Climate-politics backlash seen in Australian election

SYDNEY — The polls said this would be Australia’s climatechange election, when voters confronted harsh reality and elected leaders who would tackle the problem.

And in some districts, it was true: Tony Abbott, the former prime minister who stymied climate policy for years, lost to an independent who campaigned on the issue. A few other new candidates prioritizing climate change also won.

But overall, Australians shrugged off the warming seas killing the Great Barrier Reef and the extreme drought punishing farmers. On Saturday, in a result that stunned most analysts, they re-elected the conservative coalition that has long resisted plans to sharply cut down on carbon emissions and coal.

What it could mean is that the world’s climate wars — already raging for years — are likely to intensify. Left-leaning candidates elsewhere, such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, might learn to avoid making climate a campaign issue, while in Australia, conservatives face more enraged opponents and a more divided public.

Even for skeptics, the effects of climate change are becoming harder to deny. Australia just experienced its hottest summer on record. The country’s tropics are spreading south, bringing storms and mosquitoborne illnesses such as dengue fever to places unprepared for such problems, while water shortages have led to major fish die-offs in drying rivers.

“This is all playing out in real time, right now,” said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University. “We are one of the most vulnerable nations in the developed world when it comes to climate change.”

And yet Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s path to victory will make agreeing on a response more difficult. He and his Liberal-national coalition won thanks not just to their base of older, suburban economic conservatives, but also to a surge of support in Queensland, a rural, coal-producing, sparsely populated state.

The coalition successfully made cost the dominant issue in the climate-change debate. One economic model estimated that the 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions proposed by the opposition Labor Party would cost the economy 167,000 jobs and $181 billion.

The message resonated strongly in Queensland, where the proposed Carmichael coal mine would be among the largest in the world if it is approved.