I have a confession. I love coal. Especially brown coal. I love how when you crack a piece open you could find a perfectly preserved fossil leaf of a distant relative of an Antarctic beech as if it had been perfectly pressed between sheets of paper a few months earlier.
I love that when you look at brown coal under a microscope you can see a melange of pollen grains and interpret exactly the sort of waterlogged rainforest that once covered the La Trobe valley and imagine a time where you couldn't walk down the street of Morwell lest you be attacked by a 100 kilogram marsupial lion.
But I don't love burning coal. I have this quaint notion that burning coal is evil. I fear that continuing to burn coal now consigns each successive generation for hundreds and hundreds of years to escalating and irreversible levels of danger and suffering. And as a person who likes to think suffering of others is not a good thing and should generally be avoided if at all possible, I have a view that we should stop burning coal now. I see it in pretty black and white terms. But I know others like to argue differently.
For much of the last 20 years or so in Australia conservatives in Australia have pinned the notion of societal decline on the notion of 'moral relativism'. Moral relativism is a charge often laid by conservatives against progressives that progressives are mushy-headed and try to make everything about shades of grey when everything really should be black and white.
For instance when a progressive looks at conflict in the Middle East or the rise of groups like ISIS, they point out the role of US foreign policy in creating the situation and that this should moderate any Western involvement. Whereas a conservative will just see bad guys who need to be stopped regardless of how the situation developed.
The charge of moral relativism has been laid against progressives in debates about marriage, and about multiculturalism. John Howard, when commenting on the decay of society, once said, 'We sort of sanitise the language and we no longer talk in terms, of black and white terms, terms of right and wrong. The idea that you can just have total moral relativism in any society is ridiculous'.
However when it comes to climate change and coal, it is the so-called conservatives that suffer from this