Senator DI NATALE (Victoria—Leader of the Australian Greens) (17:57): The climate talks in Poland are happening right now: Right now, we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale. Our greatest threat in thousands of years. Climate change. If we don't take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon. Those are not my words. They are the words of David Attenborough at the climate talks in Poland right now. In the words of David Attenborough: 'This is a matter of life and death. The world's people have spoken, the message is clear and time is running out. You, the decision-makers, must act now.' We know the science is clear. We know that the coalition is dominated by science deniers and climate deniers. They are a lost cause. So my appeal is to the Labor Party right now. In 2010 we worked with the Labor Party, cooperatively, to put a price on carbon. We had a Prime Minister who rose to the challenge. We established the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and we established the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. We had a plan. It is time to re-establish a plan, and at the heart of that plan has to be a pathway to stop the burning of coal. The burning of coal contributes to catastrophic climate damage. It knows no borders. Whether the coal was dug up here in Australia and burnt overseas makes no difference to the atmosphere and oceans, who don't care where the coal is burnt. Just because this coal is burnt overseas and doesn't appear in our national greenhouse gas figures doesn't make it less of a threat. The great majority of what we dig up is burnt overseas, but it pollutes our atmosphere nonetheless. We have a choice right now. We are the first generation to experience the impact of climate change and the last generation that will be able to do something about it. The choice is clear: we need to make sure that the Adani coalmine never gets built. I urge Bill Shorten and the Labor Party to review and revoke those environmental approvals. I urge them to work with us to prevent another new coalmine from ever being built in this country and to embrace the challenge that comes with making the transition to a clean, renewable energy economy. Senator LEYONHJELM: The proposition put forward in today's debate by the Greens is that Australia's coal exports are one of the most significant contributors to human induced climate change globally. To assist debate, I'm actually going to try to put a figure on this contribution. Human induced climate change, to the extent it occurs, is a function of cumulative anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide emissions, over at least the last 100 years. So, first we need to recognise that for the first half of the last 100 years Australia's coal production and exports were negligible. Moving to the present day, Australia now produces around seven per cent of the world's annual coal production, and we export around three-quarters of our production. Globally, coal accounts for around a third of annual total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. So, in answer to the Greens proposition, Australia's coal exports make less than a one per cent contribution to climate change. This reflects the fact that Australia's coal exports made next to no contribution to cumulative anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions for the last 100 years, and are making a less than two per cent contribution to annual global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions now. Let's talk about the two elephants in the room, China and India. China and India produce more than half of the world's annual coal production, and consume more than two-thirds of the world's annual coal consumption. Together, China and India account for more than a third of annual anthropogenic global greenhouse gas emissions. Given this enormous footprint, the cessation of Australia's coal exports would not contribute to mitigating human induced climate change to any realistic extent. The only way to mitigate human induced climate change would be to push for an agreement involving a commitment from China and India to not increase their annual emissions by many billions of tonnes over the coming decade. To put their emission increases into context, remember that Australia's total annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are around half a billion tonnes. No-one is pretending it would be easy to strike an agreement involving a commitment from China and India to not increase their emissions by billions of tonnes; such an agreement would need to offer net benefits to each country that signs up, including China and India. This would mean either that at any reduction in business-as-usual emissions in China and India would need to be small, or that China and India would need to be paid off by the rest of the world to do more. Any irrational resistance to expanding nuclear power would need to be jettisoned. Only this sort of agreement would allow Chinese and Indian emissions to ease off, while allowing the people of China and India to continue their march out of poverty. Under such an agreement, demand for our coal could well fall, but the silver lining for us would be that demand for our uranium should skyrocket. The issue of China and India's anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is a wicked problem, but it is absolutely fundamental to any practical action targeting human induced climate change. Those who purport to care about human induced climate change but who say and do nothing about China and India increasing their annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by billions of tonnes are clearly not primarily concerned about climate change; they are more concerned about self-flagellation—or, more accurately, about everyone around them being flagellated. They are suffering a neurosis, and they shouldn't be in charge. Maybe they belong in an institution, but that institution shouldn't be the parliament.