Change and Climate Change

“Ice masses are melting rapidly away. If the rate of thawing continues, civilisation near the sea may be submerged and profound changes be wrought in climate, soil, sea and the race itself.”

This was reported by Brisbane’s The Courier Mail in 1947. But you could easily mistake it for something written this week. Below is the link.

Whole Earth Seems to be Warming Up

Who knew what and when (in brief)?

The scientific thread connecting carbon dioxide to warming is far older than most people realise.

Svante Arrhenius (1896)

Svante Arrhenius (see picture above) was a Swedish physicist and physical chemist — one of the founders of physical chemistry as a discipline. In 1903 he became the first Swedish recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded for his electrolytic theory of dissociation (Nobel Prize Organisation 1903). But while Alfred Nobel was still accumulating the prize dollars by blowing things up, Arrhenius was doing meticulous calculations on atmospheric carbon dioxide. In 1896 he published a landmark paper in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science titled “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,” predicting that increases in CO₂ levels in the atmosphere would substantially alter the surface temperature of the Earth (Arrhenius 1896).

The Australian Press (1912)

Australia’s own newspapers were on the case remarkably early. The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal on 17 July 1912 carried this note (Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal 1912):

“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

The same text had earlier appeared in American publications and was widely reprinted across the English-speaking press (Science Alert 2018). The science was already circulating.

Charles Keeling and the Keeling Curve (1958–1965)

The first irrefutable confirmation of rising atmospheric CO₂ came in the late 1950s.Charles David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography developed instruments to reliably measure carbon dioxide concentrations and began continuous measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in March 1958(American Physical Society 2025; Keeling Curve 2013). He reported his initial findings — including evidence of a year-on-year rise — in the journal Tellus in 1960. The resulting data set, now known as the Keeling Curve, is considered one of the most important scientific works of the twentieth century (Britannica 2011).

By November1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee had delivered a formal report — Restoring the Quality of Our Environment — warning of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and measurable climate change driven by fossil fuel combustion (Worth 2024;Guardian 2015). This was the first official report to any government in the world on the climate risk posed by rising CO₂.

So everyone jumped into action? Not quite.

Australia Wakes Up — Slowly

By the late1980s, momentum was building in Australia. CSIRO and the Commission for the Future — established in 1985 under Science Minister Barry Jones — jointly launched The Greenhouse Project in1987, a national awareness campaign briefing the public and business community on the scale of the coming challenge (CAWCR 2015; All Our Yesterdays 2023). The inaugural GREENHOUSE 87 conference drew 260 participants and the Australian public came to be recognised among the best-informed in the world on climate issues (The Conversation 2017).

In October1990, the Hawke Labor government set a bold CO₂ reduction target of 20% by 2005(The Conversation 2015; Climate Action Merribek 2019). It was a landmark political commitment.

So everyone jumped into action? Not quite.

The Change Problem

Everett Rogers, in his landmark book Diffusion of Innovations (first published 1962), warned us about exactly this kind of failure:

“A preventive innovation has a particularly slow rate of adoption because individuals have difficulties in perceiving its relative advantage. The desired consequence is distant in time…” (Rogers 2003, p. 217)

This insight was prescient. The 20% target effectively disappeared when Paul Keating became Prime Minister. John Howard later set up a Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading in December 2006, announcing a formal ETS commitment in July 2007 — a scheme he took to the 2007 federal election (ABC 2016; Australian Politics 2007). Kevin Rudd, a genuine climate believer, then ratified the Kyoto Protocol and designed a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme — but it was twice blocked in the Senate (Wikipedia 2007).

Then things got complicated.

Barry Jones, who served as Commonwealth Science Minister from 1983 to 1990, captured what went wrong and how politics is a really tough business:

“The Rudd–Gillard–Rudd government comprehensively lost it by getting the politics wrong: failing to understand the fatal conjunction of inertia, self-interest, corporate power and media saturation.” (Jones 2011)

For a comprehensive outline of Australia’s climate policy history, The Conversation provides an excellent summary:

The Conversation on Climate Change in Australia

Where Hope Lives: The Battery Revolution

The NSW Climate Change Fund is working against this long pattern of inaction. Cobalt59 evaluated two of its projects. The Fund has assessed 2,000 NSW public schools for their suitability for solar and battery systems, with the Smart Energy Schools Pilot Project — the largest school-based renewable energy project of its kind in Australia — deploying around 7,488 solar panels and 4,605 kWh of battery storage capacity across 79 public schools (School Infrastructure NSW n.d.; NSW Climate Change Fund Annual Report 2022–23). Projected annual savings include 63,750 MWh and a reduction of 35,500 tonnes of CO₂e in the first year.

But the schools program is now being joined by something much bigger in Australian households.

Australia’s federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program launched on 1 July 2025, offering households, businesses and community organisations around 30% off the upfront cost of an eligible solar battery —administered through Small-scale Technology Certificates (STCs) under the existing Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (Clean Energy Council n.d.; Solar Calculator 2026). The program was originally budgeted at $2.3 billion over ten years.

The response has been extraordinary. In just the first month of the scheme, over 19,592 home battery systems were registered for subsidy support, adding 344.1 MWh of nominal capacity in July 2025 alone — more battery capacity in a single week than Australia installed in the entire first two months of 2024 (SolarQuotes2025a; SunWiz 2025). By the end of December 2025, 184,672 batteries had been installed under the program, adding 4.27 gigawatt-hours of storage capacity (Solar Quotes 2026).

In the second half of 2025 alone, 183,245 home batteries were installed — a four-fold increase on the same period in 2024, and more than the entire five-year stretch from 2020 to 2024 combined (Cosmic Renewable Energy 2025). Australia now has over 454,000 home batteries installed nationally. Around three-quarters of batteries installed under the federal scheme are in regional and outer suburban areas (ABC 2025). Such demand has led the government to allocate an additional$4.9 billion in funding amid fears the original budget would be exhausted well ahead of the scheme’s planned 2030 end date (Solar Calculator 2026; ABC 2025).

Before the federal scheme launched, the picture was already shifting. In the full year of2024, 74,582 home batteries were installed nationally — up from 46,127 in 2023— yet only 4.5% of Australia’s four million rooftop solar households had a battery attached (Clean Energy Council 2025). The federal rebate has transformed that trajectory almost overnight.

In NSW, the state government has updated its Peak Demand Reduction Scheme to complement the federal program (NSW Government n.d.), and the combination of federal and state incentives is making batteries accessible to a far wider cohort of households. Rooftop solar already supplies 14.2% of Australia’s grid electricity — nearly double its 7.2% contribution in 2020 — and the battery fleet is rapidly reshaping how and when that energy is used (Cosmic Renewable Energy 2025).

It is, in the words of one long-time energy market watcher, demand that has “gone off like a rocket” (ABC 2025)... but without all the fiery propellant that adds more CO² to the atmosphere.

Perhaps, at last, the rate of adoption is beginning to match the scale of the problem.

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