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British-born astronaut Piers Sellers has died of pancreatic cancer, aged 61, Nasa says.

David Suzuki says we are the first species in the history of life on Earth to have created the conditions for our own demise.

We’re currently having a national conversation about climate and energy, with reviews of climate policy and the National Electricity Market underway. Up for debate is how the states and federal government will share these responsibilities.

Following the recent statewide blackout in South Australia, the federal government pointed the finger at Labor states’ “aggressive”, “unrealistic” and “ideological” renewable energy targets.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews returned: “Rather than peddle mistruths, Malcolm Turnbull and Barnaby Joyce should start providing some national leadership and focus on developing a renewable vision beyond 2020.”

It might seem to be yet another partisan, ideological stoush between a Liberal federal government and three Labor state governments.

However, the Liberal-led New South Wales government has now also entered the fray, with a 2050 emissions target that will almost certainly require complete decarbonisation of the electricity sector within the next 25 years.

And to achieve this, renewables will have a key, many would argue overwhelming, role to play.

What are the states already doing?

NSW released its climate policy framework in November, joining Victoria, South Australia and the ACT with an aspirational target to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

While NSW didn’t announce a renewable target, the majority of states now have one. Queensland is seeking 50% renewable generation by 2030, Victoria 40% by 2025 and South Australia 50% by 2025.

Tasmania’s generation is already mostly renewable (albeit mostly conventional hydro generation). The Australian Capital Territory looks set to achieve 100% renewables by 2020 and the Northern Territory has announced a 50% target for 2030.

At present, the federal government has a renewable energy target of around 23.5% renewable electricity by 2020 and a 2030 target of 26-28% greenhouse emission reductions from 2005 levels. These ambitions fall way below those of the states.

And way below the almost complete electricity sector decarbonisation by 2040 that the International Energy Agency says is required globally to avoid dangerous global warming.

What does the law say?

Constitutionally, energy policy in Australia is a matter for state governments. The development and implementation of the National Electricity Market over the past two decades has been achieved through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), with harmonised legislation in each state.

State governments therefore have the constitutional scope to act both independently and in consort to achieve clean energy related goals.

Whether they should choose to do this, however, is another question. There is an obvious national context including Australia’s participation in international climate change processes such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

National policy coherence also has value in avoiding uncoordinated policies that can adversely impact investment incentives, increase compliance costs, and generally lead to less efficient outcomes.

While suitably ambitious, nationally consistent, legislation under federal government leadership may be ideal, it hardly seems realistic at present. The apparent divisions within the federal government seem likely to prevent useful progress, even with the two reviews.

It might well be a choice between state leadership or very little leadership over the next few years. And these years will be key to setting Australia on a clean energy path fit for the future.

New South Wales’ climate plan

The NSW climate change policy framework proposes to meet the net zero target through a number of policy “directions” to reduce emissions. It also proposes adaptation measures to cope with the warming that is already underway.

The emission reduction directions include: enhancing investment certainty for renewables; boosting energy productivity (energy efficiency); capturing other benefits of reducing emissions (such as improved health from reduced air pollution) and managing the risks; and growing new industries in NSW.

These are to be advanced through government policy, government operations, and advocacy. Specific initiatives are to be outlined in a set of action plans, including a climate change fund and an energy efficiency plan, which are currently under consultation.

A further advanced energy plan will be developed in 2017. This will include provisions for the future role of renewable energy. Clearly the government will not be able to achieve its aspirational emissions target in the absence of a transformation of the energy system, so how will renewable energy figure in the absence of a state target?

While we can’t preempt the plan, the policy framework defines advanced energy to not only cover renewable generation itself but also how it is integrated into industry structures and adopted by end users.

Given the importance of integration in transitioning the energy system, such a broad focus could usefully complement the activities of other states as well as NSW.

The policy also emphasises collaborating with the commonwealth and other states through COAG.

NSW: a climate advocate?

Combined state action has historically played a key role in federal climate policy. It was bottom up pressure from states that resulted in the Howard government’s initial emissions trading scheme (ETS) proposal in 2007.

The Garnaut review that formed the basis of Kevin Rudd’s ETS was originally commissioned by Labor state governments.

On this point SA Premier Jay Wetherill has taken the lead in calling for a national emissions trading scheme to be implemented through harmonised legislation at a state level.

While this seems unlikely to be a feature of NSW’s advocacy in 2017, continued failure by the federal government to advance climate and energy policy might require such types of coordinated state efforts.

In this light, state government efforts do not appear “ideological”. That would seem to better describe the federal government’s present opposition to even exploring promising emission reduction options.

And while it is too soon to know if NSW’s climate policy is fit for the future, it certainly represents welcome progress, and provides a basis that can be built upon.

Anna Bruce receives funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), Energy Consumers Australia and the Australian Research Council Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living (CRC-LCL), and leads the Australian PV Institute's solar mapping work.

Graham Mills receives funding from the CRC for Low Carbon Living

Iain MacGill is a Joint Director of UNSW Australia's Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets. The Centre has received funding from a range of government sources including the Australian Research Council, Energy Consumers Australia and ARENA. He has also undertaken consultancies for a number of Australian State Governments and the Federal Government on clean energy regulation, markets and policy. He also contributes unpaid expert advice to a number of government organisations, industry associations and not-for-profit groups in the clean energy area within Australia and internationally. Iain's share portfolio includes AGL which owns a range of coal, gas and renewable generation in Australia.

Wildlife advocates said the animals, which were being readied for shipment on Friday night, were unsuitable for live export

More than 30 wild elephants were being readied on Friday evening for an airlift from Zimbabwe to captivity in China, according to wildlife advocates.

The founder of Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, Johnny Rodrigues, said on Friday that their plane was still at Victoria Falls airport because officials could not find scales big enough to weigh the animals, which were confined inside heavy crates.

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In 1945 the first Country Hour program went to air, and so began Australia's longest running radio program. We're looking back at the biggest agricultural stories to celebrate 70-plus years of ABC rural broadcasting. We begin in the 1940s and the start of the Snowy Mountains scheme.

We search for bum-breathing turtles in the Mary River in Queensland; bait foxes in the remote and rugged Burrup Peninsular; and join citizen scientists looking for fungi in the Tarkine Forest.

In 27 years as environment editor at the Guardian, I have seen both devastation and progress. Now I’m retiring – but I still have hope for the future of the planet

In September 1989, Guardian editor Peter Preston took me to one side. “Environment? Your idea. You do it,” he said. I was on the arts desk and had quite forgotten that, two years earlier, I had proposed that we cover this fast-emerging issue in more depth and with new pages.

We had a great correspondent in Paul Brown, but no single journalist could keep up with events. This was the height of Thatcherism, the old Soviet Union was collapsing in ecological ruin, and there had been serious nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. That year, more than two million people in Britain had voted Green in the European parliament elections.

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A British team is in the final stages of designing its car for next year's World Solar Challenge in the Australian desert.

Fruit bats, a nosy kangaroo and the last male northern white rhino are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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“Only vicar’s daughters become naturalists.” This was the response of Stan Micklethwaite when his young daughter Mari (my future wife) declared her life’s ambition. Stan spent most of his working life weighing wagons of coal at the pithead of Barrow colliery near Barnsley, yet his many active leisure pursuits included beekeeping and gardening, with Mari always at his side, eager to learn. Neither Stan nor Mari’s mother, Nellie, lived to hear of the fame that Mari, who has died aged 80, went on to achieve in her adult career as a wildlife writer, illustrator, broadcaster, conservationist and storyteller. No doubt they would have been surprised as well as very proud.

Mari and I met in 1954, as chief bridesmaid and best man at a cousin’s wedding, and we married two years later. It was only after our four children were all at school in Warwickshire that Mari was able to enrol in classes at local colleges to learn more of botany, horticulture and ecology, writing copious notes with cross-reference to multiple sources as well as her own careful observations of the natural world around her.

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The aftermath of southern Africa’s drought is having a devastating impact in rural Zimbabwe. More than four million people will be in need of food aid between January and March 2017, nearly half the rural population

All photographs by Justin Jin

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An oil terminal to be built in northern Russia where the river Yenisei meets the Arctic Ocean lacks the technology to deal with oil spills, say environmentalists

The livelihood of the Nenets people who live along the northern stretches of the Yenisei, Russia’s longest river, depends on two pursuits: fishing and reindeer herding.

But locals have said both of those activities are under threat from an oil terminal due to be built on the Tanalau cape, near where the river empties into the Arctic Ocean. Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) have protested against the high risk of an oil spill in difficult Arctic conditions. More than 40 people have signed a letter of protest to the company building the terminal, the Independent Petroleum Company (IPC).

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Record temperatures threaten traditional ways of life in Greenland but as the sea ice retreats, new mining, fishing and tourism opportunities are helping communities to adapt

Asked if he is fearful about the impact of climate change, Tønnes “Kaka” Berthelsen’s response is typical of many Greenlanders. “We are more concerned about the Maldives,” he said bluntly.

Greenland has lived with extreme environmental changes for a decade or more. Sea ice is forming two months later and melting one month earlier. Rivers fed by retreating glaciers are at record levels. And temperature records were smashed twice this year, with stunned meteorologists rechecking their measurements after 24C was recorded in the capital, Nuuk, in June.

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National Grid expect Len Goodman’s show to create a ‘TV pickup’ as people across the country boil kettles, flush toilets and switch on lights after the show

Len Goodman will follow in the footsteps of David Jason, Pauline Collins and an extraterrestrial as one of Christmas TV’s top challenges for the people tasked with keeping the lights on.

When the judge finishes reminiscing over 12 years of Strictly Come Dancing on Friday night, kettles will be boiled, lights switched on and water company pumps powered up as toilets are flushed across the UK.

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Fermyn Woods, Northamptonshire I watch them through thickets of interwoven hazel and birch as they make their getaway

Crack! A stick snaps a little distance to my right. Too big a snap for a small animal. Probably deer-sized, I estimate. I wonder how close I can get to the originator before being detected in the wood’s growing afternoon gloom. I creep away from the muddy path, through snagging brambles and naked hazel. I have advanced 15 meters towards the target when I feel a stick give under my foot and an inevitable, and similar, “crack” resonates through the still hush. Instantly, three young roe deer start from cover 20 meters away; I watch them through, and between, thickets of interwoven hazel and birch as they make their unswerving getaway with a stiff, springing gallop.

My tracking skills are good enough to know how rudimentary they are. As a young lad I would, entranced, read Jim Corbett’s accounts of years spent pursuing man-eating leopards and tigers in the forests of India. Marvelling at how his corporeal self was absorbed into the forest. The meaning of every rustle, crack, bird call and grunt so familiar and significant that they keyed directly into his nervous system, and into that of the cat that was sometimes his quarry, sometimes his hunter, often both.

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Some dinosaurs shed their teeth as they grew up, according to fossil evidence.

Brazilian photographer Ricardo Stuckert captured amazing close-up photographs of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe after his helicopter flight took a detour to avoid a rainstorm and happened to fly over their longhouse

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This week, the Australian government announced plans that will ultimately require cars sold in Australia to match international fuel efficiency standards.

The resulting savings over the life of a typical vehicle would more than offset higher initial costs. The saving on fuel costs is estimated at up to A$28 billion a year by 2040.

Not coincidentally, this measure would also help to cut carbon dioxide emissions, which are currently growing at a rate that makes achievement of the government’s commitments for 2030 virtually impossible.

Up to speed

Putting Australia’s vehicle standards on a par with other developed nations sounds like such an obvious idea that we might ask why it hasn’t been done already. There are several reasons, although none of them can justify the years of inaction to date.

First, until quite recently, politicians were overridingly concerned with the fate of Australia’s domestic car manufacturing industry, which focused primarily on the production of large cars like the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon. While fuel efficiency standards are designed to take account of a vehicle’s “footprint”, the domestic industry naturally saw the idea as an extra burden.

With the end of domestic production in sight, this issue becomes irrelevant. Indeed, you might think, given that Australia is now set to rely solely on imported cars, that we would automatically gain the benefits of international standards without needing to upgrade our own. But it turns out that imported cars sold in Australia are generally less fuel-efficient than cars of the same make and model sold in markets with more demanding standards.

There are several reasons for this. The most immediate is that it’s cheaper to make a less efficient car. New car buyers, particularly fleet buyers, are sensitive to the sticker price of the car but much less so to the running costs, most of which will be paid by others, including subsequent owners. So even though fuel savings outweigh the increased purchase price over the life of the car, it’s easier to sell a cheaper, less efficient version.

Another problem is that Australia also has lower standards for fuel quality, particularly sulfur content, which creates problems for more efficient vehicles. These standards will have to be revised soon for public health reasons, but until now the task of coordinating fuel efficiency and fuel quality standards has proved too difficult.

The government is now proposing to address both issues at the same time. The options are to reduce sulfur content for all kinds of petrol, or to phase out “regular” 91-octane fuel in favour of the more efficient, but more expensive, 95-octane.

Unsurprisingly, this measure is facing resistance from the Australian Institute of Petroleum, which is warning of the costs to Australian refineries. The institute can at least claim consistency here: it fought the removal of lead from petrol in the 1980s. More disappointing is the negative response of the Australian Automobile Association, which purports to champion sustainability but evidently thinks cheap petrol is more important than clean air or a stable climate.

The final problem is that there is a trade-off between fuel efficiency and perceived performance. This has led some manufacturers to “game” the regulations by producing vehicles that are fuel-efficient in lab testing but less efficient and more responsive on the road.

The most notorious case was that of Volkswagen, which installed special software to detect, and cheat, lab testing equipment. The resulting scandal cost chief executive Martin Winterkorn his job and has left the company flirting with bankruptcy.

Play by the rules

Of course, regulations of all kinds can be evaded. But the catastrophic consequences of being caught, as shown by the Volkswagen case, mean that manufacturers who want to stay in business will be more cautious in future.

Any policy to tackle climate change has costs as well as benefits. But there are few cases in which the balance is so clearly weighted to benefits. And with its 2030 climate targets in serious doubt, Australia needs to pick every piece of low-hanging fruit it can.

The only remaining issue is politics. The influential right wing of the Coalition government is dogmatically committed to climate science denial, and will oppose any measure to address the problem. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has already collapsed spectacularly on the issue of an emissions intensity scheme for the electricity sector. That policy, like the fuel standards upgrade, came recommended by the Climate Change Authority (of which I am a member).

If Turnbull is to salvage any credibility, he needs to face down the opposition of ideologues and vested interests on this question. Whether he will do so remains to be seen.

John Quiggin is a Member of the Climate Change Authority. This article represents his personal views.