Forget climate denial, Labor’s tactical fatalism will burn us all

Anyone working to increase the supply or use of fossil fuels in 2025 is one of two things.

The first option is that they’re a climate denier; refusing to accept the physical evidence proving the consequences of what happens when those fuels are burned. Climate deniers are bad. The Labor Party are not climate deniers (its members regularly point that out).

There is a second possibility — something far scarier, and far worse. Someone can work to worsen fossil fuel reliance in 2025 in full acceptance of the consequences, but without any willingness to work to prevent them. There isn’t a great name for this, but we can call it “tactical fatalism”: the intentional, weaponised insistence that a worse future is the only future (from those who benefit the most from whatever makes it bad).

When Labor’s new Environment Minister Murray Watt approved the gargantuan North West Shelf fossil gas processing facility’s 40 year extension recently, there was a justified outcry from Australia’s major environment and climate groups. You didn’t have to look far to find someone feeling “betrayed” by the government’s decisions. 

What struck me, though, is that Labor have always been subtly clear about its stance on global climate futures, through its own decisions and statements. The party is a tactical fatalist, limbering up to be the coal and gas supply pit for a world it sees as inevitably on the verge of burning its inhabitants to char.

The release of Labor’s “Future Gas Strategy” just over one year ago drew similar outrage (and feelings of betrayal) from the big environment NGOs in Australia. I found that report absolutely incredible. Normally in these types of documents put out by governments, you’ll see a careful, awkward dance performed; avoiding the fact that the best-case future climate scenarios see significantly lower use of fossil fuels like gas around the world. The laws of atmospheric physics mean a good future for the gas industry is a bad future for the rest of us. 

Not only does the Future Gas Strategy not dance around this, it absolutely burns up the floor like a confident teenager playing Dance Dance Revolution in 2003. The “analytical report” features this brazen graphic, where the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) “net zero” scenario, featuring a massive drop in global fossil gas consumption, is compared to the government’s own Department of Industry, Science and Resources 2024 assumptions: 

The Albanese government’s projections show a worse reliance on fossil gas in 2029 than the IEA’s own “worst case” scenario (“STEPS”, or “stated policies”, assumes the whole world freezes its climate policy ambitions in place with no new ambitions). The March 2025 update of those projections is roughly the same, despite the IEA’s own scenarios massively revising down the amount of assumed gas burned in all of its scenarios, between 2023 and 2024. 

When the “Future Gas Strategy” report came out last year, my first instinct was to think “Haha, I’m going to make a chart that shows their plans against the IEA’s scenarios”. My hair blew back from the desk when I saw that they included it in there themselves.

“There are a wide range of gas demand estimates in 2050 that correspond with different levels of global ambition to reduce emissions. With national pathways to net zero in development around the world, global gas demand through the transition and in 2050 remains highly uncertain,” write the report’s authors.

In justifying presenting a broad spread of future scenarios, the government claims “actual level of gas demand in 2030 could be materially higher assuming that the short-term forecasts are accurate”, and that “planned consumption by trading partners is inconsistent with emissions reduction commitments … there is no single story about the future of global energy”.

It’s upsetting to have to say this, but it’s truly no kind of fucking revelation that different futures are possible. What matters here is that those futures manifest depending on the decisions made today. Decisions like “let’s just assume the future is worse than the worst case scenarios, and act accordingly” are self-fulfilling prophecies that instil behavioural lock-in and a failure to imagine that better things are in fact possible. Actively setting out to wind down the supply of fossil fuels (without causing unjust price shocks) would definitely bring about a resulting decrease in fossil fuel demand, if done carefully. We already know about possible futures; the question is, which one are you fighting for?

The decision to let North West Shelf live longer than I probably will arrived on the same week as the massive conference of Australia’s gas lobby, “Australian Energy Producers”. At that conference, the day before the approval was formally announced, the Minister for Resources Madeleine King stood up and reinforced the message of the “future gas strategy”:

As many will recall, the strategy strongly acknowledges the ongoing role of gas in the energy transition … my department is consulting on changes to retention lease policies to encourage more timely development of existing gas discoveries.

Labor only really sees one desirable future among that spaghetti of future lines: maximum gas consumption, no matter who gets burned in the process. This is why Albanese is scrambling to rationalise the project’s approval by flat-out lying about it being used for domestic gas power generation. Chris Bowen falsely claimed the site’s massive domestic emissions are being controlled by the “Safeguard Mechanism”, when Woodside already meets its targets entirely by buying up cheap, highly suspicious carbon offsets. King frames exports as sustaining “millions of households and businesses”, when the key customer, Japan, breezily buys it up and then on-sells it for a profit. 

The global context here is important: there has been a rising drumbeat of centre-right climate-aligned institutions and individuals calling for a “reset” of climate policy. Figures like Tony Blair and the US “Council for Foreign Relations” call for a more brazen fatalism on climate: giving up on goals and focusing instead on “energy security” and nationalist priorities. A half decade of wars, invasions, energy crises and a really nasty pandemic haven’t been easy on our movement, and the tactical fatalist predators are circling.

When North West Shelf was approved, the Climate Council issued a release describing Labor’s climate status as “two steps forward, one devastating step back”. The latest domestic emissions data released by the government showed a subtle rise in exactly the wrong direction, and my own analysis of current and projected emissions put Labor on track to have the highest cumulative exported emissions of any government to date. In short: it is more like “no steps forward, and several million steps back”.

The Climate Council list the fact that the Albanese government “acknowledges the clear link between climate change and more frequent and intense extreme weather” in that post. 

But we already know Labor is not a climate denier. It’s worse: it’s a tactical fatalist. It’s a party that understands the gas industry dies in the potential future where we get to live, and so is setting about whipping open the gas taps to Asia in the hope that the methane firehose will encourage this half of the planet to burn as much methane as possible over the next few decades.

The climate movement is ill-equipped to deal with a threat that looks like this. The easy binary of deniers vs believers died last decade. Any fantasy we had of a global moral pact of good intentions is dead. This decade we are realising how much damage and death can be caused openly, without any shame. Genocidal countries know it, and the fossil fuel industry knows it, too. Our only hope is shifting back to fighting like hell to force the powerful not to choose to knowingly destroy our lives.

As Australia heads to Bonn to lobby to host COP31 in 2026, it does so happy in the knowledge of a new permission space for fossil fuel fatalism emerging globally. And it won’t feel any shame about it until we grow the language to describe it.