Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office in 2022 pledging to end the country’s climate wars — and he may have just done it.
“The wars are on, but the good guys are winning them more,” Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen told me ahead of Albanese reappointing him to his post last week, after his Labor Party won its largest majority in 80 years.
Climate does not generally win elections — but it can help lose them, as demonstrated by four previous Australian prime ministers and the Greens’ recent losses in the EU. More often, it simply becomes a partisan cudgel, as in the United States, where Republicans are fast dismantling the Biden administration’s clean-energy agenda after Democrats failed to defend it in the 2024 election.
So the fact that Albanese became Australia’s first prime minister in 20 years to serve a full term and win another in part on his climate agenda is worth unpacking, even for politicians and energy leaders who have never heard of Warringah or Kooyong. His trajectory holds lessons for not only how to win on climate-friendly energy policies, but how to hold power while executing on them.
