I’m edgy when writing about the limits of hope. I’ve read many accounts that more or less insist that without this emotion there is nothing but bottomless despair. I don’t buy that.
The breakdown of the climate will produce a febrile emotional milieu. Fear and blame, grief and helplessness, among a larger set of intense feelings, will wash over and within us.
At a time when the International Energy Agency (IEA) has called for a total moratorium on opening any new coal, oil or gas projects to avoid climate disaster, Woodside is hell-bent on locking in increasing greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come.
It is time for climate-change policies and programs at regional, state and federal levels to respond to the productive ‘climate action’ of First Nations people with recognition and respect, and equitable resourcing to allow it to flourish.
The problems they face from this extended economy are so far beyond the state mechanisms still at their command, their business as usual, that their fate may well be to utterly discredit ‘reasonable politics’
We must get better at communicating risk so that communities have the best chance to prepare for the coming onslaughts—to make good decisions and take the best actions they can, whether in fires or floods, heatwaves or severe storms.
The climate wars seem bound to intensify, given that the systemic transformation needed to address our climate and ecological crises is not on offer. At the grassroots of the climate movement, activists are preparing to fight.
Diseases once confined to the tropics, like dengue fever, will find the warming conditions conducive to southerly migration. Currently dengue is confined to sites 200kms north of Brisbane.
There is an obscure but very real connection between a Queenslander being ferried by a neighbour in a tinny from their inundated home in the recent floods, and a small gathering of economists and others in a Swiss Village in 1947.
The Australian Way meant ‘technology, not taxes’. The airy assumption here is based upon technology that has yet to bear fruit and upon a total absence of modelling and detail.
