Climate change is already affecting your daily life and that of the people you love. And it will get worse: there will be more hot days when your kids can’t play outside, and more weekends where your local sports oval is off-limits because it is flooded. There will be more evenings where you get home late because your daily commute is disrupted by a major storm, and more days where your power goes off during a heatwave. These events will weaken the systems that underpin our economy and way of life: the food system, our cities and towns, health and social support, and the trade and commerce.

And yet, the Liberal and National parties have abandoned their commitment to net-zero emissions, a global goal designed to limit the worst effects of climate change.

You may not like rising energy prices, but ditching net zero won’t fix the problem. Credit: Illustration: Matt Davidson

Australia’s commitment to net zero is not a political plaything or a virtue-signalling culture war trope. It is grounded in physics and is the compass that guides us towards a flourishing economy. Throwing it away has real consequences.

Physics tells us we can limit the seriousness of climate change, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This reduces the extent global average temperatures rise, and cause extreme weather events.

Having a 50 per cent chance of keeping global temperature rise under two degrees, based on the best science we have, requires balancing sources of emissions with sinks of emissions by the second half of the century. Along with........

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