Our leaders have three tiers of responsibility, national, international and intergenerational. Leadership needs to be dignified and respectful to build national solidarity to respond to the urgency of the challenge.

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The “climate wars” of the past three decades have seen our leaders squander too many opportunities. The UN's former climate change czar and current climate leader at the World Bank, Christiana Figueres, intervened in the Australian federal election this week, backing four female independent candidates and condemning the climate wars and "extreme elements from both sides of the political spectrum" who had "frustrated sensible, forward-looking policies founded in what must be our most important guide — the science".

Not only have electricity and gas prices rocketed up to the significant detriment of households, and destroying the viability of many businesses, but we still don’t have a national energy policy, nor a responsible, whole-of-economy, emissions-reduction target for 2050. Our Paris commitment is about half what it should be.

Even Labor's commitment of reducing carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 falls short. It just sneaks in to the range of 45 to 63 per cent recommended by the Climate Change Authority. Labor's aspiration to lift electric-vehicles to at least 50 per cent of new car sales by 2030 is commendable, but it offers little detail on how this might be achieved, and is not so different to the Coalition's expectation of 30 to 50 per cent.

As perhaps the highest per capita polluter on the planet, and the second largest exporter of coal and LNG, our international responsibilities are clear. Yet, Australia is “missing in action”, falling from Kyoto leader to now global laggard.

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Neither major party offers a genuine transition strategy to achieve emission reductions, nor a national waste strategy, nor a national fuel security strategy, nor a regional development strategy.

All up, our politicians have seriously compromised and constrained the future of our children. Valuable time has been lost. Many hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investment have been forgone as we have failed to capitalise on our enormous national assets of sun, wind, graphite, lithium, and a significant range of feed stocks, with world-class technology to convert them to power. Our political leadership has just left us to sink.

Even though climate has emerged as the major election issue, we have been reduced to the facile debate about relative targets and “how much each will cost the economy”. Scott Morrison confines his estimate to the cost to the budget, while attempting to pin Bill Shorten on the cost to the economy, which the Labor leader, in turn, basically says can’t be estimated. Neither will rule out new coalmines, especially Adani.

The debate about targets is a sideshow when global targets are woefully inadequate to save the planet. An effective transition does not need to “cost” – an assumption since climate sceptics such as John Howard and Tony Abbott. Sure, those in coal and coal-fired power and petrol vehicles will be adversely effected, initially, but the transition to renewables, bio-energy and fuels and storage will bring with it new industries, business opportunities, and lifestyle possibilities –  as did the transition from horse-drawn to petrol vehicles.

Consider the monumental and rapidly mounting cost of inaction: extreme weather, financial collapses, the unprecedented loss of bio-diversity, species extinction and, ultimately, of the planet itself. This is a climate emergency. Refer then to this week's UN report on a million species – including our own – in peril.

To be serious about a response to climate, the focus should be, positively, on the detail of the transition and its management – how many jobs will be lost in coal mining and power generation and in the transition to autonomous trucking, to cite just a few of the more obvious. How will people in those industries be compensated, retrained, relocated? How will communities be supported and the development of new industries facilitated?

Many more jobs are available in tourism, aged, health, disability care and education than could be supported by, say, Adani. But in this election campaign, genuine leadership on climate is a scarce commodity.  Both sides are still “standing in the doorway” and “blocking up the halls”. It will be our nation that “gets hurt”.

I was particularly struck in the recent student climate protests that children from Byron Bay Public  recorded themselves as “absentees” to stand in a public space and trace out the words Our Future. They get it. They clearly understand the failure in political leadership. They deserve, and will increasingly demand, better.

John Hewson is a professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, and a former Liberal opposition leader.