Burning truths

12 July 2024

I remember reading Bruce Dawe’s Condolences of the Season for the first time soon after it was published in the early 70s. I was still at school. In ‘for the duration’, Dawe speaks of prisoners unable to imagine their escape. The opening lines felt very immediate to me, even as the sheltered, earnest, evangelical girl I was then. ‘Where we are now has a peculiar habit of seeming/ Where we have always been, where we will end our days.’ The cascading phrases have the capacity to look both ways, signalling a warning and, alternatively, a resigned acquiescence. Now, on the precipice of climate disaster, Dawe’s words feel dangerously true. Climate modelling studies show that an increase of 2°C in the Earth’s average temperature will lead to days above 50°C in Sydney and Melbourne as early as the 2040s. Australian climate scientist Joëlle Gergis pleads in language beyond the careful neutrality of traditional science-speak: ‘We need you to stare into the abyss with us and not turn away.’

Gergis, who was a lead author on the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report, writes a Quarterly Essay entitled ‘Highway to Hell’. She not only explains the science in language accessible to non-scientists but explores the politics that prevent it being heard. The science is incontrovertible, so why is the message so choked?

Essentially, fossil fuel lobbyists and the companies they represent have undermined the science at every level. It was widely reported that they were present in overwhelming numbers at the 2023 United Nations Climate conference (known as COP28) held in Dubai. Gergis says, ‘Close to 2500 delegates representing the interests of corporations such as Shell, British Petroleum and ExxonMobil outnumbered every country delegation aside from the host country of the UAE and Brazil which will run COP30 in 2025.’ This recent example is mirrored in tactics across the globe.

Ultimately the ‘business as usual’ message of the lobbyists has a blanketing effect which overlays our capacity to imagine our world otherwise. ‘Where we are now has a peculiar habit of seeming …’

In recent weeks we have heard politicians speak as if the changes called for in the 2015 Paris Agreement are optional, that they only apply to ‘people in Paris’.

My country cousin tells me that when she goes back to her old stomping ground she hears the normal variation theory: ‘We’ve always been a country of droughts and flooding rains’ or, worse, ‘Anyone

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Burning truths

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