Amanda Vanstone | The Greens are to blame for Australia's climate change response

After all, it is not a stretch to lay blame at their feet for two things.

First the divisive and nasty tone of environmental debates. This style has carried over into other debates and this contributed to the nasty undercurrent in Australian politics.

Second, climate change as we know it. Yes it is a big call but bear with me.

The debates over climate change today are often little more than slanging matches. The civilised discourse of the town square is nowhere to be seen.

If you don't agree with these guys you are characterised as being in the pocket of one industry or another, as ignorant or living in the past.

Knock-'em-down, gung-ho politics might occasionally be appropriate but not with something that is so important to all of us.

The more important anything is, the more important it should be to have thorough debate of all the options.

The Greens consistently display an our-way-or-get-lost attitude. Bad luck if the environmental policies we are thus able to implement are less effective than they might be.

Independents and minor parties can struggle to get the media coverage they need. One solution is to go on the attack.

It makes a good story despite the lack of substance.

A wise man once told me he thought the then-Australian Democrats should have a slogan: "feels so good, costs so little".

After all, if you are not likely to form government you can happily tout a wide range of policies that governments just could never implement.

You know you will never have the responsibility. The same could be said of the Greens.

They just know that they'll never be in government anytime soon. It no doubt feels great to paint yourself as the champion of the environment.

You see only yourself as on the side of righteousness. People who have thought that in the past have often been afficionados of ugly politics.

They have also been spectacularly unsuccessful. With their extremely narrow, simplistic anti-all-coal mantra they have shone a light on just one small part of the debate.

Coal use incidentally is up. Yes. It is not that it is not down far enough. It is up. Predicted figures for 2022 are 8 billion tonnes, topping the previous record of 2013.

That hasn't been much of a success. Shutting the odd coal-fired power station is like tossing a grain of sand in the ocean on a global scale.

China and India are addicted to coal. I think they take up about 60 per cent of the world's usage.

Greta and the Greens should be finger-pointing at Xi Jinping.

Even better, they could encourage the world together to look at how we can realistically diversify energy sources.

Why not encourage governments and the private sector to keep building and sharing research in this area? That's where success lies. Simon Friederich is an associate professor of the philosophy of science at Groningen University in the Netherlands. He has a piece in the recent Aeon magazine entitled "In defence of a high energy future".

It makes compelling reading. Shifting from horses and hand ploughs to mechanised tractors used more energy. And lifted millions out of starvation and poverty. We are going to use more energy. It needs to be better energy, not less.

The Greens also show little nous when they blindly stick to renewables like wind and solar.

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Of course these have their place. But whilst they are renewable they are at any one time finite. Does anyone consider the environmental impact of the mining for solar panels or how we are going to dispose of the spent ones?

What effect do large swathes of solar panels across previously untouched land do to the ecosystem? Incidentally, orange-bellied parrots and raptors alike are not big fans of wind farms. Easy solutions are often seen as elusive when they just may not even exist.

In Europe we see the energy debate playing out quite dramatically because of sanctions on Russian energy.

The French have long been and still are strong on nuclear energy. There are some issues with their supply at the moment but that will be resolved. The Italians shut their nuclear plants and were buying nuclear-produced energy from France with plants just a hop, skip and jump across the border. France is keen to build a pro-nuclear bloc within the EU. Australians holiday in Paris and all over France without batting an eyelid about the nuclear power stations operating there. Ditto the United States.

But mention the merits of clean nuclear energy here and many people freeze up in fear.

The Greens have been anti-nuclear for decades and in that campaign they have had success. We are all still using coal. Not much of a success.

If you look at the human toll of nuclear accidents it is small beer compared to the number of people who get crushed on our roads each year or who die or are destroyed by illegal drugs or who die of starvation or in natural disasters.

Nonetheless we have a perhaps irrational fear, fed by extremist environmentalists and greens. If you can face it, key into your search engine "effects of nuclear accidents".

You will be surprised. I think the environmentalists and greens have successfully talked the world out of clean energy, hence climate change is with us. If they had one job, to clean up the atmosphere, they have failed spectacularly.