Australia is finally getting serious about global warming, and everyone from oil majors to billionaire mining magnates is looking for a way to capitalize on the transformation.
Signs of change are everywhere on the continent. A new government has been elected, pledging to cut greenhouse-gas emissions faster; the nation’s biggest power grid has a multibillion-dollar plan to dump coal; and some of the country’s richest people who made their fortunes in mining and technology are lining up huge green-energy projects designed to pivot the nation from fossil-fuel king to a global supplier of green energy and the metals needed to build electric vehicles.
Few countries in the world can make such an outsize difference to climate change relative to their population.