Australia cannot shirk ‘moral obligation’ to tackle climate change: Brian Schmidt

A photograph of ANU Vice-Chancellor Prof Brian Schmidt, smiling and looking towards the camera.
23 January 2021

Australian Nobel laureate scientist Brian Schmidt has told a summit of global leaders that Australia is duty bound to take a lead on climate action and called for an international effort to combat an anti-science agenda and climate change denial.

“For Australia, which is such a large per capita contributor to global emissions and which has such abundance of natural renewable resources, the answer lies in scaling up clean energy generation ASAP,” Professor Schmidt, vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, said in a speech on Friday night.

“This is an urgent moral obligation which Australia must not shirk.”

Professor Schmidt, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 2011, made his comments to the Climate Adaptation Summit, hosted by the Netherlands but being conducted online.

Read the full article on The Sydney Morning Herald website, featuring ANU Vice-Chancellor Prof Brian Schmidt