Just as we approach tipping points for irreversible climate change, such as the melting of the polar icecaps, Flannery offers hope over despair by highlighting positive tipping points for climate politics. First, Australia’s megafire in the summer of 2019–20 made it impossible for all but the most diehard denialists to ignore the effects of human-caused climate change. Second, the current Covid-19 pandemic has shown that ‘governments can act decisively’ in response to a global crisis. Indeed, Flannery matches his three-part climate cure to three main responses to the pandemic: first ‘and most urgent’, deep cuts in fossil fuel use are akin to containing the spread of the virus; second, adaptation to a changing climate is similar to ensuring critical-care capacity to support the virus-afflicted; and third, the long-term response to climate change by the ‘drawdown’ removal of CO₂ is analogous to the development and rollout of a vaccine. I am convinced that the Australian response to Covid-19 shows that governments can act rapidly to avert the worst of a crisis, but there are caveats. Flannery only acknowledges in passing, towards the end of the book, that ‘the climate emergency is slower burning than COVID-19’. The direct and immediate threat of the pandemic, and the example of the medical catastrophe in countries like Italy, caused Australian state and federal governments to act quickly and decisively, and Australians, for the most part, to accept restrictions. Though last summer’s megafires may have kick-started shifts in Coalition government climate policy, we have not yet seen anything like a decisive national response to the climate emergency. And if Australian democracy has thus far passed the Covid test, the Covid response of democratic governments in the United Kingdom, Brazil, and the United States is less reassuring. It remains to be seen if Joe Biden’s presidency will help unlock US political intransigence in the face of both pandemic and climate catastrophe.

Flannery’s Part 1 on ‘The Great Australian Tragedy’ details the history of folly in Australian responses to climate change, and will be familiar to most observers of recent Australian political history. Part 2 offers a step-by-step, policy-by-policy ‘Three-part Cure’, with seven chapters about cutting carbon emissions and generating renewable energy, a chapter each on adaptation and drawdown, and a chapter about leadership and cooperation in a global emergency.

Flannery is quite clear that the main enemy is the fossil fuel lobby and its apologists (including a revolving door of politicians who move between the industry and politics), and that the cuts in fossil fuel emissions must be deep and immediate. He details the fallacy of the ‘natural’ gas options favoured by the Coalition government, and explains why hydrogen energy created using fossil fuels is not the answer, except for fossil fuel companies desperate to retain profitability. Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s support for ‘dirty’ hydrogen ‘seems to be based … on what he imagines is currently politically acceptable’ and not on ‘what’s possible with science, engineering and economics’. As Flannery explains, the fact that renewable energy is becoming more economically viable than fossil fuel is a ‘win-win’ scenario increasingly recognised by Australian corporations, investors, and state governments. Indeed, Flannery argues, citing economist Ross Garnaut’s book Superpower (2019), that Australia is not only replete with solar and wind energy options but could become ‘a clean-energy hydrogen super-power’ if a ‘visionary government’ pursues ‘long-term and consistent policy’.

Crucially, Flannery acknowledges that the ‘belief that coal regions will lose out as we combat climate change is probably the greatest political barrier Australians face as we seek to win the climate war’. An ‘Australian Coal Compromise’, on German lines, that ensures a just transition for coal communities by investing in ‘clean energy hubs, tourism and environmental remediation’ could ‘change our politics by allaying the fears of vulnerable communities’. Someone in the Labor Party needs to force-feed this chapter to Joel Fitzgibbon, Hunter Valley MP and defender of coal-fired power stations.

In the chapter on ‘Adaptation’, Flannery explains how the climate crisis is already impacting Australian bushfires, heatwaves, floods, cyclones, aridity, biodiversity loss, and coastal inundation as sea levels rise, and advocates a National Commission for Climate Adaptation to research, risk assess, plan, and implement adaptation strategies for differentially affected Australian regions. Flannery hopes that Australia might become an international deal-broker and mediator for global adaptation efforts (in the same way that Australia’s H.V. Evatt helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the late 1940s) – though it’s hard to believe that Australia retains enough global political capital to have any sort of positive impact right now.

The final chapter, ‘Drawdown: A Vaccine for the Fossil Fuel Pandemic’, proposes massive research investment in four cutting-edge options: seaweed farms in deep oceans where carbon will sink to depths that ‘can’t easily rise’; mining of silicate rocks that sequester CO₂ as they weather; carbon-negative building materials (concrete that can remove CO₂ from the atmosphere); and ‘direct air capture’ of CO₂. For many readers who are not scientifically trained, including me, this sounds like science fiction, but Flannery provides compelling research evidence and is persuasive as to why we need to consider anything and everything that might help win the climate war.

If Flannery is right that the megafires and Covid-19 have created a narrow window of opportunity for Australian climate politics, then 2021 may be our last big chance. It is not at all clear that the federal Coalition leadership has the political imagination or will to confront the climate deniers and fossil fuel supporters within. Surely this is the time for the ALP to step up with a bold and imaginative climate strategy to take to the next election? Flannery’s important book offers a road map that we all need to follow.