Too hard basket: why climate change is defeating our political system
Retrieved on:
Dimanche, octobre 1, 2023
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When I was first asked to write an opening piece in The Conversation’s series on climate change and the energy transition, I wanted to say no.
Key Points:
- When I was first asked to write an opening piece in The Conversation’s series on climate change and the energy transition, I wanted to say no.
- It may already be too late to save the world as we know it.
- Or should I write “be under threat” instead of “likely be gone”, to soften the story?
- The focus on rising temperatures itself makes the future seem more benign than it’s likely to be.
The Albanese government’s softly-softly response
- In his 2023 Intergenerational Report Treasurer Jim Chalmers included climate change as one of the five major forces affecting future wellbeing.
- It’s one among many, and the emphasis is on the economic opportunities and jobs offered by the energy transformation.
- Chief Climate Councillor Tim Flannery said:
Climate dwarfs everything else in this report. - In The New Daily, Michael Pascoe asked, “What is Albanese hiding?
- The Labor government’s response to the greatest emergency we face seems set on slow, as if we have time for an incremental response with little disruption to daily life and it’s OK to keep subsidising fossil fuels and approving new gas and coal projects.
Government can and must act
- All this after four decades of neoliberalism in which both the federal and state governments have surrendered capacity to the private sector.
- But as the COVID crisis showed us, when faced with an emergency our governments can act decisively and put the lives of people ahead of the interests of business.
- A report from the Centre for Independent Studies claimed voters born after 1996 were the most progressive since the Second World War.
- As the electoral weight shifts away from the old baby boomers Labor’s federal future is likely to be as a minority government with support from Greens and independents who will demand bolder action.
Why we struggle to face facts
- Elliot from “Burnt Norton”, the first of his “Four Quartets”:
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kindCannot bear very much reality.
- Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
- Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.