Woodside's CEO and her peers need to fund Australia's climate catastrophe measures

Today Woodside's CEO Meg O'Neill called our youth "ideological" because they demand enough climate action to make their future bearable. It's time we make the CEOs pay for our "bandaids".

Australian Environment Minister Murray Watts appears set to extend the Woodside North West Shelf gas project through to 2070. It seems the re-elected Labor government is bound by corporate pressure, alongside that from our major trading partners, and unable to commit to meaningful climate action. Australians must demand that Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill and her fossil fuel corporation peers who create this pressure contribute the necessary funds for the Albanese government to start preparing to meet the direst impacts of the climate catastrophe.

Food

Australia must be addressing the looming food crisis: the impacts of food insecurity will be catastrophic for those unable to feed their family, with growing costs hurting the majority.

Farmers in the NSW floods currently face “utter devastation.” Droughts, floods and fires are only the obvious ways that the climate crisis will make food more expensive initially, with severe shortages likely down the track. These disasters threaten production, storage and distribution.

The Farmers for Climate Action group produced a report in 2022 that highlighted many of the ways that food production is under threat from the changing climate. Higher temperatures mean that crop yields are generally lower and livestock is stressed. Food staples like wheat and rice have lower nutritional value. Bulk storage will need climate control to protect food supplies from heat and pest deterioration. The process of pollination itself is threatened by climate change. Climate change can also cause unseasonal frosts that can harm food production. All of these factors impact availability and cost.

What are the Australian government and its fossil fuel pressure groups doing to ensure that there are adequate and affordable food supplies when we have more overlapping drought, flood and heat harm to food production?

Housing

Tens of thousands of Australians are currently cut off and displaced by the current floods. Eight hundred homes have been declared uninhabitable so far. These are not quick or easy problems to solve: in October 2024, it was reported that 100 of the insurance claims from the Victorian Rochester floods in 2022 were still open. The catastrophic Queensland floods from earlier this year are only just beginning to be dealt with. Each disaster compounds the shortages of labour and material.

Even with insurance payouts, most cannot afford the additional cost of rebuilding to disaster-proof standards to prevent the next destruction.

Many of those devastated in the current floods had their homes and farms destroyed by the “once in a century” floods of 2021. These floods, only 4 years later, are worse. In 2022, nearly one in twenty Australians was affected by a “weather-related” disaster. The climate is warming every year making floods and fires more regular, more damaging and more extensive.

In February, the Australian insurance sector called for the taxpayer to subsidise a $30 billion flood defence fund to cover the increasing number of houses set to be ruined by climate disasters. Insurance for a house in a threatened zone can cost up to $30,000 per annum. People in these zones are more likely to be low income since the housing stock has been cheaper. The Insurance Council report found that 70% of people in the high cost insurance zones earn less than $92,000 per annum, with a third of those living in poverty.

This cost should not be worn by the taxpayer. The Australia Institute has just issued a call for the fossil fuel sector to back a “National Climate Disaster Fund.” The Institute explains that more than two million Australians live in homes that are not fully insured. Over 30 billion dollars are invested in under- or uninsured mortgaged properties. Serious damage to those properties will result in massed bankruptcies.

As the number displaced grows, and areas become too dangerous for rebuilding, there will be an ever-intensifying crisis of accommodation. Tent cities are not an acceptable option, particularly in climate crisis conditions.

How do the Australian government and its fossil fuel pressure groups intend to house the increasing number who will be homeless for years or permanently unable to return to their land?

Fatal heat

Much of Australia is set to become hot enough that being outside for long will be deadly. Heat already kills more Australians than all other catastrophes combined.

Fatal wet bulb temperature heatwaves will be a genuine threat to - initially - thousands of lives. The wet bulb score measures the combination of dry air temperature with humidity. The humidity intensifies the danger by preventing sweating to cool the body. Combining air temperature of 40C with 75% humidity creates a wet bulb temperature of 35C. It is now thought that a wet bulb temperature of “only” 31.5C is critically dangerous to human health, although a lower wet bulb temperature than that is deadly for vulnerable people like the young and aged. The damage is worse because the hot nights that are inherent to climate change prevent the cooling that our bodies need to stabilise. Currently these conditions are only lasting for a few hours at a time: they will get longer. Across the tropics, we are heading towards the limits of humanity’s ability to survive the heat.

Australia’s tropical north will be “unliveable.” Much of the rest of Australia will be unbearable: Western Sydney, home to 2.5 million people, is already dangerously hotter than coastal Sydney.

The impacts of this kind of heat on the body make for grotesque reading.

So we must calculate the repercussions of the reduction in hours that it will be safe to work outside as the dangerous heat periods increase. Both those re-building houses and farming our food will have to limit their outdoor working hours.

How quickly is the Australian government with its fossil fuel pressure groups building emergency cooling shelter accessible to people all around the country?

These are only the most pressing crises facing Australians in the years ahead, created by the global behemoths and their control of governments’ ability to act. Food shortages and longterm mass homelessness are only some of the conditions that will damage civil society as well as lives. We have seen the harm done to our democratic experiments by bad actors manipulating crises of mass displacement; we know that they will only double down on their fear-mongering with the greater displacement that is already beginning. The implications for the displaced themselves and for our societies are frightening.

Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill has, today, called young people demanding the climate action that might make their future tolerable “ideological.” No doubt her own probable children will be able to afford food no matter how expensive it becomes. Their energy supplies will keep them air conditioned no matter how precarious the rest of our existence. Maybe it is her children’s privilege, as well as her career, that blinds her to the real and justified fear that drives so many of us.

If Ms O’Neill does not want her children in our thoughts, she should stop patronising as well as endangering ours. Her cohort must fund the measures that will help us survive the repercussions of her business model.

Footnote: See O’Neill’s attempts to shame youth below. Note that fossil fuel created the idea of the “carbon footprint” to shift the focus to individual behaviour away from the decades of delay caused by fossil fuel.