Kylea shares her week

As we come to the end of the World Leaders Summit at COP26, I’m struck by the thought: what will it truly take for our global leaders to set aside personal agendas and egos and work together for the greater good of our society and our planet?

Like many others in our community, I watched the news coming from COP26 with hope – and frustration. From David Attenborough hoping that the next generation would see “nothing but improvement” after his had seen “nothing but decline”, through to our Prime Minister insisting that the answers to the challenges we face were not likely to be present in the room. What struck as most consistent in everything I heard however was the fact that each person who spoke seemed to be speaking “to” the room rather than “with”.

Let’s be clear. We already have the knowledge we need to address the challenges we are facing – we are not lacking the technological solutions. We are though lacking political will, true leadership and a unified desire to put aside conflict and competition to bring us all to a better place.

There is no Planet B. There are though multiple courses of action we can choose to take in the next decade which would have an immediate impact on our planet.

Why would we not as a developed nation work with third world and evolving economies to help them sidestep the unnecessary adoption of fossil fuel energy systems? Why not help them move immediately to scalable sustainable and renewable energy solutions? Why should they have to walk the same path we have had to: making our same mistakes and contributing the same level of carbon and methane emissions? To me this is completely illogical and goes against anything I was ever taught about learning from others and not repeating the mistakes of the past.

In answering these questions it seems obvious to me that our leaders here in Australia are currently fixated on maintaining our status as one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels. Why? Maybe because it’s easy for them: we know how to dig and ship.

But how incredible would it be if we instead applied our political will to repositioning Australia from being one of the world’s largest per capita emitters to leading the development and export of sustainable and renewable energy? Solar panels generate 2.5 times as much energy in Queensland than in Germany! Apply this to the generation of transportable green hydrogen and suddenly our economy, and our planet, immediately looks different with Australia leading the way.

If we willed it, India need not make its way clumsily through a transition from a reliance on fossil fuel energy to sustainable and renewable sources by 2070. We can as a nation help them move immediately to a greener and cleaner economy. And what other reasons than greed and commercial advantage could there be for us to not help them do this.

Never have we so needed our political environment to be geared towards collaboration and advancement for all and this can only happen when we stop focusing on winners and losers in any debate. A strong cross bench in Canberra is one way we can force our system back to a collaborative table and it’s for this reason that I am running to represent our North Sydney community at the next federal election.

Let’s change the climate in Canberra.