But morality also requires us to consider the consequences of climate action.
A recent article by Paul Driessen, “How Dare YOU — Doom Pixie and Your Political Pals?”, turns Greta Thunberg’s famous accusation back upon the politicians and activists who have translated climate alarm into public policy.
What gives governments the right to impose enormous costs on people today in pursuit of a distant and often immeasurably small climatic benefit?
Good Intentions Are Not Enough
Climate policies are too often judged by their intentions rather than their results.
Closing a coal-fired power station is called progress. Building wind turbines and solar farms is celebrated as climate action. Higher electricity prices, lost industries and restrictions on everyday life are treated as regrettable but necessary sacrifices.
Yet an action does not become moral merely because it carries a virtuous label.
Every policy should answer three questions:
What measurable benefit will it produce?
What will it cost?
Who will bear that cost?
The people paying are not theoretical projections. They are pensioners afraid to turn on the heater, families struggling with bills, workers whose factories have closed and farmers whose land is crossed by transmission lines.
Their welfare matters too.
Where Is the Proportion?
There is a reasonable case for reducing emissions where it can be done efficiently and without undermining reliable energy. That is very different from treating every emissions-reduction measure as inherently good.
Australia produces roughly one per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Even eliminating every Australian emission tomorrow would therefore have only a marginal effect on future global temperatures, particularly while emissions continue rising elsewhere.
That does not mean Australia should do nothing. It means those proposing costly measures must explain what they will actually achieve.
Saying that Australia must “set an example” is not enough. An example has value only if others follow it. Closing Australian industry and importing the same products from higher-emitting countries may improve our national accounts without reducing global emissions at all.
The atmosphere does not recognise accounting boundaries.
Climate Policy Has Victims
The costs fall most heavily on those least able to afford them. Wealthier households can absorb higher energy prices and take advantage of subsidies. Poorer households spend a greater proportion of their income on electricity, food, housing and transport.
The consequences are even more serious in developing countries. In 2026, the International Energy Agency reported that 655 million people still lacked electricity, while around two billion relied on polluting cooking fuels.
For them, reliable energy means clean water, refrigeration, hospitals, education and escape from poverty.
Denying people affordable power today in the hope of marginally changing the climate decades from now is not self-evidently compassionate. Who gave wealthy Western activists the authority to make that trade-off for the world’s poor?
Morality Requires Comparing Harms
Climate change may present genuine risks. But acknowledging those risks does not justify every policy proposed in their name.
Money spent on an expensive and ineffective emissions scheme cannot also be spent strengthening electricity grids, improving hospitals, reducing poverty or protecting communities from fires and floods.
A policy that costs billions, damages reliable energy supplies and produces no detectable effect on global temperature is not made moral by the sincerity of its supporters. It is bad policy wrapped in moral language.
Environmental stewardship seeks practical improvement, weighs costs against benefits and changes direction when policies fail.
Zealotry begins with certainty. It divides people into believers and deniers, treats compromise as betrayal and accepts human suffering as the price of a supposedly higher cause.
The Moral Burden Must Be Reversed
Those questioning costly climate policies should not continually have to prove that they care about the planet.
The burden should fall upon those demanding the sacrifice.
They must show that the policy will produce a meaningful benefit, that less damaging alternatives have been considered and that the costs are proportionate to the likely result.
The real moral question is not whether we care about the climate. Most people do.
It is whether governments are entitled to reduce prosperity, weaken energy security and limit opportunities today for policies that may have almost no measurable effect on the climate of 2100.
Protecting future generations can be a moral objective.
Sacrificing the present generation for gestures that achieve almost nothing is not.
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