Article by Editorial, courtesy of The Australian
17.02.2026
In the US, at least, the retreat of climate catastrophism in the corporate boardroom has made room for a less strident but more sustainable climate realism, focused on innovation and the commercialisation of low-carbon technologies.
In Australia, climate action has slipped well down the list of voter concerns, with the protest set distracted as it prioritises support for the terrorist stooges of Iran’s theocratic despots.
The latest polling shows concern about the environment and climate change near the bottom of voter concerns at 64 per cent, with the second-highest level of voter disinterest (17 per cent), behind only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. Economic issues take five of the top six spots.
As a result, the energy debate is squarely back in Mr Taylor’s ideological wheelhouse of technology not taxes, with a focus on reliability and cost.
The Albanese government continues to head in the opposite direction. Rather than a private sector-led response that backs technology and defangs the climate bureaucracy, the federal government is flirting with the European approach of a carbon border adjustment scheme to punish imports from countries with less rigorous climate policies than our own.
The issue will make the price of domestic goods in areas hit by the tariff more expensive. Top of the list is anything to do with cement, given its high level of difficult-to-abate emissions. It does not take a Rhodes scholar to understand that higher cost inputs for construction – think housing – are at odds with the federal government’s stated priorities. The potential for unintended consequences is writ large.
Mr Taylor says Labor is failing because it has attempted to pick favourites. “It’s all ideological, and Australians pay for it,” he said. The danger is that Chris Bowen is just getting started, with the level of public subsidies continuing to grow. This stretches from electric vehicles to home batteries as well as a raft of pie-in-the-sky industry interventions on boondoggles in hydrogen, green steel and offshore wind that will potentially leave taxpayers exposed well into the future.
Donald Trump is working hard to unpick the distortions that were injected into the US economy by Barack Obama under the shrill insistence of Al Gore. Top of the list was the Environmental Protection Agency endangerment finding that declared greenhouse gas emissions a threat to public health and safety.
In 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The decision provided a legal basis for the EPA to regulate CO, which wasn’t mentioned in the Clean Air Act. Trump EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has moved to roll back the Biden regulatory overreaches.
The fight is significant given the Albanese government’s joint project with the Greens to establish a federal EPA here. Green groups want the EPA to have wide powers to determine what companies can and cannot do. The cause will no doubt be cheered along by former Greens leader Adam Bandt, who lost his seat at the last federal election but is now determined to turbocharge the fight against fossil fuels as head of the Australian Conservation Foundation.
We are back at a fork in the road. The big picture is a community showing signs of having moved on. It is ripe for a dose of common sense in how to solve the energy trilemma of affordability, reliability and environmental responsibility in a way that does not make the cost-of-living crisis only worse.
Angus Taylor has returned to the energy debate as Opposition Leader at a critical moment, with the world diverging on its level of interest and desire for action on climate change. As The Wall Street Journal has noted, the climate crisis has clashed with the affordability crisis, and affordability won.