Most people think that the effects of climate change will take place in other places and far off into the future, and are too dire to bear engaging. I don't have the comfort of such detachments. The trajectory of climate change is in a sense a family story.
My dad is a seafarer. He navigates cargo vessels for a European company on contracts which last from three to six months. Most people don't realise how critical seafarers are to economies. Ships are the arteries of globalised industry, carrying an estimated 90 percent of trade. Quite obviously, the only way that bulk commodities such as grain and steel can be transported from one country to another is over the ocean. This is particularly the case for Australia.
My own sense of the mining boom comes from Dad plying the routes from Australia to different parts of Asia far more often in the past decade than he did when we were growing up. I knew about the bottlenecks at Dampier and Port Hedland before I read that export volumes were straining port infrastructure. I usually ask Dad what they are loading when he gets there. Coal. Industrial salt. Iron ore.
Lately, mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has been running a campaign about 'Our Iron Ore', pushing for a parliamentary inquiry into prices, targeting his multinational competitors BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto. Such machinations by miners always seem tawdry to me; billionaires acting like they are oppressed and fighting on our behalf is patently pantomime. We saw it in their successful campaigns against an emissions price scheme and mineral resources super-profit tax.
The 'carbon tax' repeal is particularly egregious not just because the price signal had in fact slowed the increase in emissions. Dad was born and raised in Leyte, an island on the eastern seaboard of the Philippines. In 2013, the category 5 super typhoon Haiyan pummelled Leyte and other parts of the Visayas region. The damage in his birthtown was not as horrific as in Tacloban; only one relative lost the roof to their house.
Of course no single typhoon can be directly attributed to climate change, but the science tells us that increasingly warm surface conditions in the Pacific affect cyclone characteristics such as intensity, size and movement. Based on fatalities and damage, the five worst typhoons on record in the Philippines happened in the past decade.
In my dad I see the labour