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Sharing the farmhouse on weekends with a 21-year-old recent Ag Science graduate — who’s firmly convinced his old man knows nothing about politics, economics, or history — is hard enough. Especially when I’ve read more books on these subjects than he’s even walked past in the UWA library. It gets worse when we stray into soil science, when there is nothing he does not know despite him never having been seen with a text book

Something’s shifted. You can feel it in the air — and no, I’m not talking about carbon dioxide, the superfood of plants. I’m talking about the political climate, the social mood, the economic headwinds, and, most importantly, the dawning realisation across much of the Western world that Net Zero isn’t the pathway to the promised land — it’s a mirage. Not that you’d know it from the days of the federal election, where the government

It wasn’t so long ago that every farm group in Australia was racing to outbid each other on climate targets. The mania for net zero swept across the country like a green gold rush, with grains, wool, dairy, beef and sheep all falling over themselves to sign up. Not to be outdone, every other industry – mining, aviation, transport – also jumped aboard, egged on by the government dream of becoming a clean energy superpower.