Fire At Will
In these hyper-politicised times, even a debate about devastating, lethal bushfires will quickly spread to include the issues of climate and power. By Nick Cater.
The archetypal villain in an old-fashioned Christmas pantomime could drive an audience into a paroxysm of hisses and boos without uttering a line.
A similar thing happened to Scott Morrison when he visited a bushfire-stricken town in southern NSW last week. In the hyper-politicised climate debate, a centre-right leader is on a hiding to nothing in an angry summer like this, particularly in a community like Cobargo which cast a 58 per cent primary vote last year for Labor and the Greens.
Leaders from the left, on the other hand, are cast as heroes in the melodrama that environmental management has become. No one refuses to shake Justin Trudeau’s hand because the permafrost in the Canadian Arctic is melting at a rate described by the IPCC as alarming.
Yet the Canadian Prime Minister was praised as “a real breath of fresh air” by Al Gore. “Canadians should know that he and his team made a huge difference in the Paris negotiations … he’s really provided outstanding leadership.”
Leadership in what? Canada’s record on the actual reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is less than impressive. It had reduced its emissions by just 1.9 per cent since 2005 and will struggle to meet its Paris target of 30 per cent by 2030. Australia, on the other hand, has cut emissions by more than 12 per cent since 2005 and is well on track to meet its 2030 Paris commitment.
The average Australian’s carbon footprint has shrunk by 31 per cent since 2005. The average Canadian’s has fallen by just 14 per cent.
Yet it is Morrison, not Trudeau, who is accused of dragging his heels. Singed koalas, not bewildered polar bears, have become the anthropomorphised face of climate change. We shouldn’t be surprised.
It has been clear for some time that there is more to the climate change agenda than fixing global warming. It is not just emissions that the deep ecological movement wants to eliminate, but centrist governments on both the left and right, capitalism and the existing social order.
Evidence of environmental skulduggery is present in the great poisoned-air emergency in London, a moral panic that has lately swept through the British capital demolishing rational arguments and sceptical journalism in its wake.
“Researchers say dirty air is killing 800,000 people a year in Europe, and urge the phasing out of fossil fuel burning,” reports The Guardian, which has stubbornly refused to interrogate that inherently unlikely figure.
Children are particularly vulnerable, according to numerous accounts. One small girl, who tragically died from an asthma attack, has become a cause celebre. Activists demand that her death certificate be made the first in Britain to diagnose “air pollution” as the primary cause of death.
Like every moral panic, it contains a grain of truth. After the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, European governments saw diesel cars as a way to meet their CO2-reduction targets, since diesel emissions contain less CO2 than those from petrol engines. Now diesel fumes have been linked to cancer, governments are spending billions more to phase them out.
The idea that London’s pollution is “unprecedented”, the routine scare-adjective for anything connected with the environment, fails the sniff test. London, after all, is the city that gave us the word “smog” in the early 1950s.
Concentrations of black smoke have declined by a factor of 50 since the passing of the Clean Air Act in 1956. The concentration of fine particulate matter in British cities is 10.8 according to the World Health Organisation, about the same as in Denmark. In China it is 51 and in India 68.
Asthma is indeed a serious cause of ill health in Britain, but the suggestion that it is singling out the young is wrong. Deaths from asthma for Britons aged under 24 declined from 72 in 2002 to 25 in 2016. Deaths for people over 65, however, rose by 20 per cent to 1128 over the same period suggesting the rise in asthma cases is a product of the ageing population, not air pollution.
The focus on children turns out to be little more than a publicity stunt. “The narrative of protecting children’s lungs is a very compelling one that anyone would find difficult to disagree with,” Muna Suleiman, campaigns officer at Friends of the Earth, explained to the Pacific Standard.
Suleiman’s candid admission points towards an even more dispiriting ideological agenda, a campaign to overturn the hierarchy of power and oppression born of the dogma of the new intellectual left.
The Pacific Standard reports the ambition of some to shift the air-pollution focus away from children to marginalised groups, such as immigrants and the city’s poor, “a large number of whom are non-white” and live in polluted neighbourhoods.
It will come as little surprise to learn that there is a whole new academic discipline driving this stuff, post-carbon sociology, which frames victims of climate change as a new subset of the oppressed.
Immigrants in polluted suburbs have not taken the first rung on the ladder in a new country. They sit on an axis of inequality, just like victims of racism, heteropatriarchy, classism, nativism, ableism, ageism and speciesism, according to University of California professor David Pellow, one of the go-to people in this field of inquiry.
“These inequalities are mutually reinforcing in that they tend to act together to produce and maintain systems of individual and collective power, privilege, and subordination,” he writes.
The science of climate change was complicated enough before the cultural studies departments got hold of it, turning it into a new frontier for the overturning of the hierarchy of oppression.
A pragmatic government, systematically reducing its emissions as fast as the technology allows, can feasibly meet its international commitments with more honour than most. But if the Prime Minister thinks it will win him the keys to Cobargo, he should forget it.