IN an interview earlier this week, Acting Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce described the attitudes of some countries to the United Nations COP26 in Glasgow by pretending to roll up a piece of paper as rubbish and to lob it into the bin.
The Deputy Prime Minister and National Party leader did this to highlight what he said was Australia's scrupulous adherence to the international agreements it signed.
While some on the pro-environmental side of the debate might cavil with Mr Joyce's assessment - and point to some contested accounting methods that Australia has relied on previously to meet its existing climate targets - the Member for New England has a valid point.
It is one thing to front a gilded podium, or to join a phalanx of national leaders at a media conference, and to promise to achieve "net zero by 2050", when that deadline is 29 years distant. In democracies, that's a good seven to 10, if not more, elections away.
It is another thing entirely to return to domestic politics and embark on a suite of decarbonisation practices that will necessarily cause job losses and other disruptions in the name of "saving the world".
In an interview yesterday with the Newcastle Herald, Mr Joyce laid his personal political cards on the table when he had no doubts about ranking the Western world's concerns over a rising China ahead of the more distant threat of climate change, when it came to "existential threats".
Some might say that's a false equivalence: the world can manage geopolitical challenges - and hopefully avoid a physical war - and still carry out the major changes that are demanded of societies everywhere if humanity is to cut deep and hard into the global greenhouse budget.
But Mr Joyce is correct when he implies that climate change is still a second order issue for many people, and, indeed, for many developing nations more worried about feeding their people than accommodating the pious preaching of the well-off West.
It will take until long after COP26 has folded its tent to calculate its practical impact.
Plenty of things being advanced at Glasgow could still proceed without China, India and Russia, but any protocols or pledges that do not include their signatures will struggle to be recognised as truly global - especially those promises relating to "net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050".
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