Climate Hegemon: Gotta Catch Em All (Chinazard, Mimik-EU, Trumptwo)
A race to the top or a spiral into the abyss? It’s a petrostate vs electrostate climate geopolitics spectacular, with a side of Productivity Palooza 2025!
‘Abundance v Sufficiency: Dawn of Justice’ T-Shirt Edition
The sufficiency movement is winning… at least when it comes to LMSU merch! If you haven’t read Abundance but keep finding yourself sucked into conversations about it, have we got the “No I haven’t read Abundance, that’s what podcasts are for” t-shirt for you! Merch as a proxy for ideological dominance? You decide. Run, don’t walk to our merch page and grab the limited edition Abundance tee: www.letmesumup.net/p/merch/.
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Productivity Palooza 2025 continues like the perpetual festival the PC wished for and your intrepid hosts round up some of the big-ticket climate and energy related outcomes of Jim Chalmers’ roundtable. Environmental approvals? Hot to trot, before 2025 is out! Road user charging? Definitely happening, but only for EVs for now! Unlocking more investment from Aussie super funds? I spy with my little eye a performance benchmark test redesign!
And what of the National Construction Code pause and reform? The suggestion of a lengthy pause to NCC updates resulted in exasperated bemusement at the boneheadedness of it all from climate folk, subsequently tempered by what was announced, a more modest pause until 2029. The verdict? Maybe focusing on the fact the NCC itself was a productivity reform is a good start, and while we’re at it, avoid scapegoating energy efficiency changes that save households money. AI to streamline the code and everything else will clearly save us all!
Our main course
It’s time for some game theory as these beautiful minds leap into the climate geopolitics multiverse of Michael Mehling’s paper, ‘In The Vortex Of Great Power Competition: Climate, Trade and Geostrategic Rivalry in U.S.-China-EU Relations’. We take the green pill and immerse ourselves in three different universes, from a ‘Race to the Top’ where competitive cooperation drives climate innovation, to ‘Geopolitical Fragmentation’ where nationalism stalls progress and maybe leads to thermonuclear war? And the most intriguing of all, ‘Reversed Leadership’ where China leads the global decarbonisation charge, taking the mantle of global leadership from the US. China looms large across all three scenarios, driven by its increasing dominance in clean tech, but parts and combinations of all three scenarios are entirely plausible today. This short, timely paper packs a lot of punch!
One more things
Tennant’s One More Thing is: the 2025 Luxton Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide, delivered by none other than friend and sometime co-host of the pod, Alison Reeve!
Frankie’s One More Thing is: the Climate Change Authority’s 2025 issues paper consultation, asking a range of questions on the effectiveness of the government’s response to climate change. If you have thoughts, and we’ll bet you do, chip them a response by 1 September!
Luke’s One More Thing is: a shout out to friend of the pod, Dylan McConnell, who - in response to our last episode on the NEM review - reminds us that visibility of large, industrial loads is just as important as aggregated is also in the sights of Nelson and his panel. Point well made sir!
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