In the middle of the last parliamentary brawl over pricing carbon emissions in Australia, a Liberal-voting friend pointed out to me that we should be paying more attention to adaptation. He was referring to strategies that address vulnerability to climate change, such as poverty reduction, education and building institutional capacity. Adaptation includes infrastructure such as sea-walls, drainage systems and early warning protocols.
At the time, I took it as an irresponsible deflection. It didn't make sense to talk about adapting when we had not even taken steps to circumvent the things to which we would adapt. It felt like a defeatist position to take when a legislative window had opened to mitigate climate change.
But with Prime Minister Tony Abbott prioritising the repeal of the carbon price legislation, it is starting to feel like we are dancing over the watery graves of our Pacific neighbours.
The debate over climate change, like most international debates, is a thoroughly Western, developed world privilege. We need only consider the prospects facing the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati to realise this. People living on such island-states do not have the luxury of wondering whether climate change is 'natural' or induced by human activity. They do not get to have protracted internal brawls over which mechanism would effectively restrain the speed and impact of climate change.
'The Pacific is fighting for its survival,' said Marshall Islands president Christopher Loeak in the lead-up to the annual Pacific islands summit last September. 'Climate change has already arrived.' He and other island-state leaders have been saying so for years — while we have tinkered with questions around scientific consensus, and pointed at China and the United States to justify our inertia.
Part of this inertia of course relates to the problem of persuasion. We have not been able to substantively persuade people about basic aspects of climate change, much less frame it as a problem to care enough about that it constitutes political suicide for our leaders to do nothing.
Moralistic harangues about debts to our grandchildren have not worked, nor have emotive appeals about disappearing polar bears. There is no room for persuasion anyway when arguments are pre-empted by the view that someone who disagrees with you is a bad person or just doesn't 'get' it.
As it turns out, facts are not persuasive, either. As former political adviser Marcus Priest recently pointed out, it is not the solidity or volume of climate science