Australia’s election sets a heartening precedent on climate change

word normally used only in homeware catalogues, alongside “coral”, “fuchsia” and “taupe”, to make a bluish-green towel or sweater sound sophisticated and desirable. But teal has suddenly become the most important term in Australian politics. It denotes independent candidates who might pass as members of the right-of-centre Liberal party, whose colour is blue, were they not several shades greener. In the on May 21st six such “teal” candidates unseated leading Liberals in the party’s wealthy urban heartland, helping to usher it out of power and dramatically expanding the boundaries of what is politically possible overnight. For Americans who long for their politicians to do more about , in particular, it is an encouraging example.The election is a watershed for Australia. Not only has it led to the first change of government in nine years; it also marks the first time that an Australian prime minister has come unstuck for doing too little, rather than too much, to curb climate change. Previous s who had tried to institute carbon taxes or emissions-trading schemes had been painted as loony tree-huggers and ejected from office either by the electorate or by their own s. The received wisdom in Australian politics had been that voters were not as worried about climate change as they claimed to be when pollsters asked them—or at least not worried enough to pay for any curbs on emissions. Both the Liberals and their main rivals, Labor, had promised to make Australia carbon neutral by 2050, but both parties tried to talk as little as possible about how they might bring that about. Yet this circumspection won them both fewer first-choice votes than at the previous election, while the teals and the Greens saw their share of the vote jump.