Article: We've run out of elections to waste -- this is the last chance to make a difference on climate change

We've wasted three decades since scientists first raised the warning

100 companies produce most carbon emissions
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I'm no expert on Australian politics I don't know all the cross-currents that will determine this week's balloting.

But I do know a fair amount about the climate crisis, having written the first book on the subject back in 1989. So I can say with confidence that if Australians want to play a serious role in fixing the greatest challenge we've ever faced, this may be about the last election where people retain enough leverage to make a real difference.

Global warming, after all, is a math problem: how quickly can we reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its report last year, said that unless a fundamental transformation was fully underway by 2030, we stood no chance of meeting the targets the world set in the Paris climate accords. No matter what country you're in, "fundamental transformations" don't come overnight; if you want to dramatically trim carbon emissions in 2030, it means you better start in 2020.

The climate change election: where do the parties stand on the environment? That means that if Aussie politicians of all stripes are still passing around lumps of coal and fantasizing about huge new coal mines, that's not going to happen.

Not only that, but we're in a "climate moment" around the globe. It's been inspiring to watch the pictures on social media of young Australians joining the climate strikes now breaking out around the world; their British counterparts, and their older colleagues at Extinction Rebellion, were enough to convince the Tory-led British Parliament to pass a declaration of "climate emergency" last month. Even in Donald Trump's United States the Green New Deal keeps gaining momentum -- most of the Democrats vying to replace him are calling for a concerted response to an "existential risk."

Reading that Tony Abbott bet $100 that the climate will not change over the next decade is the latest reminder of the pervasive intellectual dishonesty necessary to prop up the status quo. Australians literally watched hot water kill off huge swaths of the Great Barrier Reef in two years. Hell, you've watched wildfires wipe out suburbs in two hours.

A decade is an eternity in climate time now. We've wasted three decades since scientists first raised the warning that's guaranteed that we'll have massive increases in temperature.

It means we've run out of decades to waste, and hence of elections to waste. Every election matters; it registers who we are at a certain moment in history, and it sets the course of the next few years.

But this election will matter forever.