Time to talk dirty

It's not just what you say, but how often you say it

As I write, Australia’s ‘progressive’ government has just approved an extension to one of the world’s biggest dirty gas projects - for 40 years. Until 2070.

This, as the headline posted above from Australia’s Climate Council, is opening the floodgates on climate chaos. For background, here are some details from the Climate Council on what this climate vandalism means for the future - a.k.a the lives of our children and grandchildren:

The North West Shelf extension is a climate bomb that would unleash 4.4 billion tonnes of climate pollution, making it Australia’s second worst polluting fossil fuel facility. That’s 10 years’ worth of Australia’s emissions, and twice as polluting as the Coalition’s nuclear scheme would have been.

The scale of this pollution is visualised for us in this handy graph I borrowed from the Climate Council:

Federal Labor has committed to 4.4. billion tonnes of climate pollution for dirty gas that will largely be exported, with virtually no financial benefit to Australians. Tell that to your kids.

Excuse me?

As I’ve written here before, language is big and malleable. So the hands driving this climate-smashing lorry into our future have no end of rhetorical options to put up their excuses for this decision. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous, how untrue, how disingenous, how contradictory. Language will never save us from ourselves - it gives us the tools, and then stands back to see what we will do with them.

And let’s face it, we have for generations said and believed all kinds of ridiculous things, like the idea people go to war because they are fighting for peace. Yeah, fighting for peace, that so makes sense. From here, it’s hardly a great rhetorical leap for Labor Prime Minister Albanese to argue this enormous new dirty energy project is somehow just one more step along the road to the ‘transition’.

When we look at the overall issue, if you take a step back, we are already more than halfway to delivering on our commitment of 82 per cent renewables by 2030, we're up to 46 per cent as we're speaking here now … In order to get that investment in renewables you do need firming capacity, whether it be batteries, hydro or gas, and that is what will encourage that investment and the transition to occur. In Western Australia they are closing their last coal-fired power station at Collie in 2027. They are moving to renewables backed by gas, and that will be a really important part of the transition that will occur.

I mean, if you can fight for peace, you keep on heating the planet along the way to saving it, surely? Albanese language has the sound of someone defending money. Notably, the number Albanese is reaching for to defend this decision has nothing to do with how much pollution this project will add to our already overburdened atmosphere. Instead, he is arguing there is ‘nothing to see here’ because of how much renewable energy we are now producing. It’s like trying to argue with your cholesterol level: ‘I know I had bacon, chops and cheese for breakfast, but I had an apple for morning tea’. Cholesterol doesn’t care how much good stuff you eat - it’s all about how much bad stuff you put down your gullet.

Here’s another number Albanese could have pointed to: we are at 425.88 ppm of CO2 as of late May, and you can check the rising methane levels here. And don’t let anyone tell you we will just be able to pull this dangerous gas out of the air.

Check this website here (Global Monitoring Lab) for the critical figures on polluting greenhouse gases

Sure, we are building more and more renewable energy, but if we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it won’t matter much how many of us are driving EVs, or drawing electricity from solar. Even our current levels of climate pollution are causing more extreme weather, leaving behind a very long trail of un-natural disaster survivors, with more and more traumatised survivors being created every few months. Hear their voices in this video below: it’s the sound of climate trauma.

The new environment minister, like our previous one, just has the best excuse ever for keeping on with this latest planet-wrecking approval. Because Australia’s key environmental legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC), despite its name, and despite opportunities over years for governments, including the current Albanese government, to change it, doesn’t actually require the government to protect Australians from climate disasters.

I put together the word cloud below created from this central piece of environmental legislation. Can you see the word ‘climate’ here? The text has over 150, 000 words in it and only one of those is ‘climate’. That’s 0.0006% representation of climate in the central piece of legislating deciding if it’s OK for a dirty energy company to make the planet even hotter. To add insult to this injury, the law’s only usage of the word is to refer to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (well over a quarter of a century ago); and even this is simply to state that regulations ‘may be made for and in relation to giving effect to any of the following agreements’, a list which includes the 1992 Framework.

‘May be made’ … we are still waiting. Here’s a summary of what this law is designed to protect, from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water:

The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) is Australia's main environmental law. It gives us a legal framework to protect and manage unique plants, animals, habitats and places. These include heritage sites, marine areas and some wetlands. The Act also protects listed threatened and migratory species.

This isn’t nothing - but now it’s 2025, and there is evidence that we are well on our way to smashing through 1.5 degree of warming. Pardon the pun, but Australia’s key environmental law - subject to extensive review in 2020 - now looks like a case of not seeing the wood for the trees.

Or I should say, choosing not to see the wood for the trees. The government knows what the science is telling us, and yet they have the chutpah to say, when announcing an approval like this, that they have taken this decision ‘following the consideration of rigorous scientific and other advice’ - that’s a quote from the Minister who approved it. He goes on to law-wash his decision by stating what he was ‘required to consider’:

In making my proposed decision I was required to consider:

• the potential impacts of extending the life of the plant on the national heritage values of nearby ancient rock art, and

• economic and social matters concerning the proposed development.

Minister Watt gets to use a highly restricted piece of legislation to back up this terrifying decision, just like the previous environment minister did when approving new coal mines. The meaning of these short sharp dot points in his media release is ‘mate, I’ve done my job’ - he even ends his response by saying he will make no further comment. Meanwhile, anonymous Labor MPs who spoke to the Guardian, as well as Australia’s Energy Minister Chris Bowen, offered the same defense, saying that the enviroment minister was constrained to work within the current environmental laws. ‘His hands are tied’, they tell us, as if they haven’t just had three years of government to fix this law. Will we start to see this as a kind of Nuremberg defense - the ‘I was just following orders’ excuse?

Instead, the minimal changes they made during their previous term has left this law even weaker than when they came to power. Reflecting on this piece of legislation back in 2022, Dr Laura Schuïjers of the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law wrote

Australia doesn’t have a climate law to protect its children.

Can you pause and read that again?

Time to talk dirty

This latest decision is so galling that the Climate Council released a video on social media with the caption ‘we really wish we were f***king joking’.

I’m all for the f-word and other expletives to help process the pain and anxiety that this announcement has brought with it. Fuck Albanese and fuck Watt. But here’s a more important, strategic response to this decision: we have to reclaim ‘energy’ from the dirty fossil fuel mongers. In a recent post at his Subtack The Crucial Years, Bill McKibben wrote about the launch of ‘SunDay’, a US campaign working towards a day of action to promote renewable energies. The campaign, which is organized around building a momentum around sun and wind and batteries, is ‘seizing the opportunity to change both local laws and the national zeitgeist’. And if it works, he wrote, ‘when we’re done no one will ever talk about ‘alternative energy’ again. Everyone will know this is the normal, obvious, beautiful way forward’.

To make this change, we need to use words differently. All forms of change, big and small, are powered by shifts in how we use language. If we want to reclaim energy, so in its standalone form it refers to clean energy, then we have to build a movement of tongues deriding and stigmatizing dirty energy. We can’t just promote ‘clean’ energy, we have to demote dirty energy. That means getting tens of thousands and more people consistently referring to fossil fuelled energy as ‘dirty energy’. Over and over again, time in time out, over days, weeks, months and years.

Right now, ‘clean; energy is the special case: like the ‘Women’s World Cup’, it’s not the real thing, but a marginal DEI version. While dirty energy suppliers can just talk about ‘energy’, renewables are still, despite their roaring popularity, worded as if they are the marked case.

I’ve pulled my evidence from a very big corpus of news data (you can go here to try this yourself: https://www.english-corpora.org/now/). This data set is more than 21 billion words of news data, across 20 countries, collected from the start of January 2010, up until now. To find out the dominant ways we classify ‘energy’, I asked this system to give me the top 100 L1 collocates of ‘energy’. That is, I asked the software to list for me the top 100 two-word phrases [ngrams], where the second word is ‘energy’. I’ve graphed below all the examples that specify a source (or type of source) of energy. The top ngrams are all ways of referring to clean energy. The only dirty energy that gets a mention in the top 100 is ‘nuclear energy’/’atomic energy’.

What I want to show you is that we very rarely hear the term ‘dirty energy’ or ‘fossil energy’. And this is what we have to bring out from the shadows. Planet-heating energy companies get this beautiful positive word ‘energy’ for free. We have to snatch it away from them, so that their energy becomes known as dirty and polluting - so theirs becomes the marked option. Right now, terms like ‘fossil energy’ and ‘dirty energy’ are so infrequent they are long way off the top 100. This enormous data set can put a figure on how often you will hear ‘clean energy’ versus ‘dirty energy’: it’s a ratio of over 100 to 1. And this chart shows the term ‘dirty energy’, from an already low base - in 2010, it was recorded at 1/10th of a word in every million - has gotten even less frequent in recent years.

It is not easy to effect this kind of change. But words change minds. The more we all say ‘dirty energy’, the more it will catch on and spread. It’s even more important to say it if you are someone will lots of reach on your forms of media. This is how we change the zeitgeist. It’s time to talk dirty.