The late Peter Coleman recalled in his memoirs that around the time when the Japanese were bombing Darwin, Sydney’s young bohemians would meet at Sherry’s coffee shop in Pitt Street to discuss matters more important than the war.

Last week, as G7 leaders considered united action to counter the threat of Communist China, the ABC insisted climate change was the real issue. The Australian Prime Minister, even more than the Chinese President, was the recalcitrant who should be brought into line.

David Speers’ opening line on Insiders set the tone for last Sunday’s discussion on which the Greens’ Adam Bandt was the star turn. “The Prime Minister is rallying leaders of the world’s greatest democracies to step up on China, but he remains out of step with his counterparts on climate targets,” said Speers. Bandt accused the government of warmongering and urged the US and Europe to punish Australia’s supposed belligerence with trade tariffs.

Any hope that the pandemic might bring the intellectual left to its senses was extinguished in the first weeks of the outbreak. Having escalated the threat of global warming from one of many policy challenges to pose a threat to human existence, everything else shrank in importance in the minds of the intelligentsia.

As Niall Ferguson reminds us in Doom: The Politics of Catastrophism, at the start of Covid-19’s fateful global tour in January 2020, the World Economic Forum in Davos was focused on the wrong worry. The overwhelming theme at Davos was climate change while environmental responsibility dominated discussions on corporate boards. Little did they know that China was about to make its biggest contribution to reducing carbon dioxide to date through a pandemic that would disrupt global energy consumption patterns. Daily global CO2 reductions decreased by an estimated 17 per cent in April 2020.

Meeting a target of net-zero emissions by 2050, however, will require a more sustained contribution than that from the world’s largest carbon emitter. That is unlikely to happen. Since the Chinese administration has no intention of playing by the rules of international law, trade or commerce, we’d be nuts to imagine it would ever be a trusted partner in a global agreement on climate change.