Sure, War is Good. But How Good is Climate Change?

 Alright, now I’m pissed off. I was pissed off already but now I’m really pissed off. Dragging myself out of a drug induced mind fuck has been trying to say the least. Eight months of getting the doctors to reduce the dosage, coupled with only taking half of what the prescribed amount was enough to convince them that I don’t need to be on the meds.

 

I no longer have to consume the bloody pills which allows me to form a coherent thought before midday but I’m waiting for the residual to leave my system. Fuck knows what the half-life of this crap is, but I have begun to be capable of writing once more and was midway through what I believe wasn’t a shit article about Climate Change which everyone temporarily forgot about because a nuclear armed nation that wasn’t the USA invaded another country.

 

Then the east coast of Australia flooded.

 

Twice.

 

And my computer had a conniption, so I lost the aforementioned unsaved piece I was writing (remember to save and backup, people).

 

At this point Australia remembered that we have more pressing concerns than some nutter from Russia pushing a button. Of course the invasion of Ukraine is an important issue but no more important than the ongoing war in Yemen, West Papua being occupied by Indonesia for fifty odd years, Syria still in strife and The Taliban back in charge of Afghanistan, along with a bunch of other conflicts that Western media has chosen to ignore but this time it’s happening to White people, so it's different. However, as important as all of these conflicts are, they pale in significance when one considers the conflict we are having with our own planet and how it will affect all of us.

 

When I refer to “us”, I am not speaking only of humans but every living thing on this little blue-green marble where we exist. From algae and coral to the giant redwood forests of North America, The Amazon, Daintree and Congo rainforests who provide habitats for a plethora of species from the smallest microbes to the largest species known to modern science. I’m being selective as I don’t like lists, but we can’t ignore the biodiversity and beauty of the world’s deserts because, for those us who don’t drown, will end up living/dying in one.

 

Stating that the conflict “we” are currently engaged in, however, is a direct condemnation of the human race for starting the fight in the first place and doing bugger all to end it after some of us realised we were the only species able to do so. To hear people continue to deny and disparage the scientific evidence that has existed for decades shits me to tears. I’m amazed that some among us lack the capacity to look out the window and see what’s going on, or, failing that, turn the bloody news on to watch the “never seen before” weather events unfolding before their eyes.

 

Not to brag, but when my family returned to Australia thirtyish years ago, we were greeted by “the worst drought in history” then there was a flood and the drought was broken. After that, we experienced another “worst drought in history”. I think that one was broken by a cyclone, pretty sure it was named Leon but don’t quote me on that. Anyways, we had another “worst drought in history” and I was turfed off to boarding school to wait it out. Not that a drought really affected us living in town but we did have the water restrictions and it was generally viewed as something that impacted the community as a whole, so most people followed the guidelines and stopped doing stupid shit like watering their lawns at midday.

 

We were told that this is just what Australian weather is like by everyone from our educators to our artists. Dorothea MacKellar is often quoted by Australian Climate Change Deniers when they try to avoid answering questions regarding the obvious clusterfuck that is Climate Policy in this country. Sure, we are a land of droughts and flooding rains but so is every other inhabited continent, the only difference is that the English claimed the whole thing and a bunch of islands off the coast of the big one which means we live on the only country-continent on the planet. This only makes us unique in so much as we have a Government that is supposed to govern the whole joint. Conveniently, this current mob are more concerned with keeping their jobs than saving lives.

 

It isn’t unusual for a cyclone to hit the coast, devastate communities, turn into a low, head inland or down the coast dumping huge amounts of rain which end up flooding other communities while somewhere else, the country is on fire. This happens in Australia, always has and will continue to do so into the future. The problem is the frequency and severity of these events. Since Europeans started taking meteorological records the telling trends for the casual observer demonstrate that as the centuries have dragged by, shit has gotten worse.

 

One does not need to be a Meteorologist or Climate Scientist to figure out that the weather is changing as a result of human action and that inaction on the issue only serves to exacerbate it. To compound my lived experience of successive “worst drought in history”, I’ve also had the enviable experience of living through two (2) “once in a hundred year” floods in the space of eleven years, chuck in the odd cyclone here and there and even the most uninformed among us should be able to appreciate that I’m not speaking from a position of ignorance.

 

Not a single person who has been paying attention is speaking from a position of ignorance either and before you start telling me about your grandfather telling you that it was hotter, or the floods got higher, or a cyclone was more devastating and the fires were worse when he was a kid – your grandfather has dementia. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.

 

Climate Change is not going away despite how much people want it to. This is the one issue that will affect the human race as a whole, not just a select few. For once, we are actually “all in this together”. Not that you’d know it given the attitude of our elected representatives who are wont to make jokes at the expense of Scott’s “Pacific Family” by suggesting that it is only necessary to worry about when the “water is lapping at your door”. Quite poignant that when the water was lapping at people’s roofs in Lismore recently, the Pacific Islanders in town to pick fruit on Seasonal Worker Visas, were out in the floodwaters rescuing residents.

 

When Pacific Nations disappear beneath the waves, which they inevitably will if we continue on our current trajectory regarding CO2 emissions, the flood of Climate Refugees will be comparable to those that occurred following major wars which Australia participated in, if not worse. Unlike the European wars, where immigration was a relatively ordered process or even the exodus following the American War in Viet Nam. The Climate Crisis will create a Refugee Crisis of the like that we have never seen before.

 

It won’t only be the Pacific that will need to be evacuated. The Indian Ocean has a bunch of islands and archipelagos who are set to suffer the same fate, as will parts of Indonesia, Papua, Malaysia and the list goes on. After we are done counting our island neighbours, low lying countries that exist on continents need to be considered. Bangladesh springs to mind but this will not be restricted to individual nations. Climate Change does not recognise borders and the internally displaced will be as big an issue as those seeking refuge in foreign countries. At times like these I think of heavily populated river deltas around the world and the people being forced to higher ground or onto boats in the hope they can reach a foreign land before they die.

 

Australia is teetering on a position where it might be possible to prevent this scenario from becoming reality, or failing that, delay it. The answer is pretty simple, we need to stop exporting fossil fuels. Being mentioned in the same breath as Russia and Saudi Arabia is not something any liberal democracy should aspire to, but for some reason this Government thinks it’s a good thing to be in the top three countries killing the planet. Maybe it’s the shared Human Rights Abuses that justifies this thought or maybe they just don’t give a shit.

 

The argument that Australia only emits bugger all of the world’s total emissions it utter bullshit. Just because we don’t burn it here doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for it. All of the coal we dig up and the gas we extract to be shipped overseas on diesel powered ships to countries who will burn the coal and gas for energy is our contribution to Global Warming.

 

Australian Politicians have long bragged about how Australia “punches above our weight” on the world stage and when it comes to carbon emissions, we certainly do. By exporting fossil fuels, Australia is at least complicit and at worst, active in promoting the continued destruction of the planet. What makes this disturbing is that Australia will bear the brunt of the more frequent extreme weather events that are already occurring and when you combine that with an influx of refugees who will have nowhere to be housed, there will be chaos.

 

In a country that is failing to house the people who already live here, we have little hope of accommodating the potential millions who will be rocking up on our shores because their homes are underwater and the water won’t be receding as it does with riverine flooding.

 

The longer Australia dithers on meaningful action regarding Climate Change the worse it will be for everyone. Not just The Indo-Pacific region but the entire planet. It wasn’t too long ago when Siberia was on fire and the west coast of the USA’s fire season now overlaps with eastern Australia, which means we can’t lease any of those water bombers we desperately need yet Scott refuses to buy. The inaction of this Government regarding Climate Change is comparable to their inaction on preparing us for the inevitable sea level rises and increasingly severe weather events, occurring more and more frequently as a result of the first inaction.

 

Human influenced Climate Change is here. Has been since the Industrial Revolution. It won’t go away unless humans do something to make it leave. We only have a short window in which to do so but the powers that be are unwilling to act. Which leaves it up to us, The Great Unwashed, to cast a vote for a candidate who is committed to doing something to address Climate Change in a meaningful way.

 

This election is likely the last in which Australia can do anything significant about Climate Change, because if we don’t, the damage will be irreparable. I’m not telling you how to vote. I’m asking you to think of the consequences of your vote. Think of what will be lost if we continue on our current path.

 

Australia has arguably the most unique Fauna on the planet and the Flora isn’t too shit either but every year we hear about another native animal or plant being added to an endangered species list, if not being registered as extinct. That the responsibility of bringing attention to the destruction of the planet has fallen on the shoulders of children says more about the adults than it does about the kids. These poor little buggers are scared and rightly so. By the time they reach voting age there won’t be much that can be done to reverse what will have happened to Earth while they waited to have a say in what is happening to the planet they might inherit.

 

As a child I organised a boycott of French classes in protest of the nuclear tests being conducted at Mururoa Atoll. Kids these days are organising coordinated global protests demanding they inherit a habitable planet. We should listen to them. If you have a young person in your life please have an honest conversation with them discussing their concerns about the future and consider those concerns when you cast your vote. Many of us who line up at the ballots will be dead by the time the full effects of Climate Change are realised. But those young people will have to survive it.

HH