissez-faire approach to regulatory policy in general.
While there is a wealth of scepticism towards AI, the structural integration of AI into our everyday lives promotes the narrative that AI, much like evolution, is inevitable in its progress. The evolution of technology is framed as being autonomous, masking the policies and actors which shape its progress and direction. The structural insinuation of AI in our daily lives, as it is absorbed into our workplaces, search engines and spotify playlists, supports this narrative. As does the vagueness of language surrounding its operation. AI is slippery in our fingers, difficult to dig our nails into, an entity (falsely) portrayed as incorporeal. Even if we do not trust the idea that AI will solve issues like climate change, these narratives, portrayed in dominant news platforms, are constructed to make us feel as if human agency over the future of our climate is a pipe dream. When measured against a mainstream audience, the perceived capacity of collective action to direct our future shrinks. The future of our climate becomes framed in terms of our ability to innovate—either technology will land on a magical solution, or we will fail.
The media, however, encompasses far more than mainstream news; it is a vessel for communication and storytelling. Counternarrative has been woven into the past and present of our media and this resistance will be written into our future. My memories of summer are infused with the scent of eucalyptus leaves, coaxed by the hot sun to release their oil into the air. In these old eucalypt forests, there are underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi, which have been proven in other parts of the world to act as a channel which allows trees to ‘talk’ to each other. Mother trees send signals through the fungi, adjusting their roots to make space for new trees and sharing carbon-based resources. In the digital age, we have more capacity to share resources and information instantly. Climate activism crosses the oceans with urgency.
Mia Mottley, elected leader of Barbados, is one prominent climate activist who has spoken out on the interconnectedness of countries’ responses to climate change. Refusing an isolationist perspective, she states in her famous COP26 speech that “national solutions to global problems do not work”. In particular, Mottley has pioneered the Bridgetown Initiative, proposing to restructure global debt systems to breathe oxygen into climate resilience projects in poorer countries. In 2024, Mottley collaborated with the Nature Conservancy and the Inter-American Development Bank to refinance high interest bonds. The Inter-American Development Bank reported that USD $125 million in fiscal savings was freed to be placed into resilience investments like water management. These moments show that leaders and activists can propel climate change responses into mainstream news cycles, catalysing further action. These policies, ideas and movements are able to exist in the mainstream when they can attract our attention and our empathy. This in itself resists sensationalised narratives of defeat. Xiye Bastida, the famous 22 year old Mexican climate activist in New York, has emphasised the importance of “stubborn optimism”. In a landscape where corporations actively try to create the ideal conditions for apathy to fester, remaining positive and continuing to invest our care in the planet is a fight. In a 2022 interview with Spencer Bailey for Time Sensitive, Bastida reminds us to “experience that joy we are fighting for”.
Sometimes, I scroll on my phone and the tidal wave of negative news stories begins to erode my future. The idea of hope begins to feel like naivety, a cheesy platitude that lacks any structural integrity. Yet, narratives of hope are essential to the reimagining of our future. While mainstream media in Australia often buries our hope in defeat and obsesses over what we have lost, there is a wealth of alternative media and counter narratives that turn our attention to the resources we already hold. Released in 2019, Damon Gameau’s film 2024, imagines what the future could look like if we actioned the solutions and knowledge we already possess; fostering ocean permaculture, empowering women and implementing regenerative agriculture. Like Mia Mottley, Gameau speaks to the importance of restructuring, rather than accelerating, our current systems. The resources of our present become the seeds of our future. For tens of thousands of years, indigenous people in many countries have centred land management strategies on principles of preservation and sustainable growth, rather than extraction and surplus. In the wake of Australia’s 2019 fires, Victor Steffensen published the novel Fire Country. In it, he writes of controlled burning as an Aboriginal Australian land care strategy. When the land is “sick with weeds and too much tea tree”, small, controlled burns have long been used to restore diversity and help prevent large-scale future bushfires. However, government regulations have restricted Indigenous people’s practice—and Steffensen describes the suffering of the land as a result.
Sustained in all of these narratives of resistance is the idea that climate change and environmental decay is a social issue, shaped by human hands with roots in oppression, alienation and isolation. It is our prerogative, then, to diversify the narratives in our media with the resources we possess in relation to this frame—our attention. In the final chapter of Fire Country Steffesen writes:
“The thing with climate change is that it is presented in a way like we can’t do
anything about it. Just hang our hats on climate change... We need to get away from
the debates and just get on with doing something about it. Climate change means
that the land is telling us something, it is not all doom and gloom. If we look at it the
right way, it is an opportunity for change, if we all come to realise it.”
Sitting in my best friend's paddling pool in the hot sun this summer, I refreshed the Fires Near Me app and saw Victoria swamped in clusters of red icons. I opened the news and for every Tasmanian seaweed-eating cow, there was a burnt out husk of a farm. I scrolled back up to the Tasmanian cows. Read the article again. Clicked on an article about the use of AI to monitor animal health in Europe. About tree bark microbes reducing greenhouse gases. Put my head under the water of the pool to have a moment of respite from the heat.