New York Times Op-Ed: Australia “Committing Climate Suicide”
Here’s an opinion piece on Australia’s struggles with climate-fueled eco-destruction from local novelist Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
Prime minister Scott Morrison is under pressure to improve response to the immediate wild fires, and to step up measures to mitigate the rise in global temperatures. That’s because, as The Guardian reports, “Australia is the worst-performing country on climate change policy, according to a new international ranking of 57 countries. The report also criticises the Morrison government for being a “regressive force” internationally.”
This was the conclusion published in the 2020 Climate Change Performance Index, which was reached as a result of the work of several different think-tanks including the NewClimate Institute, the Climate Action Network and Germanwatch, each of which inspects national climate mitigation and adaptation efforts across the categories of emissions, renewable energy, energy use and policy.
With respect to national and international climate policy, Australia is at the very bottom of the list of 57. “(Australia) has continued to worsen performance at both national and international levels under the Morrison government,” the report concludes.
There is a great deal of good in the world; as I type these words, there are more than 200,000 groups whose purpose is environmental and social justice. Will all this effort be sufficient to deal with the impending climate crisis? Nobody knows.
Craig,
Good grief, that’s all the unfortunate victims of the Australian bush fire season need, a bunch of leftist media leeches writing inaccurate and mawkishly sentimental articles about stuff they noo nothing about!
No, Koala’s are not ‘Bears” , they are marsupials and are in no danger of extinction.
Nor is the Great Barrier Reef “dying” (it may be suffering ring from and over supply of documentary makers).
There are no “tropical rain-forests” being destroy by fire. The fires affect grassland and temperate native forests.
No “great kelp extinction” has occurred nor are the current bush fires more deadly or disastrous than those in the past.
Nor are the native Australian aboriginals magically wiser or more “in harmony” with nature than anyone else. In fact most of he reason for the poor soil and uniquely fire reliant flora in Australia, is the result of the practice of pre-European inhabitants setting deliberately setting wildfires as method of hunting game.
In 2009 the town of Marysville, Victoria, Australia was completely destroyed by a forest fire. The town lost 90% of buildings and 45 of the 519 inhabitants were dead.
These were known as the Black Saturday bushfires. I was a substantial property owner in the town and lost friends and employees in the conflagration.
The current fires are no where near as devastating as the “Ash Wednesday” bushfires of 1983 when the entire city of Melbourne spent days covered in ash and black clouds created by the burning country side.
The current fires are dwarfed by the Black Friday bushfires of 1939 which saw over 20,000 square kilometers of fires.
From the geological record we can estimate that a mere 299 years before European settlement, NSW Australia had a bush fire season that affected as much as one third of the State and Eastern sea board.
The resultant ash reached Japan and South America.
Indulging in an orgy of invented “White guilt” or “human species guilt” while adding a politically motivated “environmental guilt” is neither productive nor honest.
I have met Richard Flannery a talented novelist, if a little propagandist, but never the less intelligent and interesting.
On the last occasion he was outraged by what he described as the the imminent loss by the people of Tuvalu of their Island home due to sea level rise, it took some time and heated discussion to ge5 him to concede the was wrong. (the islands are actually growing in size).
It was therefor disappoint to see an article by him in the Guardian where he repeated the claim which he now knew to be false.
But that’s the way of the all Leftists, isn’t it, eh? An emotive fiction is preferable to sensible truth.