Richard Flanagan has a piece in the New York Times entitled, How Does a Nation Adapt to Its Own Murder?

One juicy titbit:

“Australia’s situation is now no different from that of low-lying Pacific islands confronting imminent destruction from rising seas. Yet when last August those states protested against the Australian government’s refusal to act on climate change, Australia’s deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, said, “I also get a little bit annoyed when we have people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive.”

“Today Australia has only one realistic chance to, you know, survive: Join other countries like those Pacific nations whose very future is now in question and seek to become an international leader in fighting for far stronger global action on climate change. But to do that it would first have to take decisive action domestically.

“Anything less and Australia will be lost to its climate catastrophe as surely as Tuvalu will be to rising oceans.”

Slightly freaky though: this pretty bad mess we’re in isn’t going to magically solve itself with a few more solar panels and a few more group hugs. This is going to get messier.

And this kind of ongoing bollocks doesn’t help:

“And yet Prime Minister Scott Morrison argues that Australia is on track to “meet and beat” its pitifully low pledge, under the 2015 Paris climate accord, of cutting 2005-level greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent before 2030. Experts have overwhelmingly rejected Mr. Morrison’s claim as false”.

Another fun fact: the bushfires have effectively doubled Australia’s usual CO2 emissions!

Thankfully at least Australia is not planning any more coal mines.

Oh wait, I just made that up for a laugh.

I’d thought there was one new coal mine on the way. Then I heard about another one. However:

“According to a recent United Nations report, what is happening in Australia is “one of the world’s largest fossil fuel expansions,” with proposals for 53 new coal mines”.

Fifty. Three.

That is some daft parallel universe shit going on there.

One more fun fact is that coal mining in Australia only directly employs 37,800 people. That’s diddly-squeak percentage of the Australian voting population. And yet ScoMo is protecting the industry as if his tackle is tied to a mine manager’s wrist.

Maybe because it is:

“According to John Hewson, a former leader of the conservative Liberal Party, Mr. Morrison “is almost totally beholden to the fossil fuel lobby. Several of his senior staff are ex-coal executives; a couple of his key ministers have coal industry links; fossil fuel companies are major donors.”

And then into another parallel universe we go:

“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”.

Good luck with that Mr Fancy-Pants Australian novelist! See you on the evacuation beach!

[Cover photo: Matthew Abbott for the New York Times]