The profits of doom*


Hot on the heels of the Hurricane Helene which flattened large tracts of North Carolina, and the devastating floods in Spain, the death toll from which has exceeded 200 people, the CSIRO last week released its State of the Climate Report for 2024. The report, compiled from global and Australian data and placed within a 100-year context to determine trends and outcomes, provides an outlook for our short to medium term expectations. And these expectations paint a worrisome picture. While globally, the hottest year on record was 2023, thanks to back-to-back La Niña systems since the Black Summer, our hottest year was 2019. 

However, the report warns that our land and oceans continue to warm:  

“Extreme fire weather is increasing. Sea levels are rising. Marine heatwaves are becoming more intense and frequent. And oceans are getting more acidic. All of these come with serious consequences for Australia’s environment and communities.” 

It’s not like this is a revelation. We’ve known about climate change, its causes and effects, for decades. In 1987 a conference was held at Monash University with 260 of the world’s eminent climate scientists. The findings of the conference were published by the CSIRO the following year in a volume entitled Greenhouse: planning for climate change. It set out a likely timeframe for climate change based on data available at that time, and action that the government and business sectors could take to mitigate and potentially reverse the warming trend. 

That was almost 40 years ago. Since then the timeframe has been radically shortened and we’re already seeing firsthand the effects of what could have been averted if the warnings had been acted upon when scientists sounded the warnings.

The first United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP1) was held in Berlin in 1995. We’re now up to COP29, which will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this month. The hot air generated by these conferences would be enough to increase the climate on its own. In 2015, COP21 reached what is known as the Paris Agreement. This treaty, negotiated by 196 nations, aims to keep the rise in global surface temperature to well below 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels and states that preferably the limit of the increase should only be 1.5 °C. According to the CSIRO, however, this is highly unlikely to happen. 

Why, despite all the talkfests, all the science stacking up, all the physical indicators that the climate is at tipping point, have those in control of the politico-economic levers not met targets and show no sign of doing so? Because there’s no profit in averting disaster. There is, on the other hand, a lot of profit to be made in cleaning up after disaster. 

The profits of doom are a booming industry. 

The way our economic system works, every time goods and services are exchanged, the economic indicators increase. So a disaster such as the Lismore flood or the 2019-20 bushfires, generate profit through clean-up, rebuilding, emergency services, insurance claims and so on. Even while people and communities suffer, big business and the economy benefit. If the economy is benefiting, the government benefits because we have become conditioned to believe in an abstract notion of 'economy' which doesn't include us.

How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to continue to support an economic system that is destroying us? How much longer will we support a political system that mouths the platitudes of climate change while acting for those who are reaping the big bucks from climate-generated disasters? Are your grandchildren’s lives and livelihoods worth the risk? 

*First published as the editorial in Braidwood's Changing Times, Wednesday 6 November 2024 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On hiding Barnaby

Image
Cartoon: Matt Golding It seems the Nationals plan to "hide" former leader and serial drongo, Barnaby Joyce, for this year's election campaign, restricting him to campaigning within the boundaries of his electorate. Clearly, Barnaby has become a party liability, although his popularity in his rural heartland remains high. Mind you, restricting Barnaby to New England still means he has a lot of ground to cover. It's the twelfth largest federal electorate by area and covers a vast swathe of central west and northern New South Wales.  Of course, the Nats could hide Barnaby permanently by just disendorsing him. Find themselves a candidate who won't embarrass the party by getting pissed and passing out on the footpath in the middle of Canberra or knocking up a junior staffer while trumpeting CFV*. Ah, yes. Good old CFV. The public fallback position for all conservative pollies while they're privately pursuing anything but. They roll it out regularly in order to poi...
Read more

On the problem of mindfulness as a consumer product without ethics

Image
 Living in the present moment, or what the well-being industry calls ‘mindfulness’, has become one of those words that is overused to the point of meaninglessness. Like resilience, sustainability and wellness, it has come to be used as a vague umbrella term for a range of behaviours and attitudes that are, on the face of it, positive, but which require conscious effort to put into action. Just saying one is resilient or living sustainably doesn’t guarantee any change from the non-resilient or unsustainable self. Adopting the words alone makes no change. In a capitalist world there is also a strong “ka-ching” value to these words. There’s any number of entrepreneurs, influencers and con-artists happy to sell you wellness, mindfulness, resilience, sustainability and a host of other zeitgeist buzzwords for a price.  There’s no end to the products you can buy, the workshops you can attend, the books you can read, the websites you can subscribe to, phone apps to download, celebrity...
Read more

On the conflicted nature of unfriending people

Image
  In 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary proclaimed unfriend as its Word of the Year. It's a rather brutal notion that one can simply delete a friend by clicking on a button. Yet it also brings into question our concept of what it actually means to have a friend in an age of technology. Before social media, when all our friends were people we actually knew, one might fall out with a friend or simply drift apart due to geographic distance or different life paths. "Oh, yes," you might say of a certain former friend, "we were friends once but we had a falling out over what constitutes an appropriate pizza topping and as far as I'm concerned, he and his disgusting pineapple pizza deserve each other." Or, "Yes, I was quite good friends with her, but after she joined that religious cult and moved, we just stopped seeing each other. I wonder how she's going now?" There are other friends with whom we remain close for our entire lives regardless ...
Read more