Why Can’t the UN Fix Climate Change? or Can It? [S3-06]

Show Notes

Please leave a comment, particularly if you have your own “Why can’t they just…” question, or email us at whycanttheyjust@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Find out more about us and how you can support us at ⁠⁠⁠https://whycanttheyjust.com.au/⁠⁠, which includes a link to our Patreon site where you can sign up for exclusive content.

Please also feel free to rate and review us, as it does help people to find us.

Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Transcript

link to podcast

30 September 2026

Glenn
Welcome to another episode of Why Can’t They Just, a podcast about politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Glenn Davidson and I’m a member of the Labor Party.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a climate, environment and anti-racism activist.

Luke
I’m Luke Robertson, a member of the Labor Party, as well as a conservation biology and environmental policy student.

Janaline
Before we start, I‘d like to acknowledge that we are all recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia. Recognising that sovereignty was never ceded, we pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and we extend those respects to any First Nations listeners that we have today.

Glenn
Today we’re talking about climate diplomacy and international climate negotiations.

Back in the 1970s, some of us can remember that there was a problem with a growing hole in the ozone layer, caused by chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCS, in aerosols and refrigerants.

This came to somewhat of a head in 1985, when researchers confirmed the existence of a large seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica. That same year, governments adopted the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, creating a framework for international cooperation. Just two years later, nations negotiated the Montreal Protocol, which committed countries to phase out the production and consumption of ozone depleting substances, including CFCS. Subsequent timely action accelerated the phase out of harmful chemicals and saw the ongoing recovery of the ozone layer.

It set the tone for later climate agreements.

Then in 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit, governments adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and established the principle that countries would work together to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. The world had done it once; surely it could do it again, and quickly.

Janaline, what’s happened since 1992 in the world of climate diplomacy? How are things going?

Janaline
Well, a lot has happened since 1992 in climate diplomacy, not least the growing and visible impacts of climate change.

Post Second World War, with the creation of the United Nations, the reaction to two devastating wars was ‘countries need to get together and cooperate’. In 1972, there was the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, which set the frame for the idea that countries could cooperate on transboundary environmental issues, and at that stage people were talking about pollutants.

At the Rio Conference in 1992, it was the 20th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference. It was the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development: importantly, the concept of sustainable development had started to get a bit of traction. On climate change, it was very much a sense that: the world can get together, set a bunch of rules like they did with the ozone depleting substances, and the climate would be saved.

The difference between the Montreal Protocol and the Convention on Climate Change was that the Montreal Protocol was dealing with a very, very small list of discrete substances that were being produced for very specific purposes, basically refrigeration and air conditioning. Commercial interests involved were very, very small.

Climate change was dealing with the emission of carbon dioxide. It was dealing with the entire basis of the post-industrial revolution economy and so there were massive interests involved.

There was a huge debate about the relative responsibility that should be shouldered by developed countries and developing countries. And the argument ran: ‘the Europeans and the North Americans, principally, have created this problem by industrialising. And now they’re telling all of these developing countries and these emerging economies in Asia and Africa and Latin America that they are not allowed to develop to this stage’. And there were all these conspiracy theories about how this was actually just the new colonialism: having lost the decolonisation fight, all of the old imperial powers were now trying to stop the development of their former colonies.

Meanwhile, the climate is changing. And I think in 1992, this was a very intellectual argument. It was about, well, you know, if climate changes, we’ll see sea level rise and we’ll see this and we’ll see that. And everybody said, ‘yes, yes, that’s all very interesting’.

In the 2010s, we start to see actual impacts of climate change. And then we come to the 2020s, where we start having regular catastrophic bushfires. Every year since about 2015 has been the hottest year on record. Once-in-a-hundred-year floods are happening every two years. Physics and biology are now telling us that actually climate change was real.

All of those doomsayers in the 1990s saying ‘you talk about the economic cost of shifting away from a fossil fuel based economy, but you’re not taking into account the billions and billions of dollars of damage that climate change is going to cause’. And now we’re in the billions and billions of dollars of damage that climate change is causing.

The other thing that I think has changed is that, in the 1990s, there weren’t really a lot of good options to replace fossil fuels. So unless you were willing to go into a massive deindustrialisation program across the world - and I’m not going to lie, there were people who were saying ‘yes, we need to deindustrialise’. Renewable energy was incredibly expensive. The only really proven viable option to fossil fuel energy in the 1990s was nuclear energy, and nuclear energy was then, and still is, very, very expensive.

Going back to your question, Glenn, two really important things have changed: one is, people are living climate change now; the second thing is, the alternatives to fossil fuel energy are not only widely available and proven technologies, but they are also now the cheapest form of new energy. So I think there is a positive story to tell, but I think it is a shame it’s taken us nearly 40 years to get here.

Glenn
All right. Janaline. Well, that’s a good mix of the good news and the bad news.

Now, on the back of what you were just talking about, it really sets the scene for us being in an interesting position. Or is it a bind? On the one hand, many of the drivers and technologies needed for decarbonization are advancing faster than expected: cold, hard economics, energy security and industrial competitiveness mean renewable energy continues to expand. That is all to the good.

On the other hand, the current pace of reduction still falls short of what scientists say is needed to meet the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious goals. Climate politics and diplomacy has largely shifted from debating the reality of climate change to arguing over who should pay and how quickly fossil fuels should be phased down. The result is a world in which the energy transition is undeniably underway, but not yet moving with the speed, consistency or international unity needed to fully match the scale of the climate challenge.

So, Janaline, how is international climate diplomacy evolving and seeking to address the situation? What role is Australia playing in advancing or delaying the progress that is needed to avert the existential threat of uncontained climate change? And how has that role evolved since 1992?

Janaline
Back in 1992, there was a lot of hope that an international convention could be negotiated that placed a bunch of obligations on countries to do certain things. That’s how we would deal with climate change. It was very top down, and this was the model that had been very successful with the Montreal Protocol on Ozone-depleting Substances.

Why didn’t it work on climate change? Because energy is the basis for all economic activity. The UN Convention on Climate Change set out a set of principles and, very importantly, the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities, which was code for ‘developed countries are the cause of this problem and the main contributor to it, and they should pay for it to be fixed, and developing countries should not be disadvantaged in that process’. That’s not an unreasonable proposition.

So the Convention Parties agreed to negotiate a very specific Protocol similar to the Montreal Protocol, with very specific actions and specific targets. That system staggered through the Kyoto process, not helped by George W Bush famously pulling the US out of the Kyoto Protocol and John Howard then standing up and saying, ‘well, if the US is not in the Kyoto Protocol, Australia is also not going to ratify’. I was actually on the Australian climate negotiating team at the time and it was, I’ve got to say, a little demoralising, that we went from a situation where Australia had been a very active and serious player to being utterly sidelined: because our government had said it wasn’t actually going to implement this thing, so nobody cared what we thought.

Subsequent to that, we have the attempts to negotiate the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, where for the first time there was conversation about the big developing country emitters coming on board. By that stage, China, Brazil and India were emerging as very, very big emitters.

So then we have Copenhagen in 2009. That was supposed to be the agreement where we bring all of the major emitters on board, including the developing countries. And those negotiations very famously collapsed.

Another really significant political force in the international negotiations leading up to Copenhagen was a massive rearguard action by countries who were worried that the impact of the response measures to climate change in the developed world would lead to the collapse of their economies because people wouldn’t be buying their fossil fuels anymore. So all of these economic interests, combined with a lack of real understanding amongst populations about the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change made it really, really difficult to get that second agreement.

After the Copenhagen talks collapsed, there was a real sense that, at the end of the day, the big countries are just not going to cooperate to do something good for the world.

Now what had happened in Australia, is that we’d had a change of government and we had Kevin Rudd standing up as a new Prime Minister saying ‘climate change is the great moral issue of our time, we’re going to deal with it’. And the first attempts to introduce an Australian economy wide price on carbon, which was the first in the world. So Australia went from not being a player to being a world leader.

Luke
I just have a question: from my understanding, obviously I wasn’t around, but it seems from my reading that it’s changed from, since the Kyoto Protocol where there were legally binding emissions reductions targets, to now most recently I guess, the Paris Agreement, which had a legally binding treaty but not binding emissions reductions targets. Why has there been a change over the period in which COPs have happened? There’s more non-binding agreements; there’s more flexibility. Is that flexibility a response to the initial pulling out of the US from the Kyoto Protocol? Is having these more flexible agreements allowing something to be done, even if it’s not quite as strong as we want it to be?

Janaline
To be honest, I don’t think it was about the US pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol; I think it was about the collapse of Copenhagen. The US had also had a change of government. The Obama administration was much more open to taking climate action than the Bush administration had been.

After the collapse of Copenhagen, the Obama administration had already started to convene a thing that they called the Major Economies Forum, and this was a forum of the biggest emitters in the world. And the logic behind it was if we can get all of the biggest emitters into a room, and we can get them to talk sensibly about what they can each do, then that will actually deal with the bulk of the problem of climate change. Because even though countries like the Pacific island countries and the smaller African countries suffer a lot from the effects of climate change, there’s not much that they can do within their own economies to fix it, because they’re just not major emitters.

I think the Paris Agreement was a brilliant solution, because it was a change from that very top down approach that says ‘we’ll all negotiate these things and then we’ll just suck up the targets and we’ll put up with this top down compliance regime’. It was: ‘OK, let’s have a binding agreement where we all agree that we have to do something and we all agree to these basic principles’. But, because countries are best placed to understand what they can actually deliver, let’s not give countries a number and say you have to meet this. Let’s let these individual countries come up and say ‘here is what I think I can implement’.

Now this is a second best option, as you said, because obviously if you add up all of the commitments made under the Paris Agreement, they do fall short. And probably if you had a more top down system, you could address that shortfall. But on the other hand, and this is sort of relevant to what I said in the context of the safeguard mechanism last week, there’s no point in having these fantastic targets if you’re not going to implement them. So instead of having the perfect solution, let’s have the one that we can implement and then try to use that, to build on it to get to the place that we need to be.

So the Paris Agreement is completely different from the Kyoto Protocol. The Paris Agreement doesn’t have a schedule of numbers attached to countries saying this is what you have to do. The Paris Agreement is built on the idea of nationally determined contributions. It is based on the idea that countries will come to the UN with a commitment outlining not just what they’re committing to reduce, but how they are going to achieve that. And so in that context, we have commitments from China to reduce its emissions by 2016. We have commitments from most of the developed countries, including Australia, to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. We have a commitment from India to put on 450 gigawatts of new solar by, I think it was 2040. And just for context, that’s nine times the Australian National Electricity Market in 2022.

Luke
Given that the Paris Agreement has these NDCs, the nationally determined contributions, what is the sort of diplomatic response when a country comes out with, perhaps, a contribution that might not be as good as other nations have? Are there diplomatic consequences for these contributions, even if they’re not legally binding? Can you give us a sense of what sort of response there is to these contributions when they come out.

Janaline
Well, I think the purpose of the nationally determined contribution is actually to have people make a commitment. And I think there is an understanding that sometimes countries aren’t going to make quite lame commitments.

But I mean, it gets back to the power of international law: you can’t force sovereign countries to do things they don’t want to do. Countries will make comments, like, Pacific Island countries don’t hold back if they think a country’s nationally determined contribution is insufficient. I don’t know that you could call it diplomatic consequences. I mean, that again sounds a bit top down and the whole purpose of the Paris Agreement is to be a little bit more bottom up about what people are prepared to commit to. There is a political cost in terms of other countries’ reactions if you’re putting forward a really lame contribution.

Glenn
All right, thanks Janaline. That’s a very detailed and logical progression through the mechanisms that have been tried over those years to address this issue. But what struck me, as you were talking about all of that, was just how dependent it is on the fickleness of who is the national leader; what, in the overall scheme of things, petty political imperatives they’re responding to while we’ve got this global existential threat. Your comments about when Obama was there, versus George Bush pulling them out, versus Obama trying to get groups to come together and come up with ways of doing things. And Australia’s action: at one stage, dropping right out of the system; and then being a world leader with a change of government. I can’t say that that gives me a lot of hope for the future when we see what’s happening in a number of countries. It does come down, I think in part, to a battle between Mother Nature and human nature. And I know where I would put my money.

Janaline
I mean the Australian saga doesn’t stop with Kevin Rudd, obviously. So the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments introduced a carbon price in Australia. And I remember Australian diplomats being incredibly sought after to run around the world and explain to people how Australia had done this, because everybody wanted to learn from us. And then Tony Abbott came in promising to axe the tax: his first act of parliament was the repeal of the carbon price.

Subsequently, the failure of the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Coalition governments to even land on an energy policy, firstly, set back Australia’s transition by a decade. It meant that when the cheap renewable energy technology started to come on stream, instead of that technology being owned and commercialised and utilised in Australia, the Australian creators of some of the best solar systems went to China. And China has become a world leader in solar technology.

Now I’m not going to say that Australia would ever have ended up producing 90% of the world’s solar panels, which is the case for China, but I am saying that we could have had a much bigger share of that market, and a lot of it was about government policy.

Now we have the Albanese government that is trying to rehabilitate Australia; that has taken some pretty serious measures towards reducing emissions and also transitioning the economy. And their argument is that this is not just about being nice to the climate, although they do take climate change and its impacts very seriously. This is about securing Australia’s economic future because the future has got to be decarbonised. Because Mother Nature, as you say, is telling us that that’s what we have to do.

Glenn
Now COP 31 or the Conference of Parties number 31 is scheduled for the 9th to the 20th of November 2026 in Antalya, Türkiye. And that faces a wicked problem: climate science indicates that current national commitments remain insufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious temperature goals; while political divisions over energy policy, development priorities and financial responsibility have become more pronounced.

Janaline, what can we expect from COP 31 and what is Minister Chris Bowen doing to achieve a positive outcome? Are we now effectively just arguing over the placement and allocation of deck chairs on the Titanic?

Janaline
So the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, which set up this new process of nationally determined contributions. Clearly when you add them all up, they were not sufficient to meet the UN’s target of limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels.

There was a huge push from environmental groups and also from low lying states, small island States, and particularly led by the Pacific, to have a global agreement to phase out fossil fuels. And this is obviously because the main source of climate-harming gases is the burning of fossil fuels.

Weirdly, the only Conference of Parties that has come close to talking about the need for a transition away from fossil fuels was in the UAE, which is of course a very major fossil fuel producer. And maybe it is not a coincidence that Sultan Al Jabar, who was the COP president at the time, was able to push through that agreement, because the UAE is a major fossil fuel producer and so he had the credibility to be able to say, ‘well, we want this to go forward’. Which is a million miles away from the position that a lot of the Middle Eastern states had taken in earlier years, where they were basically saying ‘you can’t stop using fossil fuels because our economies depend on it’.

Since then, there has been this massive allergy to talking about phasing away fossil fuels. In Belém in Brazil, at COP 30 in 2025, the Brazilian presidency tried very, very hard to revive the idea of a just transition away from fossil fuels. There was a massive resistance not only to those words but even to referring back to the UAE Consensus, which is where those words had appeared. Now, one of the practices in international negotiations is that you can always go back to previously agreed language, and in this case even that was a massive struggle. So in the end there was a reference back to the UAE consensus, but it was a very vague reference and it was a huge struggle even to get that.

So why are countries so resistant to the idea of transitioning away from fossil fuels?

There is one narrative that says ‘it’s because they’re in the pockets of the fossil fuel companies. They just want to keep extracting this money for massive profits and they don’t care about the state of the world’.

I think it’s actually a bit more complex than that. So, unquestionably, throughout the last 36 years, fossil fuel companies have exerted enormous effort and invested millions and potentially billions of dollars into lobbying countries not to threaten their profits by taking climate action.

But these countries opposing the words around transitioning away from fossil fuels aren’t doing it because they hate the planet; they are doing it because their economies are dependent on fossil fuels for their energy, and they need to be able to deliver reliable and affordable energy to their people. They need it for development. They need it to keep people alive. So I think there is actually a more benign explanation for this resistance.

So how do we deal with that? I reckon we deal with it by not talking about transitioning away from fossil fuels. By keeping that in mind as our objective, but by talking about ‘how do we get to transition away from fossil fuels’? And the way that we transition away from fossil fuels is to build the alternatives.

Now, as I said, renewable energy is now the cheapest form of new energy in the world. It’s not just in Australia: according to the International Energy Agency, renewable energy is now the cheapest form of new generation. Given that, there is a massive incentive now for countries to actually look at investing in the cheapest form of new energy generation.

And to highlight that, ironically, Donald Trump, who came in saying ‘drill, baby, drill’ and ‘climate change is a hoax’ and ‘I want to have just fossil fuels because fossil fuels are real energy and I don’t like wind farms’; he has probably done more than any other single person in the world to demonstrate the importance for energy security, for national security, and for cost, to move to renewable energy.

Why? Because he bombed Iran, and Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, and now the Houthis have taken over the Straits of Bab al Mandeb and fossil fuel exports from that part of the world have ground to a near halt. Oil reserves have already been massively depleted since that initial attack at the end of February in 2026. So the price of oil, the price of petrol, of diesel, of fossil fuels has skyrocketed. And it is very clear to countries all over the world that the best way of assuring their energy security is actually to turn to non fossil fuel alternatives.

So I think there is a huge opportunity for this conference of parties to focus on a global commitment to decarbonize global heavy industry supply chains. Why heavy industry? Because heavy industry is a massive user of energy and, in the countries that have these heavy industries, it tends to be the leader in energy infrastructure. So if you change your heavy industry energy infrastructure, then businesses and residences will follow, because when you build the new infrastructure, that’s what they will use.

Glenn
Yeah, now that’s a really interesting way to look at it: to think that Donald Trump has actually done the world a favour with his war in Iran, as perverse as that seems.

Because if we go back a little bit, I can remember when we had the first world global oil shock back in the 70s, when the Middle Eastern countries realised they had a valuable commodity that they were selling or giving away far too cheaply, and raised the price of oil substantially. And it was utterly transformational.

Back before then petrol was very cheap. I remember when I first started driving, you could buy petrol for about 9 or 10 cents a litre, as hard as that is to believe, and the price sort of doubled and trebled very, very quickly. Houses were still being heated by burning oil. That went by the board and things like solar hot water came into being. And it did - large gas guzzling cars suddenly became much more fuel efficient and so on. It was transformational.

And in the same way, you know, this current oil shock is likely to be transformational, which leads us back into your point that I’m sure you’re about to make about decarbonizing the world.

Janaline
Yeah, and this was exactly Japan’s issue, because after that first oil shock, Japan moved exactly from gas guzzling cars to making the smallest, most efficient cars in the world.

So just to be clear, I am not suggesting Donald Trump has done the world a favour by bombing Iran. I think that war was incredibly ill-conceived, unlawful and a terrible, terrible idea for everybody, not least the people of the United States.

However, I think what it has done, ironically, is shown people the real risks of an over-dependence on fossil fuels. And including those exporting countries, right? Including Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Qatar. All of those countries have already started investing massively in renewable energy because all of those countries also have enormous renewable energy potential. So it makes a lot of sense for those exporters to reduce their reliance on this geopolitically vulnerable commodity and to actually start exporting energy in different forms.

And this is exactly what the Australian government’s strategy is with a Future Made in Australia. A Future Made in Australia is all about using Australia’s considerable renewable energy potential to make things, to process things, including heavy industry, including steel and iron, to make things that will transform that energy into products that they can then sell overseas. To replace the fossil fuel exports on which Australia has depended in the past and on which Australia can no longer rely on depending. Because the world is decarbonizing. And so a smart country will get ahead of that trend.

And what Donald Trump is doing to the US is not stopping the world from decarbonising, but actually putting the US in a position where, instead of being a market leader and getting the benefits of this decarbonisation shift, it is going to be left behind. And a future administration is going to be left scrambling to pick up the pieces.

I mean, one of the really striking features of what has happened in the oil markets since February, when Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, is that the oil price has not risen to the levels that people had initially expected. And a large reason for that is because China effectively halved its demand for oil. And they did this without noticeably affecting their economic performance.

And why is that? Because they have been investing for the last 20 years in alternative technologies and particularly in renewable technologies. And so the Chinese Communist Party, because it can do this, just said, ‘OK, we’re going to stop importing oil. We are going to massively reduce our demand on oil. We are going to accelerate our reliance on renewable energy’. And they did that. And it has meant that the global price on oil has not gone up as much as people expected.

Now that is probably going to change: financial markets are predicting a pretty big spike in the oil price. Which again, I think, is a huge opportunity for the world to say, ‘yeah, OK, this is a bad idea. Let’s move to the cheapest form of new generation and decarbonize our supply chains so that we are no longer reliant on this highly risky commodity for our energy systems’.

And for the importing countries, there’s also a very obvious benefit, because the price of oil is massive. Countries that are heavy importers of fossil fuels need to be looking really carefully at what they can do to their supply chains to ensure that they have the security of locally generated energy.

Glenn
Time is just about to run out, so perhaps we might have some final comments and we’ll start with you, Luke.

Luke
Yes, I just want to make a brief comment about something that happened earlier this year. The first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, which was announced by both Colombia and the Netherlands together, was a summit divided into two conferences: one, the People’s Summit, which included civil society groups, First Nations people, youth and some trade unions; and an intergovernmental summit with 57 countries attending it.

And it addressed some harder conversations because it was a coalition of the willing. But it was able to talk about some of the harder conversations, like the debt and fiscal traps that have really locked developing nations into fossil fuel extraction, like Colombia, which in order to service their debt and pay for everything else, they have to continue exporting coal and oil.

It also addressed some other structural hurdles like the investor state dispute settlement mechanisms that allow fossil fuel companies to sue governments and really slow down climate progress, which happened here where Clive Palmer sued the government over coal mining licences. The Guardian reported last year, and many countries like Romania, Italy, Mexico and New Zealand have left environmental and emissions laws on the shelf in fear of these ginormous litigation fees with the average fee from a total of $84 billion in payouts was a payout of $1 billion.

So that conference was, you know, a little bit of good news designed to work in conjunction with COP and not undermine it. But I am hopeful for COP31 that we take, Minister Bowen said, quote, ‘a hard-nosed approach with petrostates ‘and hopefully help decarbonize those supply chains and actually make a real difference and help countries get away from that fear of being so dependent on fossil fuels.

Glenn
Yeah. And from you, Janaline.

Janaline
I think the Santa Marta thing was interesting. I’ve got to say I’m a bit of a skeptic about having a plurilateral approach to climate change.

So a plurilateral is where, if you can’t get a very broad number of countries signing on to an agreement, you make an agreement with a number of like-minded countries who are willing to go forward. It is an approach that has been quite successful in the World Trade Organisation context.

I think the problem with climate change is: it is such a global problem and you really, really need those holdouts to be part of the party. If you have a plurilateral agreement to transition away from fossil fuels and none of the major fossil fuel countries, either importers or exporters, are part of that agreement, you’re not going to get very far. I do think it is important that - those conversations about what might be stopping countries from moving forward faster are really important, because I think those discussions will help to illuminate pathways forward that might hopefully bring in all of those other countries.

One of the things that I’m very encouraged by is the fact that the Turkish COP presidency and Chris Bowen as President of negotiations put forward a proposal for a target of 35% of the world’s energy demand to be met by electricity by 2035. Now that is really, really significant because if we are to decarbonize these heavy industry supply chains, a lot of that heavy lifting has to be done by electrification. So having a very concrete electrification target firstly gives countries a concrete measure that shows them the pathway towards reducing their reliance on fossil fuels, and it does it in a way that is very tangible.

I would like to see a more general commitment to decarbonizing heavy industry supply chains, not just through electrification. And I would like to see some real money and some real technology-transfer commitments to make that possible, so that countries that do have these impediments with respect to access to technology or financing do have those pathways available to them. And I think by doing that, you’re actually laying the bricks on the pathway towards the transition away from fossil fuels. Not by making a vague commitment to do this at some point in the future and work towards it in an undefined way, but actually concrete commitments.

Because every time you open a green steel project, or every time you electrify an important process and source that electricity from renewable sources, you are reducing emissions. So for the countries, like in the Pacific, who want to have urgent action as fast as possible, having this kind of concrete pathway actually delivers those outcomes sooner than having a rhetorical commitment sometime in the future.

So it would be amazing if COP 31 could deliver this. It would not only be a tangible start on the path to transitioning away from fossil fuels; it would restore the world’s faith in its ability to come together for the good of humanity to address a problem that is facing all of us.

Glenn
That was another episode of Why Can’t They Just? The theme music that we use for this podcast is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Janaline
You can also hear us on Canberra community radio, 2XX FM 98.3, on Tuesdays between 6 and 7, or via 2XXfm.org.au. If you like our work, consider supporting us on Patreon, via our website whycanttheyjust.com.au.

Glenn
I’m Glenn Davidson.

Luke
I’m Luke Robertson.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?