Ebony Bennett | El Nino is here and a hot summer awaits

Now that La Nina has ended, I greet summer with a sense of fear and trepidation. I fear the silent killer: extreme heat. And I fear Australia is only accelerating the cause of this extreme heat, with the mining, burning and exporting coal and gas.

This reality of extreme heat is our new normal. Not in 2050, but right now. As the National Disaster Preparedness Summit got under way this week, and emergency services prepare for a hot summer and a catastrophic bushfire season, it's worth remembering that an ounce of prevention is far cheaper than a pound of preparedness.

But is Australia really prepared for the reality of extreme heat? I recently interviewed Jeff Goodell, New York Times best-selling author of Heat: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, in which he explores the impacts of heat on human health right now, as well as on the planet.

"The last time the Earth was hotter than it is today was at least 125,000 years ago, long before anything that resembled human civilisation appeared ... Extreme heat is remaking our planet into one in which large swaths may become inhospitable to human life."

He points out that past a certain point, human bodies simply cannot cope with extreme heat. If, like me, you are lucky enough to work behind a computer in an air-conditioned office, extreme heat is a mild inconvenience.

But if you are one of the thousands of Australians who works outdoors on a farm, or tiling roofs, or installing insulation, or building roads or serving coffee to people outside, heat can be excruciating, costly and deadly. Heatstroke is no joke, it's a matter of life and death, and Australia and countries around the world are ill prepared to deal with its effects on human health or even our economies.

Also sounding the alarm on extreme heat is Fortescue Metals, which recently gave a presentation warning of the risks of lethal humidity. "At just 35 degrees, with high humidity, you can die in six hours" the presentation warned.

Past a certain point of heat and humidity, the sweat that normally cools you down can no longer evaporate, and your body temperature begins to rise.

Fortescue is walking the talk. It aims to be the first mining company to completely decarbonise, aiming for real zero (as opposed to net zero) by 2030. But its presentation also called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and ended with a call to action that sounded more like Doctors for the Environment than your regular ASX100 listed company:

"We are the ones responsible for the deaths caused by climate change. You can hold business leaders and government leaders to account ... make us change."

The fact is, Australia has a huge and influential role to play in avoiding dangerous climate change. We are the third largest exporter of fossil fuels on Earth, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. Luckily, we are also blessed with many of the minerals critical for the clean energy transition, as well as abundant solar and wind capacity, so we are not a country without good options.

Yet Australia continues to make the problem worse. The federal government has approved four new coal mines since May last year as well as $1.5 billion publicly funded subsidy to facilitating the expansion of the gas industry in the Northern Territory. And we are allowing companies to simply buy junk offsets rather than genuinely decarbonising their businesses. It's not good enough.

The Australia Institute recently co-ordinated an open letter signed by a coalition of more than 220 world-renowned scientists and experts, which ran as a full page advertisement in the New York Times, calling on Australian government to abandon its extensive plans for fossil fuel production.

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The open letter was signed by signed by leading climate scientists including Professor Michael Mann, Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Professor Jing-Jia Luo, Dr Peter Kalmus and Dr Joelle Gergis. Eminent experts include Farhana Sultana, Bill McKibben, Sunita Narain and Nobel laureate Professor Peter Doherty.

Despite the Australian government seeking to host a UN climate summit with a Pacific Island as co-host, our government has essentially ignored the Pacific's call to phase out fossil fuels. In March, Pacific countries made the Port Vila call for a fossil free Pacific, calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and demanding "an end to the development and expansion of fossil fuel extracting industries, starting with coal."

Timor Leste answered the Pacific's call before Australia. It recently became the first fossil fuel producing country to back the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. The East Timorese realise the existential threat posed by an expanding fossil fuel industry and understand they need international support to avoid expanding an industry that threatens their future. The fact Timor Leste has acted before a wealthy country like Australia shows just how politically powerful our fossil fuel industry really is.

Australia already has loads of existing coal and gas mining operations, which will continue for the foreseeable future. But the International Energy Agency, the UNFCCC and UN Secretary-General have all declared that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with keeping global temperatures below 1.5 degrees. Despite new fossil fuel projects threatening our future, Australia is not only opening new gas and coal projects, we are still subsidising fossil fuel projects with public money to the tune of at least $11.5 billion a year.

I recently saw someone suggest that we ought to begin naming heatwaves like we do hurricanes, to give the public a sense that they can be just a catastrophic. A US meteorologist has started naming them after oil companies, perhaps it's time we started naming our heatwaves after gas and coal companies. At least until we can stop throwing fuel on the fire.