Sometimes, teenage activist Anjali Sharma wonders what her life would be like now if she had just flicked past those videos.
If she hadn't delved into research about temperature rises and coral bleaching, about floods and melting sea ice. If the then 12-year-old had not been filled with anxiety — and a need to act — as she connected climate change with the crippling heatwaves endured by her relatives in India.
"There's been heaps of moments where I've kind of just wished that I could be a teenager," Ms Sharma, now 19, tells Australian Story.
"Because once you enter the world of environmental activism, you start to look at the world in a completely different way."
Ms Sharma didn't just enter the world of activism, she burst into it. At 14, she organised school climate strikes in her hometown of Melbourne; by 16, she sued the then-federal environment minister Sussan Ley in a climate change-related Federal Court case.
Loading...She's stood, daunted, in courtrooms where "everyone seemed so tall … so professional … so well-dressed". She's watched via video link from her year 11 economics class as her landmark win against Ms Ley was handed down, the legal jargon so foreign she wasn't sure if it was a win or not.
She's held hands with her young friends, devastated, as the victory was overturned eight months later.
She's been called naive, trolled on social media, racially vilified, patronised.
But Ms Sharma believes the world, her future, is on the brink of a climate disaster and it's her right – duty even – to try to pull it back. So, while it would be "quite nice" to be a normal teenager focusing "on the next exam … or the next party and [not] have that sense of overwhelming worry about the world", Ms Sharma's extracurricular activities are a tad unusual.
First, she tried the courts. Now, she's focused on the government, marshalling a band of like-minded young people, lawyers and politicians to lobby federal parliamentarians for legislative change.
Their goal? To have laws enacted that would compel politicians to consider their duty of care to the health and well-being of future generations when considering fossil fuel projects.
"Ultimately, it's young people who stand to bear the brunt of climate change," she says. "And if our interests aren't considered, then we can't be confident that we'll have the ability to enjoy what the world can offer us in the same way that generations before us did."
It's an ambitious piece of legislation – and controversial. At a Senate hearing into the proposed bill last month, Liberal senator Hollie Hughes voiced the umbrage taken by politicians on both sides of parliament at the idea that they pass laws without considering future generations.
"This is absolutely insane and offensive to me that we're going to legislate a thought process as we put policy in place," Senator Hughes said. "A lot of us are parents, we all do consider the future."
Getting the bill through, even with alterations, is going to be tough, but Ms Sharma is adamant that if it fails, younger generations will know their place – secondary to fossil fuel companies wanting to "extract and exploit and export".
The dorm room HQ
The lobbying headquarters helping to drive this landmark legislative change is not filled with bound volumes of case law or old men in suits.
It's not even an office but a dormitory, with happy snaps on the wall and a tiny teddy bear on the bed. It's here, in Anjali's dorm room at Canberra's Australian National University, that her grassroots team of four young women meet to discuss strategy and talking points.
"None of us have ever participated in parliamentary legislation drafting before," says Ms Sharma, now a second-year law student. "It's a massive learning curve."
They do have help. Some say too much help — that these earnest young women are being used as pawns for the advancement of others' political or financial aims.
Ms Sharma can rattle off the criticisms: "They're being controlled by the lawyers, by their parents, by the renewable energy companies."
She maintains the genesis of the Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill 2023 was the talks she had with her legal team after the successful case against Ms Ley was overturned on appeal in March 2022.
Devastated, they discussed the positives.
Central to the original win was the finding that Ms Ley, in considering the approval of a specific coalmine expansion, had a duty of care to protect younger people against future harm from climate change.
In overturning the decision, two of the three appeal court judges did not explicitly find there was no duty of care – rather, that it was for the parliament to impose, not the courts. The court also did not reject the lower court's findings that climate change was a risk to future generations.
'Far-fetched and fanciful': Will the bill pass?
So, the legal team and Ms Sharma switched focus to parliament and the idea of formulating legislation to impose a duty of care. At first, she says, even they considered it a "far-fetched, fanciful possibility".
But in the break between finishing year 12 and starting uni, she threw herself into research and met with environmental lawyers and policy experts, building up the case for a bill and how it could operate.
With that in hand, she canvassed several politicians for their support. Senator David Pocock, the independent senator for the Australian Capital Territory, was receptive and, given her move to Canberra, he became her conduit.
Senator Pocock says he'd been considering introducing a private senator's bill on climate and had been keenly watching Ms Sharma's court battles. "We started to talk to her and … it seemed like a good fit," he says.
He says his office did "a huge amount of work" investigating the wording of the bill and where it would fit in existing legislation.
The result, says Senator Pocock, is a bill that would help safeguard younger generations' climate future by limiting emissions. "Any fossil fuel project that is going to worsen climate change and the impacts that are felt wouldn't go ahead," he tells Australian Story.
To be expanding the fossil fuel industry in 2024 is "total madness", Senator Pocock says. "When it comes to climate change, we have this really narrow window to act."
That's not the view of all politicians, including the Nationals leader David Littleproud. He rejects the notion advanced by Ms Sharma and Senator Pocock that Australia has enough existing fossil fuel supply to transition into renewable energy and says "we've got time" to pause and plan.
"There's not the supply chain of 22,000 solar panels a day that need to be laid, or the 40 wind turbines a month that need to be erected," says Mr Littleproud, who has accused the federal government of pursuing a "reckless race" to reach 82 per cent renewables in the electricity grid by 2030.
"You take away investment confidence in the traditional industries [and] supply goes down, price goes up, and you get a situation where you don't have [sufficient energy supply] in this country at all. And that's the big risk."
Young people live in regional Australia, too, he says, and it's the regions that bear the bulk of the burden for transition to renewable energy — through the loss of fossil fuel industry jobs and the taking up of land, some of it agricultural, for solar panels, wind farms and transmission lines.
"It's not just about the ways those in metropolitan Australia want to achieve [climate change action]," he says.
Ms Sharma knows these arguments well. The young campaigner heard them often as she and 25 other young people held a full-day blitz of parliament late last year, lobbying politicians to support the bill. She's felt the tepid response from Labor and Coalition senators when she addressed last month's Senate hearings.
"One of the biggest criticisms of the work I've done … the court case, the bill, is that it tries to make change too quickly," she says.
"But I believe, as a young person, that we don't have time for incremental change and baby steps anymore.
"I'm not going to stop campaigning for radical change because I think that's the only way to safeguard the rights of young people in the face of climate change."
Anjali up for the fight
Just seven years ago, Ms Sharma returned from a trip to India, filled with anxiety about the heatwaves and erratic monsoons that were affecting the country of her birth. Back then, the 12-year-old felt "overwhelmingly responsible" and "incredibly powerless".
"Every time I turned on a light or left the tap running, it was me who destroyed the world," she says.
"I've really been able to unpack that over the last few years … I know now that individual action matters, of course, but it's the action of government, of big polluters, that will have the final say in the way that my future and the future of young people looks."
Ms Sharma still feels anxious about her future. But she no longer feels powerless.
She's felt the passion of young people fighting for climate action, been part of the huge crowds at marches, walked into courtrooms and parliament and had her say. "The best thing … has been seeing what young people can do when empowered and given even a smidgen of the tools needed to make a difference," she says.
Ms Sharma knows from experience there will be wins and setbacks in the battle for climate action. But the past few years have given her confidence today's youth are up for the fight.
Watch Australian Story's Call of Duty, 8pm (AEDT), on ABCTV and ABC iview.
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2024-03-10 18:41:49Z
CBMiamh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDI0LTAzLTExL2FuamFsaS1zaGFybWEtdGFraW5nLWdvdmVybm1lbnQtdG8tdGFzay1vbi1jbGltYXRlLWNoYW5nZS8xMDM0MTAzNTjSAShodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTAzNDEwMzU4
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