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One time, environmentalists believed that abstraction was the biggest obstacle to climate change action. They wondered how could one direct the public to the distant future.
Today we face the opposite problem. The immediacy of the crisis is causing a strange paralysis.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a warning that Extreme flooding has become more common due to global warming, its new report at the end of February spurred relatively little discussion – in part because of the water covering swathes of Queensland and New South Wales.
Tinnies rescued desperate residents from the flood, but who could deny the warning of Prof Brendan Mackey (an IPPC author)? the science clearly projected “an increase of heavy rainfall events?”
The urgency of rescuing flood victims muffled the impact of a document that the UN secretary general, António Guterres, described as “an atlas of human suffering”. It also distracted attention from another manifestation of this suffering: The 2019/2020 Black Summer Fires, which destroyed 84m acres of land, and killed at most 33 people.
The crisis is far from over. More than half of the Morrison government pledges $2.74bn to bushfire recoveryStill unallocated
Yet, as the scale of recent flood damage becomes more apparent, the Black Summer survivors might legitimately wonder as to whether they’ll be remembered or not.
On Twitter, David Ritter, Greenpeace’s chief executive, has posted A list of useful tips was compiledThis is Scientific warningsConnecting fossil fuels, atmospheric heat and rainfall.
In 2007, for instance, the Garnaut climate change review predicted “longer dry spells broken by heavier rainfall events”; in 2015, scientists found that global warming increased the frequency of La Niña eventsIn 2016, the Department of Energy and the Environment published a State of the Climate Report, which warned More intense floods.
A similar dossier could be created about bushfires starting with 2003 Report that explained how “climate change throughout the present century is predicted to lead to increased temperatures and, with them, a heightened risk of unplanned fire.”
2007 was the IPCC Warned that “heatwaves and fires are virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency”; in 2008, the National Inquiry on Bushfire Mitigation and Management This is how it was explained “fires’ frequency, intensity, and size are expected to increase under climate change”.
But despite all of that, in 2017, Scott Morrison chose to borrow a “prop” from his friends at the Minerals Council of Australia to wave in the House of Representatives.
“This is coal,” He laughed. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you!”
The same Scott Morrison stood in the same spot a few years later. A ruined Lismore and mused: “Australia is getting hard to live in because of these disasters.”
We might have been able to transition away from fossil fuels in relative stability if we had the right climate policy. Instead, we’ve allowed the symptoms of ecological breakdown to proliferate so greatly as to render addressing underlying causes increasingly difficult.
“I’ve never seen so many natural disasters …” Annastacia Palaszczuk (Queensland premier) said these words.. “[M]ore cyclones, more floods, a couple of year ago … we had the catastrophic fire event in central Queensland.”
But even as Palaszczuk acknowledged the role of the climate crisis in the recent catastrophes, she doubled down on her state’s output of fossil fuels.
“Queensland is lucky,” she said. “We have coal, we have gas, and we have huge renewable investment, which is going to really rapidly increase over the next 10 years.”
One presumes that, with a multibillion-dollar flood bill looming and many of its citizens homeless, the state doesn’t want to forgo the mining revenue on which it has traditionally relied.
What an illustration of the mess in which we find ourselves – reliant on coal to pay for the damage coal brings!
In a different context, the sociologist C Wright Mills outlined what he called “crackpot realism”, a political consensus perfectly reasonable on its own terms but utterly deranged from the perspective of the species.
Most scientists attribute the phenomenon to Proliferation of pandemics to increase environmental degradationDeforestation and uncontrolled urbanization increase the chances of pathogens passing from animals to humans.
Covid-19 would have been logically sufficient to bring an end to the war on nature. But that’s not what happened. Carbon emissions Now they are at their highest level in human history.As a result, politicians turned to coal to revive their economies after the Covid downturn.
The same “crackpot realism” manifests in relation to Ukraine.
As the Helen Thompson, British academic, it’s been obvious for decades that “addressing climate change would be constrained by geopolitics, and that choices about which new energy sources to develop would have geopolitical consequences.”
The west’s refusal to quit fossil fuels thus facilitated Russia’s imperial ambitions. Paradoxically, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has now emboldened those most committed to further pollution.
The Nationals’ Matt Canavan, for instance, say that the war means Australians should “stop trying to save the planet by building a green economy, and instead defend Australia by rebuilding our industrial base.”
We shouldn’t have hoped that world leaders would be forced to change if they were confronted with real-world signs of the climate emergency. It’s now clear the reverse holds true: that each fresh environmental calamity sends the wealthy and the powerful, like dogs returning to their vomit, to the cheap profits of the carbon economy.
As disaster chases disaster, we need to hold our leaders’ feet to the flames – and, for that matter, to the water. That means drawing the links between global heating and the proliferation of “one-in-1000-year” occurrences and insisting on climate action, even (or perhaps especially) amid economic and political uncertainty.
Yes, the “crackpot realists” of the political class will scoff. They’ll say we’re naive and dismiss us as utopians.
Mills responded to such people. “[P]recisely what they call utopian,” he said, “is now the condition of human survival”.
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