Category

Environment

If Mr. Morrison’s government genuinely believed the science, it would immediately put a price on carbon, declare a moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects and transfer the fossil fuel subsidies to the renewables industries. It would go to the next round of global climate talks in Glasgow in November allied with other nations on the front line of this crisis and argue for quicker and deeper cuts to carbon emissions around the world. Anything less is to collaborate in the destruction of a country.
But the government is intent on doing nothing.
And to the names of those historic betrayers of their people — Vidkun Quisling, Benedict Arnold, Mir Jafar — perhaps one day will be added that of Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia who, when faced with the historic tragedy of his country’s destruction, dissembled, enabled, subsidised and oversaw omnicide, until all was ash and even the future was no more.

Richard Flanagan
January 29, 2020

Climatic changes may mean that by the middle of next century, every year would be a potential “Ash Wednesday” year of extreme bushfire danger, according to CSIRO scientists. The risk would be greatest in south-eastern Australia, the nation’s most fertile and densely populated region, the scientists have told the national Greenhouse 87 conference. It is the first time the possibility of such a dramatic increase in bushfire risk has been linked to the global warming many scientists will occur within the next 50 years.
[Sydney Morning Herald, December 4, 1987]

Bob Beale
January 12, 2020

The philosopher Donna Haraway speaks of the imperative of “staying with the trouble”, of not shying away from reality but instead inhabiting the present in all its complexity, terror, hope and joy and recognising our kinship with those around us. Perhaps it is time we all learned to do that, time we learned to recognise our own hopes and fears in other people. Because that is what many of us glimpsed in the faces of the people on the beach in Mallacoota on New Year’s Eve. We saw ourselves, our shared future, the terror and pain of what is coming. And we could no longer look away.

James Bradley
January 11, 2020