Growing up in a leafy Sydney suburb Greg Mullins was taught how to fight fires by his father Jack. After being a teenage volunteer firefighter, he went on to become a career firefighter, studied bushfire fighting overseas and eventually became the first person to come from the ranks and be both CEO and Chief Fire Officer of one of the world’s biggest urban fire services, Fire & Rescue NSW.

After nearly 14 years at the helm, and after heading the peak council for all emergency services in Australia and New Zealand, he retired and re-joined his local rural fire brigade as a volunteer. He formed Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA), a coalition of former fire and emergency service chiefs from across Australia all deeply concerned about how extreme weather driven by climate change was increasing the frequency and severity of major disasters.  In early 2019 they tried to warn the PM of an approaching bushfire disaster and of urgent measures that could be taken to save lives and property but were ignored.

Firestorm chronicles Mullins’ 50 year journey as a firefighter, how, over the years, he witnessed changing weather patterns and more serious bushfires, how the “climate change penny” finally dropped for him, and the obfuscation, personal attacks and lack of action from the Morrison government in 2019. Firestorm explains the settled science of climate change through stories about fires, culminating in the horror of of Australia’s worst bushfire disaster, Black Summer 2019/20.