Yesterday, I published an essay on the deeply distressing global indifference to the now months-long fire disaster engulfing Australia. But, as some of the response to the column reminded me, there was one additional, troubling aspect to that response I left out. (1/x)
As I mentioned but didn't emphasize, Australia is now led by a climate goon, Scott Morrison—a cartoon of fossil-fueled hostility to climate action, an anti-social-justice-warrior playing culture war games with climate as if it didn't matter to his country, tho it obviously does.
Morrison was elected, just last year, in an election defined in large part by the question of climate action, by a population that, at least according to the polls, is deeply concerned about the country's climate future.
This is tremendously concerning for those hoping to see public opinion push our politics towards real action, and who expect that climate impacts will make such movement inevitable, if a bit too late to avoid even more dramatic warming.
In office, Morrison has done even worse, exhibiting almost no concern at all for climate issues, though now for a good chunk of his first year the entire continent has been, more or less, on fire, in one way or another.
(Though in fairness and frustratingly, the opposition has not been nearly as focused on these issues as they should be, by any moral or scientific logic, either.)
That the world seems now more full of goons like Morrison — who respond to the crisis only with the logic of self-interest — is a terrifying portent, too, since it suggests that we may find ourselves struggle to adapt and mitigate to intense warming with more hostile leadership.
But — and this is the part of the global response I want to emphasize — Australia's climate suffering is not any kind of comeuppance for its climate indifference, no punishment for the sin of electing Morrison, not a consequence of his bad behavior in office.
These fires would be burning just as intensely if Bill Shorten had won the prime ministership, as was expected. The climate conditions would be just as bad today for Australia if the country had, a decade ago, committed to rapid decarbonization, but done so alone.
Global warming is a global problem, produced by global behavior, and the suffering of any individual nation is, ultimately, a reflection of global malpractice, villainy, and indifference.
It also unfolds at a kind of delay, meaning no politician presently in office is really responsible for the climate conditions facing his or her nation right now.
These dynamics are deeply frustrating and unfortunate, since they torque the logic of action for any individual nation away from first-mover decarbonization.
They are part of why leaders like Morrison and Trump and Bolsonaro appeal—because no individual nation can solve the problem on its own.
And yet it is morally grotesque, I think, to suggest that the climate suffering of Australians, even under the leadership of a catastrophic PM like Morrison, is some kind of payment for the country's cruel indifference to the issue of warming.
In truth, it's a payment for global collective indifference, generated by the world's biggest emitters and directed at one unfortunate nation—one led, to top it all off, by a morally blind man. (x/x)
