Australian here:

• not hot all year round. Australia is fucking enormous, it spans the tropics to (just) below the 40th parallel. Some areas are costal and mild, although single digit temps are common in the most populus regions in winter. Inland temps vary wildly.

• Yeah huge polluters, political class gives no shits. Proles are more mixed as usual. We have massive uptake of rooftop solar driven by cost/environmental concern. Pretty solid adoption of EVs and ubiquitous adoption of heat pump based climate control. Very neoliberal culture of buy your way to a solution, no real discussion outside city centres of necessary radical transformations. Energy use is impacted heavily by how fucking awful building codes are and how corrupt the construction regulators are. For example, my house in a temperate rainforest is commonly about 8 C inside during winter, and 38 C during summer. I wear snow gear inside during winter, most people have the choice of dangerous temps or blasting ac, guess what they choose.

• Re solar, we actually have massive uptake of rooftop. However outside of south Australia there has been no real investment in energy storage. Very neolib ''let the market solve it". Wind is getting pushback from farmers and nuclear lobby :(. Location is actually a bit complex, our population is heavily urbanised (>90% in cities. Mostly in 2) but our cities are sprawling nightmares so not a lot of ‘free’ easy to build on space. Severely need densification but the freestanding home is highly valued because our cities suck and property prices are absolutely broken.

It’s crap. The national research institute used to lead the world on renewables but we have had reactionary, neoliberal govs for ~50 years. The way our cities are designed to prevent uprising (prison colony heritage) and systemic racist othering has severely hampered the ability for people to organise and struggle against neoliberalism imho.