Record high temperatures — including the UK reaching 40 degrees for the first time — fires blazing in Spain, France and Greece, infrastructure failing and thousands of heat-related deaths suggest Europe is having a Black Summer moment. And it’s getting far more exposure in local media than the colossal heatwave that beset India and Pakistan just weeks ago.
The future has arrived, and earlier than expected. We’re used to thinking of global warming as a slow-motion emergency, one for the long term, with policymakers bandying around targets for 2050, not just safely off beyond the next electoral cycle but beyond a timeframe most of us think about our own lives with.
Then a major event arrives to remind us that, sorry for the inconvenience, lazy thinking ain’t gonna work. Like Black Summer here. Then floods. Flood after flood after flood. Now it’s the northern hemisphere’s turn. White people like most of us, making it more photogenic for Australian media.
The disasters will cause a spike in calls for action and voter resentment towards politicians who seem disinclined to take action — as happened with Scott Morrison here. A moment of genuine change will seemingly beckon, when the sense that the emergency must be addressed seems unstoppable.
But meanwhile, fossil fuel companies are busy behind the scenes, constantly using every tool available to control the policymaking process: funding, employment, fake research, publicity campaigns, the cooperation of allied “media” companies like News Corp to deny climate change.
Evil never sleeps, and evil is patient. Fossil fuel companies know that electoral spikes in demand for climate action can be resisted and seen off. The weather will change, the issue will drop out of the media, daily life will once again preoccupy us. And the hard work of capturing and keeping the state policymaking apparatus will continue.
In the US, Democrat Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia has just derailed the Biden administration’s plan for significant climate action. Not merely is West Virginia a coalmining state, but Manchin is also a recipient of massive coalmining donations and an investor in coalmining.
He’s only the most egregious example of the way in which fossil fuel companies — supported, inevitably, by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News — have blocked climate action for decades by controlling senators, especially when flyspeck states like West Virginia, population <1.8 million, get the same number of Senate votes as California (40 million) or New York (20 million).
Less ostentatiously, state capture continues in Australia despite the ouster of the corrupt Morrison government. The Albanese government remains committed to expanding Australia’s coal and gas exports. Like the Coalition, Labor receives large donations from fossil fuel companies. Like the Coalition, Labor figures work for fossil fuel companies. Labor even has fossil fuel interests — via the Australian Workers’ Union and the mining division of the CFMMEU — embedded within its structure.
Labor is committed to a much more ambitious 2030 emissions reduction target than the opposition, which remains in climate denialist mode. But Australia’s direct contribution to global heating, as the denialists love to tell us, is very small. The problem is our massive gas and coal exports to other countries.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of those exports is a European company, Shell, which pays no tax on its exports of offshore gas, despite making tens of billions of dollars from it. Another beneficiary is the European company Glencore, Australia’s biggest coalminer, and another of the world’s tax dodgers. European policymakers may not be captured so directly by fossil fuel interests as Australian and American politicians are, because there is relatively limited resource extraction in Europe, but Europe is home not merely to Shell and Glencore but BP too.
These companies all work assiduously to convince policymakers to pursue business as usual, to resist calls for urgent climate action, to focus on the long-term — even to sponsor their own scam solutions to global warming like carbon capture.
The weight of public opinion can be resisted with enough money and enough long-term relationships forged with the right political figures. Look at the Liberal Party here — despite losing a huge number of seats in May, it remains wedded to denialism.
Only genuine political disruption will defeat the business-as-usual policymaking of states captured by fossil interests. Just another summer of discontent won’t be enough.
Article today on the ABC about developing Beetaloo Basin gas field (near Katherine) and how this will require taxpayer subsidy. Article postulates this as a solution to the energy crisis. Yet development of this filed will take 7 years or so.
Its also notable that Beetaloo gas has a very high percentage of CO2 mixed with the gas (20%) and the proposed solution is Carbon Capture Storage. Of course CCS has been such a big success so far…..and largely funded by taxpayers.
Why do journalists not be a bit more cynical about fossil fuel proposals. Don’t we have any journos with a little bit of economic and environmental knowledge?
Landfill Gas and other forms of bio-gas will do more to solve the “energy crisis” than throwing yet more money at the fossil fuel industry.
and balls.
It’s utterly horrifying eh scrubturkey? It beggars belief in fact that anyone could even consider the project given the risk to artesian water, let alone the gas composition’s dramatic contribution to climate change. And they want US to pay for all their infrastructure – which the NT government has asked the feds to pay for and is actually now listed on the list of urgent infrastructure needs. And that’s after Morrison literally threw billions of borrowed dollars at them for our “gas led recovery” that the Beetaloo mob got some of already. Holy snappin turtles the sheer bloody ridiculousness of it beggars belief.
To be fair, that article also outlined plenty of counterpoints to the gas cheerleaders ‘ claims about the project.
Few journos. have any technical knowledge or experience of the real world and even less interest. If they were capable of anything else they’d be doing it rather than act as stenographers to the powerful.
The core problem is that a significant number of the people in a position to affect the needed changes in society just don’t care. They don’t care if the world is destroyed (many of believe that God is going to do that anyway). They don’t care how many ecosystems collapse, because they don’t live within those ecosystems. They don’t care how many lives are destroyed by climate change, because they don’t expect to be amongst those destroyed. They don’t care how much conflict and violence is visited on human societies around the world because of climate change, because they either don’t live in those societies, or because they believe that social apparatus such as law enforcement and defense forces exist expressly to protect them and their best interests regardless of the cost to everyone else.
And these people seem to be most concentrated within or associated with the fossil fuel industry.
So the question arises: what is to be done? Governments will take no action, because governments are owned by fossil fuel interests. Law enforcement will take no action, because law enforcement exists to protect the wealthy, including those who owe their wealth to fossil fuels.
It seems that the only answer lies in a revolution by the people. If the people can be sufficiently roused from their torpor.
Bread & circuses kept the citizenry of Rome torpid until the barbarian was at the gates. Netflix & Dan Murphy perform that function today. Revolutions always eat themselves from the inside out and the same 2nd & 3rd raters emerge from the smoke & ashes to rule what remains.
Thanks Bernard for being one of the few media people who understands the urgency and recognises the inadequacy.
My reading of the current standard progressive mood in Australia is that with Labor in govt, things are now OK.
Nothing could be further than the truth:
If we were at war, the govt would have no compunction about ACTING urgently and radically (including repudiating mad decisions like the nuclear subs, stage 3 tax cuts for the wealthy, etc). This is worse than war, with the life of every person on the planet at risk!!!
I know that all revolutions end badly, but it really does seem that a revolution is our only recourse.
If only 3% of natural gas leaks from wells, pipelines and end users, then it is equally as planet-warming as coal. Leakage is frequently at 5%, detected by satellite.
And I’ll bet it’s actually a lot worse than 5% in reality.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. One only need look at humanity’s addiction and now dependency on fossil fuels for everything from food overconsumption to frivolous air travel to understand that fossil fuel suppliers and politicians are ensuring supply that consumers demand, whilst doing enough virtue signalling to gain or retain electoral support. Instead of relying on politicians, every consumer needs to review their contribution to climate change.
I think a lot of consumers are. This isn’t about us as consumers. While we agonise over whether or not to turn on the air con or to sell the car and ride a bike, the companies that are doing this are getting away with it. Not only that, they run advertising campaigns to encourage us to see ourselves as the problem. And we fall for it. We as individuals can do nothing. Politicians and business leaders have to step up to the plate, they have to make the changes, and we have to force them to do so.
What? Be responsible for our own choices, actions and demands? That’s a non-starter.
It’s now less than 8 years until 2030.
Exactly how much of this 43% is going to be achieved each year? 5% / year? 43% in 2029? Something else?
Unless there is an actual programme with actions, budgets, milestones and tracking nothing will happen at all.
Additionally there is now no cure for extreme weather. Even if we globally and magically went net zero tomorrow there will be a lag in things returning to normal – how long? Years? Decades? Centuries? I’ve no idea…
centuries or >
Nor have I any idea Nick. Other than if global strategy to forestall Climate THREAT at a macro level remains beyond reality . . . then we must secure the immediacy of response for everything we can. Right now! An example; Morrison’s refusal forestalled purchase of additional Air-Tankers to be deployed in advance of our State and Territory fire seasons.
Far better if Albo can rise to the inevitable. Before fire season(s) across our nation have the need? The one certainty we do have is that they will be needed. We knew in advance the inevitability of flood outcomes on East Coast. The Reports written decades in advance. Can we afford to ignore evidence of recent fire seasons also?
“Can we afford to ignore evidence“? No. Will we? Yes.
I hear what you’re saying Nick, but that’s an insidious thread of the fossil fuel campaign, designed to make us think it’s all too hard, encouraging us to inaction because it’s all too hard. There exist in the world right now, all sorts of ways of dramatically changing what’s happening. Maybe it will take massive demonstrations to make the labor government realize that their business as usual with Morrison’s agreements doesn’t cut it with us?
The dilemma is not new. Nor is the solution. Grandma was right – mend, don’t discard, make do, eschew debt, tend your own garden, tread lightly upon the earth and leave something for later.