Australia’s climate crisis

For us Australians, 2020 started with images of giant flames climbing up the cliffs of the Blue Mountains and the news that over a billion animals had perished in the fires raging across the continent. Over the previous month, we had witnessed the Sydney skyline disappear under a dystopian, orange pall of smoke and would soon watch in worry as hundreds of vacationing families huddled together on beaches to be rescued from fast-approaching fires.

We Australians have long imagined ourselves as a uniquely nonchalant and irreverent nation. But at the dawn of 2020, long before COVID-19 even reached our shores, we found ourselves dismayed by our apocalyptic present and terrified of what likely lies in our future.

This year’s bushfires, and the unprecedented devastation they caused, have left an indelible scar on the collective consciousness of Australians. As the carnage we experienced made clear that the climate is changing faster than our worst fears, we hoped that our elected representatives would finally take the necessary steps to address the global climate emergency.

Yet, just a few months after the fires, in an attempt to swiftly lift Australia out of the COVID-19 recession it found itself in, Prime Minister Scott Morrison authorised a “Gas-Fired recovery”: a raft of new policies that completely ignores the country’s gloomy ecological reality and aims to revitalise the economy by getting “more gas into the market”.

Australia’s seemingly suicidal posture towards climate change often puzzles foreign observers. Indeed, the Australian state’s persistent reluctance to take meaningful action as the country wilts from the worst effects of climate change defies rational explanation. Noting that “Australia is already having to deal with some of the most extreme manifestations of climate change”, renowned British conservationist David Attenborough once described the Australian government’s disinterest in responding to the climate emergency as “extraordinary”.

Australia’s apparent indifference towards this global emergency is not so much a case of climate change denialism as it is exceptionalism. There are some climate change deniers on the far right who exercise an inordinate amount of political power relative to the size of their support base. However, more fundamentally, what guides the Australian state’s problematic stance on climate change is a form of exceptionalism.

Australia’s climate change exceptionalism rests on several pillars.

First, the conviction on the part of successive Australian governments that our national consumption patterns have no material effect on climate change and the resulting belief that we can extract ourselves from the global effort to combat it without this causing much harm.

Second, a purposeful downplaying of the contributions of Australian extractive industries to carbon supply chains, which paints the country as an incidental intermediary in the production of global emissions, encourages Australians to view climate change as somebody else’s problem. This, despite Australia now being the third-largest exporter of carbon dioxide in fossil fuels, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia.

These convenient fictions allow Australian governments to ignore the scientific consensus on climate change when politically and economically convenient and opt in an out of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures as they see fit.

Excerpted: ‘Making sense of Australia’s climate exceptionalism’

Aljazeera.com