110 fires
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Tens of thousands of people are fleeing NSW’s south coast, where a ‘humanitarian crisis’ is developing. In many towns there’s no fuel, no food and no power, as dangerous bushfire conditions are tipped to kick in on Saturday.
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Tens of thousands of people are fleeing NSW’s south coast, where a ‘humanitarian crisis’ is developing. In many towns there’s no fuel, no food and no power, as dangerous bushfire conditions are tipped to kick in on Saturday.
I was a child when the movie On the Beach premiered on television. My parents watched it and gave me a very brief synopsis of the plot: the atom bomb had gone off and the only people left alive were on a remote island called Australia. They, too, were going to die, eventually, when the radiation finally seeped down to the other side of the earth. I remember thinking “well, then — Australia is the safest place.” It wouldn’t be touched by the problems from the rest of the world till last.
Waltzing Matilda.
I note that the present Australian prime minister is thoroughly corrupt, a fervent Christian (of a kind), and despite believing, I suppose, in an all-caring God (well, not quite all, since He doesn’t give a damn about refugees, particularly if they might land up in Australia), does not ‘believe’ in global warming, and is doing his damnedest to to destroy any attempts to deal with climate change. I once asked a very ‘conservative’, Catholic American friend, why it was that opposition to the idea that such a thing as global warming existed had any connexion with genuine political conservatism. I have considerable respect for certain conservative thinkers like Oakeshott, Raymond Aron, and the poet and essayist C.H. Sisson, principally because of their realism, and had not, until the Republican party (now followed by right-wing people everywhere, including people in important positions in the present British government – the slithy Gove, for example), made ‘disbelief’ in global warming a matter of dogmatic conviction, realised that there was a connexion between conservative politics and such a ‘disbelief’; nor could I see why there might be a connexion. I tried to ask my friend why, but got no response. About the only sense I have been to make of this dogmatic conviction among self-professed Christians of various kinds, is that since this ‘dim spot,/ Which men call Earth’, with its ‘smoke and stir’, has no value whatsoever compared with the delights of Heaven, with its ‘regions mild of calm and serene air’, it doesn’t matter at all what happens here – with the exception, of course, of abortions. And it doesn’t matter politically, either – if Trump, Morrison, Johnson et al (whom ‘conservative’ acquaintances seem quite happy about) weaken or destroy important political institutions, so that chaos is unleashed, these acquaintances are happy with that. God, apparently, is happy with all the destruction, except in the case of abortions.
Sastra, your comment reminded me of the last few seconds of that movie.
I read the book as a callow youth, saw the original movie when it was released on TV, then there was a 2000 movie remake.
Are we there yet?
@2 Naomi Klein addresses your question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Changes_Everything_(book)
I am well aware of the influence of neoliberal economic policy, sheer power and the thirst for money on climate change denial, which is what Naomi Klein’s book seems to be fundamentally, and rightly, about. What interests me is why conservative, religious and (some of them) highly intelligent people who are not greatly interested in making a fortune should think that way, too. It is partly, I suspect, because of a desire to stick one in the eye of the loathed ‘liberal’, but I think there is more to it than that.
And also what interests me is why what one might call traditional conservatism has changed into this appalling ideology. (In the case of my Catholic acquaintance, it has to do, I think, with his having been a fervent Trotskyite at university in the States during the time of the Vietnam War, and then swinging violently back into the fold and taking up any position that might be opposite to what the hated Left hold – the hated Left including now of course anyone or anything thing that could remotely be described as ‘liberal’.)
The angry residents of the burnt-out South Coast town of Cobargo NSW today told the happy-clappy born-again bless-them-with-bullshit evangelist Prime Minister of Australia to piss off, in no uncertain terms.
Which he obligingly did.
https://www.9news.com.au/national/scott-morrison-cobargo-tour-hastily-moves-on-as-residents-express-anger/98f2b3ff-e648-4e65-a84d-f5273d5e930e?ocid=Social-9Newss&fbclid=IwAR1dmVDK1a0ZXTndjLmCrPvPsllhbOIsdLKe7yg5jvagTmJCFUyvwKPFrNQ
Tim Harris #5
I suspect cognitive dissonance is a major part of it as well. The, more or less unconscious, line of “reasoning” might go something like this: “If Climate Change is real and as bad as scientists claim, then I have done something indefensible by supporting the kind of policies that are driving us toward the edge of the cliff. But I am not the kind of person who would do something like that, therefore the problem must be made up, or at least exaggerated, nothing to worry about etc.”
Personally I think people tend to be a little too focused on economic incentives precisely because it distracts from the role of ideologies, world-views, ways of life, or even just plain old human psychology. I have known plenty of climate change deniers who have never gotten a cent from the fossil fuel industry, but I have never met a strong denier who wasn’t either vehemently anti-left, or, at the very least, utterly repelled by the thought of making any kind of personal sacrifices themselves (getting rid of the fossil fuel driven car as well as driving less, flying less, eating less meat, consuming less in general, having fewer/no children etc.).
As I have previously written, there are no good guys in this story. Or, if they exist, they’re as marginalized and on the fringe as it gets. The kind of emission cuts that would be required to actually meet (or even get anywhere near) the targets our elected leaders claim to be aiming for are not even being considered by any major government (or any major political party) anywhere in the industrial world. If actions speak louder than words, then not driving off that cliff is about as “extreme” a position as You’re ever going to find, even among people who claim to take the problem seriously. From such a point of view the greatest difference between the Trumps and Morrisons of the world and the “moderate”, “reasonable”, “responsible” ones seems to be that the former are still stuck in the “classical” stages of climate change denial (stage 1-3)*, while the latter has moved on to what some have called “implicatory denial”, i.e. saying all the right things while continuing to do all the wrong things.
* 1) The planet isn’t warming 2) Even if the planet is warming, we’re not causing it 3) Even if we’re causing it, it’s not a problem.
In short, as tempting as it is to blame politicians, the general public has to carry the main blame in this case. If most people weren’t so hell-bent on being part of the problem rather than the solution, not a single elected leader anywhere in the industrial world would even be electable in the first place. To be sure, there are plenty of other reasons to see centrist liberals as a lesser evil than the right. But when it comes to climate change the only real difference between the likes of Barack “All The Above” Obama and Donald “Chinese Hoax” Trump is how many more rounds of ammunition they are determined to fire into the body of our collective future long after it’s dead and cold.
I’ll take a stab at this, and blame common sense.
Or, rather, “common sense,” the intuitively reasonable assumption that we humans are here for a purpose, that the universe and its laws didn’t just happen for no reason: God made us, and there’s a story there which isn’t about nature, or the planet, or ecosystems, but the relationship between Us and Him. The entire cosmos is just a stage for this drama to play out, and the spiritual clearly takes precedence over the material ( just like our minds obviously matter more than our bodies.)
Once someone is operating from this primitive view of common sense, concerning oneself with the environment is optional. Sure, you can imagine a story where God is testing to see if you’re a “good steward of the earth” — but even that scenario isn’t really real, in the long run. The religious faith that Nothing Bad Really Happens, or It Can Always Be Fixed, or This World Isn’t The Only One — or a combination — puts a powerful stream of Common Sense up against the more mundane, parochial sort of common sense which looks at data and charts and doesn’t secretly assume there’s magic.
Sastra, I think tribal identity and the all too human need for “consistency” probably enters into it as well. There may not be a rational reason why climate change denial should go hand in hand with traditional “conservative” values, but as we all know, humans are not rational. It seems to me like most people most of the time have more in common with football-supporters rooting for their team than with open-minded truth-seekers. It’s as if people were thinking “I am pro Big Business, pro religion, and pro guns as well as anti taxes, anti immigration, anti abortion etc. I Guess that puts me on ‘Team Right’. But people on our team don’t believe things like that!“
Bjarte and Sastra:
A most interesting dialogue there.
There is a left-right divide on the politics of climate change. ‘Conservatives’ want to ‘conserve’ existing property relations, and the existing distribution of wealth. As a rough rule of thumb, the greater the wealth, the further to the right the owner of that wealth will be; particularly if that wealth comes from mining, where the asset was definitely not created by the owner of it, and if simply left in the ground will not deteriorate with time to any significant extent.
And as that bright young slave befriended by Mark Twain put it: “you tell me how a man gits his corn pone, and I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” Or as Marx put it: “”It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
These days I think it to be a two-way street. Consciousness determines being and vice-versa, but prior to Marx, and particularly under religious influence, it was all consciousness determining being. Virtue rewarded and all that.
An analogy from nature: The environment of life forms selects their genotypes, true. But living beings (animals particularly) tend to congregate in environments suited to their genotypes, thus increasing the probability of individuals with like genotypes meeting and mating, so driving the process onwards. Thus smaller animals (eg hippos) will tend to favour (drift into) environments that give them an advantage (eg dense rain forest). So the genotypes are selecting the environment as much as vice-versa, and thus we get pygmy hippos, deer and humans.
The loudest voices in climate change denial have come from the mining lobby (Ian Plimer: ‘heaven+earth’; the Koch brothers; Gina Rinehart, plus their mouthpieces like Rupert Murdoch.) Rinehart was moving to use her mining wealth to take over the liberal Fairfax group of newspapers here in Australia, until it became obvious to all and sundry that the Internet was driving them out of business anyway. So she desisted.
The give-away IMHO is the opposition of ‘conservatives’ to renewable forms of energy: particularly wind and solar. These will have the effect of conserving the fossil carbon for better uses than fuel for power stations; for example as feedstock for the chemicals industry. (Australian agriculture is now heavily dependent on cheap, durable polythene pipe for example.) Yet the owners of the fossil carbon want it converted to $$$$ in their own private bank accounts as of COB yesterday.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch03
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch02
Thank you, everyone, for your thoughtful replies. Yes, Marx, and the Koch brothers: but I think – after discussions with the strongly religious and in particular Catholic (not necessarily on the burning topic at hand) – that it is, for them, consciousness that, being a function of an immortal soul whose real home is elsewhere, determines being, and the thought that the opposite might be true may at some point in life (adolescence) be entertained in a callow way, but is never deeply accepted and soon ceases to play any part in their thinking, if it is not violently rejected. And so the whole bundle of what one almost hesitates to call ideas follows: the poor deserve their situation; since we are all immortal souls, we are individuals who choose our lot and there is no such thing as society, and therefore no value in good political institutions; Adan Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ will do it all for us, since the selfishness of such as the Koch brothers pursuing their ends will in the end benefit us all… All very depressing, and I have been depressing myself further by watching Ken Loach’s ‘Cathy Come Home’.
Also, the refusal to accept that ‘social being determines consciousness’ allows the flattering illusion that you, and your immortal soul, are in control (at least in this world), whereas of course you, and it, are not. The desire to feel that you are in control, which is in some way a natural one (which is why the idea of free will never dies), trumps all evidence.
@13 Here’s another useful read for you:
https://www.cmu.ca/faculty/gmatties/lynnwhiterootsofcrisis.pdf
And obligatory note that the almost universally misunderstood ‘invisible hand’, in a simplified nutshell, was in fact the social pressure people living in communities feel to act in the interest of their community and ‘fellow man’, in order, as Smith points out, to best serve their own personal interest–which is why it worked, up to a point, in eighteenth century England but no longer works, and has no hope of working, in a culture that doesn’t even acknowledge the concept of ‘community’.