Climate Change: how little countries like Australia can make a huge difference

I’m Australian.
You know, kangaroos 🦘, koalas 🐨, flat white coffee, the Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef 🐠, and massive bushfires the size of some small European countries that kill millions of kangaroos and koalas.

Australia is a small country in terms of population though largish in terms of size.

We’re often told that despite our small size we ‘punch above our weight’, we have sporting figures like Ash Barty, reaching number one in the world tennis rankings, actors like Kate Blanchett and Russell Crowe winning golden globes and Oscars.

We have big war memorials commemorating our roles in two world wars, fighting against huge odds on the Kokoda Trail, to resist invasion efforts of Japan (who we’re friends with now by the way), holding out at Tobruk in North Africa against the Germans, as well as our participation in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign (not sure why I mentioned that one given we were totally routed, but I guess it was another time Australia was a big player on the world stage).

We’re often told that if we just put our minds to it, we Aussies can do whatever we want. Except, that is, when it comes to climate change.

When it comes to climate change we’re told we’re small, insignificant, unable to do anything about it. We’re told we should do nothing, we should give up, as we only produce such a tiny amount of CO2 emissions that it’s really someone else’s problem, not ours. The world will come and save us, we don’t need to go save the world.

That’s despite our Great Barrier Reef bleaching, and dying off due to heating waters, our forests burning due to droughts and heatwaves made so much, much worse, and happening more and more often, due to climate change, with billions of our animals dying from those fires, and billions of dollars lost through tourism, and billions more spent recovering from such crisis.

And we’re still told that we’re just a little contributor to climate change. We’re totally insignificant! We’re not the ones doing the damage, it’s the big bad polluters like China and the USA.

They are the bad ones, not poor little Australia.

But hang on, we’re being told this, but are we discussing how these big bad polluters are getting the coal to pollute? Well a lot of it is dig up in their own countries, but the rest is sold to them by other countries.
And do you know which country sells them all this coal? Well there’s a fair list, but one little country is a disproportionate contributor to this. A country punching well above its weight on the world stage.

Drum roll, and the winner is... perhaps from the sarcastic tone, one might guess, the number one  exporter of the worst contributor to climate change in the world - coal - is little, innocent Australia, the one also getting some of the worst impacts of burning the stuff. If you believed in karma you might say, you reap what you sow (or is that the bible).

And as you might see from the pics below, this coal has a direct affect on temperature rises which is in turn destroying our reef, our forests, our farming communities. Just like prior to WW2 when Australia sold iron to the Japanese who built zero planes and bombs which  they then sent down to blow up Darwin and other northern Australia cities (I note WW2 Japanese plane nerds will probably tell me that the Japanese used something else beside zeroes to bomb us, and also stress that we’re now friends with the Japanese, and please come visit, because apparently tourism is down like 30 to 40% due to the fires with many small businesses now on the verge of bankruptcy).

So what? We’re still such a small country, it’s still someone else’s problem (fans of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy will remember the SEP - someone else’s problem field which helps mask huge spaceships from view because someone else’s problem is such an effective mechanism for us humans to ignore reality). Climate change isn’t that bad, Russell Crowe can still get his golden globe award - well he couldn’t be there to collect in person as he was fighting bushfires - and we can still export our coal and make money from it with absolutely no consequences whatsoever. 

If the fight for the climate was like the fight we had in the First World War, we might see posters like this:

(Don’t know who made these  memes, I found them on a climate change group. Also since you possibly didn’t get taught much Australian history at school, the Boer War was the one in South Africa with Breaker Morant, which Aussies fought in, and the Dardanelles is where Gallipoli is, it is in Turkey - we’re super mates with Turkey as well now, no hard feelings, sorry, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

For me, this attitude goes against what we’re told is the ‘Australian fighting spirit’, taking on the world despite our size, making a difference. The world of Ash Barty, the world of gallant efforts on the Kokoda trail, in Papúa New Guinea, holding off a much bigger and more powerful country heading towards invasion of ours, while we waited for the yanks to get their arses into gear, or that time we won the America’s  Cup yacht race (acknowledging the guy who won it for us ended up in jail for fraud). That for me, is the Aussie spirit (not so much the going to jail bit, more the taking on the world bit).

The Aussie spirit, for me, is not this:

A Prime Minister holding up a chunk of coal in parliament to make a political point, which is both untrue, and also not in the nation’s interest. In historical terms, if there were memes prior to World War Two, it would be the equivalent of the then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, holding up a chunk of iron ore destined for Japanese zero factories and saying, ‘this is iron ore, don’t be afraid!’, nothing bad could possibly happen. Again, since you might not know much Aussie history, that Prime Minister got the nickname, ‘Pig Iron Bob’. I will let history judge the coal PM and hopefully also come up with an appropriate  nickname which describes his climate change antics.

Yes, don’t be afraid. Be very afraid! The coal we export now, the coal we continue to export in the future, will keep coming back to haunt us, as the zeroes (again, Japan, were seriously great mates now, no hard feelings) did when bombing Darwin and other cities in northern Australia.

And when you hear politicians say, ‘closing one coal fire power station will have no impact on the world’s temperatures’. Start being terrified. And maybe stop to think whether you’re being bullshitted to. Whether you’re bullshitting yourself. For there’s a very real and direct connection between each and every coal fired power station, no matter how small or how big, and the Earth heating up.

Each tonne of coal NOT burnt, helps us keep our reef a bit longer, each coal fire power station closed, or NOT built in the first place, helps to keep the temperatures on the Earth lower, helps mitigate our droughts, out fires, out heatwaves.

And remember,  the catastrophic fires we’ve just had in Australia are only the result of a relatively small rise in global temperatures, not even 1 degree, there’s much, much worse to come. And the less we do now, the less we do in the future, the worse and worse these horrors will be.

We’ve known for decades that this catastrophic climate disaster was coming. We’ve been told for years that the affects of climate change will cost billions to the economy, it will cost jobs, it will cause rural communities to collapse. And we have a taste now for how much more catastrophic our inaction on climate change will be for us in the future. It’s the equivalent of our soldiers leaving the Kokoda trail to the Japanese imperial army, because maybe in a few years time we might stop them in Brisbane, or that failing in Hobart. For those who don’t know Australian geography, Hobart is Australia’s southern most capital city.

Let’s take that ANZAC spirit, which helped us shrug off the catastrophe of Gallipoli (and again sorry Turkey, that was a really shitty thing to do in retrospect), and let’s actually go out and do something about changing the world rather than sitting around like a bunch of whiny drongos thinking some other wanker is going to go out and do it for us. For when it’s nobody’s problem it’s everybody’s problem (sure that’s a quote I saw from some Netflix show recently that some historical figure probably said about something really important).

I leave you with David Attenborough who also says a lot of good things:  

And a tweet from Crowey: