Anthony Albanese and Labor's first big test is climate change agenda

The bill has a 2030 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent below 2005 levels, which if successful, would put Australia on track to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

In his victory speech in May, the Prime Minister pledged to "end the climate wars" but Labor faces a potentially difficult battle ahead with the Greens, whose leader Adam Bandt is looking to make amendments in the Senate to reduce major coal and gas projects already in the pipeline.

Robust backroom negotiations will be required to get this bill over the line, even though the government maintains it can still take significant action on clean energy and emissions reductions without the legislation being passed.

Promised action on climate change was a big vote winner for Labor in the May election. It needs to post some major gains early in the piece on big ticket items such as this to build public confidence.

Over in Europe and the UK, the nasty effects of a red hot summer are revealing themselves in major bushfires in areas which have never seen such catastrophic fire behaviour before.

All of the UK's 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2002, in a country where such data has been kept since 1659. On Tuesday the UK recorded its hottest temperature ever.

Some of the country's Victorian-era infrastructure could not cope, with rail services curtailed due to buckling tracks, and buildings without air conditioning turned into ovens.

Australia has already felt this blowtorch effect. The Black Summer of 2019-20 across the south-eastern seaboard is indelibly imprinted on the national pysche.

We lost 19 million hectares of bush in one awful summer, and some of those communities, like Cobargo on the NSW South Coast, are still struggling to recover.

It's important to remember the big picture - keeping rising global temperatures within a range agreed to in Paris, ideally less than 1.5 degrees.

Forty-three per cent is unlikely to be sufficient to meet that goal, and is an uncomfortable compromise position that is as much about politics as it is about the environment. But perfect can't become the enemy of the good. A failure again that risks plunging us into another decade of bickering and inaction would be a monumental disaster for our already strained continent.

The Greens torpedoed the Rudd Labor government's proposed carbon pollution reduction measures and associated emissions trading scheme way back in 2009, 10 years before the Black Summer bushfires.

The Greens claimed it was "bad policy" and would have given billions of dollars in handouts to coal companies and big polluters. But they will be aware of the risk of pushing too hard and collapsing the entire process while trying to extract stronger commitments from the Labor government.

Within the Labor ranks, the narrow defeat of that policy still rankles and, as a result, a mistrust in the Greens to back a "best option" deal on climate change lingers on. It was one of the key issues which Liberal-National Coalition leader Tony Abbott used to work over the government in the following federal election, which Labor lost.

Prime Minister Albanese has signalled he wants to forge a fresh path on climate change.

We can only hope that history doesn't repeat itself.