It is a little baffling, in the way that time passing always is, to realise we have just concluded COP30 – the 30th United Nations climate change conference. I remember attending COP15, in Copenhagen, as a staffer for Kevin Rudd. It was snowing, cold inside the conference centre too; I grew a beard (of sorts) for the first time. The atmosphere was frenetic, briefly hopeful and then bleak.

The announcement of three hours of free energy in some parts of the country is a preview of a more hopeful future. Credit: Getty Images

More shocking than time, even, is the change in the way the world receives these conferences. Then, in Australia at least, it was front page news. High hopes were dashed, even as we heard concerning warnings about what would come without global agreement. Now, the warnings have become more apocalyptic; the dangerous outcomes are 16 years closer to becoming reality than they were then. And yet the conferences seem less significant, now; their failures more easily shrugged off, by voters and governments alike.

Consequential action on climate change has always required two different, contrasting qualities. The many conferences that have now passed point to one: an understanding of the grinding nature of progress, the way change comes over years, as the result of tedious, unremarked upon hard work.

Which is essentially the stage of the climate transition we have reached. We are past the shiny renewables-led utopianism of the late 2000s, and into the time of actual change, with more energy actually delivered from renewables, with all the advantages and stumbling blocks that it brings, as coal-fired power stations run down and state........

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