Now is not the time to talk about the connection between climate change and the “unprecedented” bushfires that have taken lives and burnt out colossal swathes of NSW, said Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian over the weekend. Morrison instead offered his “thoughts and prayers” to those affected.
Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack went further, calling any mention of climate change “disgusting” and the work of “raving inner-city lunatics” eager to prosecute an agenda.
“Now is not the time.” “Thoughts and prayers”. Accusation of running an agenda. If it all sounds familiar, it’s because they’re exactly the talking points used by Republicans in the wake of gun massacres in the US, designed to direct the anger about the wholly preventable and routine deaths of Americans away from the possibility of taking any action.
Climate denialism used to look like vaccine denialism — the result of wilful stupidity, a willingness to resort to conspiracy theory and a conviction that you’re smarter than both scientists and the sheeple who surround you.
But at a political level, climate denialism, like gun rights advocacy in the United States, isn’t some psychological tic or eccentricity; it is bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry lobbyists and donors who litter the donation returns of the Liberal and National parties.
And that denialism, and the soft corruption that funds it, has a growing body count. The victims of bushfires. The elderly who die during heatwaves. The premature deaths from smoke haze. Rural and regional Australians driven to suicide by drought and economic dislocation.
It’s never time to talk about climate change for the Morrison government, even with some of the country’s biggest corporations screaming for some kind, any kind, of climate policy to provide investment certainty.
Yes, let’s say it. These are preventable deaths, caused by fossil fuel industry-funded politicians here and overseas blocking climate action at every turn.
What’s particularly ironic is that the same set of politicians who deny climate change, or falsely insist it’s being addressed, are often the ones to be found hyping the threat of terrorism as the basis for spending billions of dollars on security theatre and systematically eroding civil liberties.
Climate change is causing far more deaths in Western countries than terrorism, much more economic damage. But those usually quick to accuse others of being soft on terrorism are themselves soft to the point of vacuum on a far more serious threat to the lives, health and prosperity of Australians.
Want to talk about politicians who ignore warnings about security threats? How many warnings have climate denialist politicians like Scott Morrison been given? Even the government’s own 2016 Defence White Paper warned that climate change was a “major challenge”.
Instead of following NRA-style talking points, this is what Australian governments should be saying as natural disasters mount up from climate change. It’s a pretty straightforward logic:
- Australia is the developed economy most at risk from climate change, due to our geography and the nature of our economy
- Australia thus desperately needs the world to move more rapidly to cap and begin reducing global emissions in order to keep temperature rises below 2 degrees (and hopefully 1.5 degrees) above pre-industrial levels
- To do this, we need to show global leadership by moving to decarbonise an economy that is one of the developed world’s most carbon intensive. If we undertake a serious program to achieve that, we can then demand that other economies, and especially big ones like the US, China and India, do the same
- It appears we can’t stop serious impacts from existing temperature rises even if we’re successful at capping global emissions, so adaptation and resilience must be much more prominent in policymaking, across areas like drought relief, infrastructure funding and regional development
- If there’s no political will to achieve abatement, and enable mitigation using market mechanisms, then taxpayer funding will have to be used. It’s less efficient, but the alternative of doing nothing, of staying paralysed, is not acceptable.
Anything short of this — whether it’s Morrison’s “thoughts and prayers” or McCormack’s insults — is recklessness of the same kind that would leave us unprotected against terrorists, only on a much vaster scale. And it is costing lives right now.
Not the right time? There was never a more important time to talk seriously about climate change. Each day of delay and denialism will cost more lives.
It’s time that responsibility was sheeted home to those who have refused to take action.
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Clearly Morrison, McCormack el al have no idea how bad the “optics” are of them “sympathising” with crying bushfire victims while the electorate knows that it is their government that is making matters worse by ignoring climate change or, in McCormack’s case, attacking the very people who are trying to raise the alarm about it. History will not remember this wilful ignorance kindly. And Deb Frecklington (Qld Opposition Leader), wtf are you doing standing next to McCormack while he attacks climate warriors? Such a dead weight on the political discourse in this state. Carp carp carp carp.
Meanwhile….
The Murdoch press on three continents and FoxNews and Au Sky TV are all making $millions from the fossil fuel industries to push their anti climate Science agenda. Comment for profit,
Bolt, Jones, etc can buy the brains of all the News Corp sheeple who bleat the criminally false message like the clones they are.
Don’t buy their rubbish, and throw out all their free Daily Telegraph propaganda. It will rot your brain.
Very true. We’ve been screwing around for far too long.
But … and it’s a huge BUT … the Greens and others most strongly advocating for climate action don’t appear to think the issue is really that urgent either. Historically the quickest (to build), cleanest and safest large scale producer of electricity and process heat is nuclear power. “Oh no they cry, that’s too expensive!” … “and the waste what about the waste!” Note the lack of question mark. They aren’t actually interested in hearing how simple nuclear waste is to handle. And they cherry pick the slowest reactor builds on the planet to prove that nuclear is slow to build … instead of looking at the median time or the best times.
These same people have watched and encouraged the Japanese Government to keep most of its clean electricity production (nuclear) off line and replace it with fossil fuels. This isn’t just a climate catastrophe, it’s killed about 23,300 Japanese since 2011 … with fossil fuel pollution.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519303611
So there are lots of people with blood on their hands, standing in the way of effective climate action; not just the climate change deniers.
What a complete load of cobblers….exactly as we’ve come to expect from the nuclear power shills. According to all official statistics, the median construction time of nuclear reactors is between 100-120 months……or close to 10 years. Also, Nuclear Power stations have a significantly higher life-cycle CO2 footprint, or do you think Yellow-cake miraculously pulls itself out of the ground & transports itself into the reactor…..then magically disappears?
Also, I note how you intentionally leave all the numerous cancer deaths, attributable to the nuclear energy industry, off your list of deaths.
It is curious that Geoff Russell’s thoughtful contribution should have provoked such a blast of sales propaganda! Rather than be bullied into silence, interested people might want to check out the facts. I suggest you browse for the following phrases or similar, while checking that each webpage is not funded by one of the competing industries.
“how long does it take to build a nuclear power plant? ”
“how long does a nuclear power plant last? ”
“what is the carbon footprint of nuclear energy? ”
“deaths per TWh by energy source”
Actually, Roger and Geoff, the latest Lazard Levelised cost of Electricity report
which was released just last week shows that solar and wind are now more cost effective over their whole life cycle than just the marginal cost of nuclear (excluding capital costs). Why would we bother building something hugely more expensive which has no existing industry in the country and produces hazardous waste?
The following are global average costs:
Wind $A40-$A78/MWh
Solar $A46-$A60/MWh
Nuclear $A171-$A278/MWh
(https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2019/)
BennN challenges, why should we spend a huge amount of money on huge nuclear power stations? It’s because the world needs to replace huge amounts of fossil generation, and replace huge amounts of hazardous carbon emissions with negligible amounts of fission products.
Could we replace all fossil generation with the cheaper wind and solar? No, because these are intermittent sources, where we need the level of supply to match demand. (The LCOE does not include the cost of balancing their raw power). Would nuclear become cheaper with mass production? Yes, there is currently competition among nuclear nations to develop small modular reactors (SMRs), which can be simplified, standardised and factory made. Each is planned to be a plug-and-play power station. Early units are planned to cost 5 USD/W, 100 USD/MWh, and generate within two years of first concrete.
LOL, thoughtful?!?! All I saw was the usual sugar coated garbage from a nucleae energy shill…..much the same as we get from you, time after time. Deaths per TWh are pretty meaningless, because cancers cannot be directly attributed to exposure to a specific source of radiation…very convenient for the nuclear energy industry. Yet most medical professionals believe the sudden spike in cancer rates within Eastern European children, post-Chernobyl, is more than mere coincidence. Expect to see similar spikes around Japan & China over the next decade or so.
The reality is that even nations with an extensive history in nuclear power are turning away from building new reactors. France has experienced significant power shortfalls, during heatwaves, as they have been forced to shut down their reactors…..so imagine how nuclear reactors would cope with an Australian Summer.
Then there is the need to mine, mill, enrich & transport the nuclear fuel in a safe & affordable fashion, as well as safely dealing with the waste by-products.
Either way, even if all this couls be ignored, & ground could be broken on a new nuclear reactor tomorrow, you’d probably see it completed sometime around 2028-2030. Hardly seems worth the cost & effort to me.
Such wild poetry is misdirected. The enemy is not nuclear, it is carbon. Those who would exclude nuclear from a mobilisation to decarbonise, threaten to leave the world as a smoking wasteland, its whimpering survivors doomed to waste away from untreated diseases, deprivation and homelessness.
Such wild poetry is misdirected. The enemy is not nuclear, it is carbon. Those who would exclude nuclear from a mobilisation to decarbonise, threaten to leave the world as a smoking wasteland, its whimpering survivors doomed to waste away from untreated diseases, deprivation and homelessness.
Read “Chernobyl”. Look at the cost of building new nuclear stations. Look at how long it takes. Look at the dangers of the working power station and of its waste.
Some of the extinction rebellion founders make the interesting additional point that in the event that major climate catastrophes occur, nuclear power plants will be abandoned, leaving lethally toxic sites for at least hundreds of years. Somewhere like Pakistan his hardly that stable even now. They need uninterrupted state stability, and that will be increasingly under threat.
They are interested in decentralization, flexibility, low impact failure modes and user maintainability. Which most renewables provide to some degree. Not to mention rapid and incremental build out.
Aside from the other problems, we’ve left it to late for nuclear.
Most nuclear power stations are coastal because they need water for cooling as well as the need for proximity to the Big cities which also tend to be coastal. Fukushima has shown us what a bad idea it is to put a nuclear power station on the coast with the prospect of unpredictable tidal surges as sea levels rise and weather events become more extreme.
Turkey Point in Florida being another case in, well, point, Rais.
Wait, what? Historically the quickest to build? Past and current nuclear plants took way longer to build than forecast and with enormous cost blowouts. Perhaps you’d like to name this fictitious plant currently under construction on time and within original budget.
Safe? Yeah, if you’re not counting the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people with thyroid and other cancers in Russia and Japan after the accidents or the spikes of cancer occurrences around nuclear sites in general.
Clean? Not so much. Neither in building or decommissioning. The only in-depth nuclear site cleanup analysis I’m aware of is the British parliamentary enquiry into cleaning up a few mothballed plants about 10 years ago. In the end they decided the amount so vast they and no doubt all other countries will leave it up to future generations to look after.
We’ve been promised clean, safe and cheap nuclear power since the 50s, but it hasn’t happened and is now being taken over by other much cleaner and safer technologies.
The only reason I can see that could entice an Australian government to spend the billions needed to build a nuclear “power” plant is if, fearing the decline of US power in our region, they wanted a plant that could produce fuel for a small arsenal of nuclear weapons “just in case.” I don’t think it will happen but certainly nuclear power is no match for solar and wind plus storage. As for the myth of mini nuclear power stations, they work in nuclear submarines but nobody has a civilian one and the only way they could be competitively priced is by making them in the hundreds. There is no prospect of that. People writing to Crikey can talk about how good nuclear could be if anyone wanted it but the following prerequisites aren’t going to happen: 1. A commercial corporation ready to invest in the nuclear power plant without state subsidies; 2. A commercial insurer willing to insure it; 3. A community willing to host the nuke in their backyard; 4. Safe, permanent disposal of waste fuel; 5. A bond to guarantee that when the plant reaches decommissioning age it can and will be done at no cost to taxpayers.
Of course, whilst they claim its “not the right time to talk about climate change”, it is apparently *always* the right time to peddle the Far Right myth that The Greens are somehow preventing Hazard Reduction Burns…..& that this is allegedly the real reason the fires are so bad. I didn’t realise a minor party which lacks power at the State & Federal Level could have so great an influence on public policy…..whilst being simultaneously unable to use that influence to stop coal mining!
In the last month forested country in the Northern Tablelands of NSW was devastated despite it being subjected to hazard reduction 6 weeks before. The reason: leaf fall caused by longterm major moisture stress followed by heat stress from the reduction burn. The ball game has changed, the catastrophic forest fires of global warming cannot be controlled by measures that worked in the past. That also applies to back burning and the creation of fire breaks. The combination of longterm moisture stress, high temperatures and extreme conditions precipitated by global warming can create tree top fires with minor understory mass.
Of course population expansion combined with living close to nature has nothing to do with it ! Nature denialism is more immediately fatal !