Take just about any country, state or territory — or just about any transnational organisation — and chances are you’ll find a list of schemes and strategies as long as your arm.
Overnight, Australia became a party to one of the latest such initiatives — the so-called Climate Club.
The announcement came as part of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s tour through Europe, which has traditionally been a front-runner on efforts to decarbonise the global economy.
It was a development that garnered some applause from environmentalists — albeit of the fairly muted variety.
But for many more Australians, the announcement was equally likely to have been greeted with a bemused look or a shrug of the shoulders.
So, what has the federal government just signed up to, and should Australians care?
What is the Climate Club?
Ostensibly, the Climate Club is designed to help jawbone emissions lower by pressing governments to put a minimum price on carbon.
As well as this, the club holds as a central tenet the idea that countries with a carbon price should tax imports from countries without one.
Together, the thinking goes, these twin policies will foster a world in which economic growth can be decoupled from carbon emissions almost completely by 2050.
The club is an initiative of German Chancellor Olav Scholz, whose ruling coalition is made up of parties from the centre-right to the Greens on the left.
Despite their differences, the three parties in the coalition broadly seem to agree on the need to tackle global warming by reducing pollution.
And Mr Scholz has already enjoyed some success in enlisting members to the cause, with all of the members of the G7 group of rich nations, such as the US, Japan and the UK, backing the club.
Other members include Argentina, Chile, the EU, Indonesia, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
Why has Australia only just joined?
For starters, the Climate Club is a relatively new initiative, which was only launched after Mr Scholz’s coalition formed in 2021.
On top of this, the club is, by reports, still yet to develop a concrete agenda or purpose, raising the question of whether Australia is even signing prematurely.
Perhaps, Australia has decided that when it comes to policies as potentially profound as those relating to climate change, it is better to be in the tent with the world’s richest and most powerful nations rather than outside it.
From October, the European Union will phase in its “carbon border adjustment mechanism”, which will tax carbon-intensive imports of products from cement to steel and hydrogen.
The Climate Club, given its membership, could ultimately help broaden the application of such a tax to other parts of the world.
Australia is already a major exporter of some of the affected products such as iron ore and aluminium.
But it also wants to be in the game of exporting clean versions of them, with a particular focus on things such as green hydrogen, steel and fertiliser.
Mr Albanese suggested the government was keen to learn through the Climate Club how to be a part of the action.
“My government has set the ambition for Australia to be a renewable energy superpower,” Mr Albanese said in Berlin.
“But we also want to be a renewable energy export superpower, working with countries like Germany on the industries of the future.”