My essay responding to Jöelle Gergis’ Quarterly Essay was published in the subscriber section of Eureka Street on July 12. It is now open to you. I recommend you read Jöelle’s essay, the Quarterly Essay is available on line and in newsagents. Eureka Street is online and has subscriber and open sections.
I remember meeting Bruce Dawe’s Condolences of the Season 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 2º in the Earth’s average temperature will lead to days above 50º in Sydney and Melbourne as early as the 2040s[1]. 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.’[2]
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 so incontrovertible, 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.’ [3] This recent example is a 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 Agreemeent 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 can tweak their laptop to give a bunch of figures.’ What makes it okay for educated people to dismiss the labour of scientists in this way?
I have no head for science or maths, it took a lot of explaining for me to understand the compounding risks of the planet heating. Lamentably, I used to think that the world getting 1.5° hotter was no big deal. It sounded like a simple change of forecast; instead of the temperature being 32° might come up to 33.5° I heard a bus driver this week saying much the same thing to a passenger. I’m embarrassed to tell you I thought that the seas rising by metre just meant the tide would come one metre closer into shore. Coastal experts estimate that every one metre rise in sea-level results in 100 metre retreat of the coastline. [4]
And what makes basic misunderstandings like mine worse is the rife misinformation. The diffidence of science in laying down the gauntlet to politicians has left the space wide open for the loudest voices with no sense of the moral obligation or truth telling.
If there is any possibility of halting the slide into climate disaster, it is now that we need to know that our habits can no longer be what they were. To believe that we can just keep pressing forward is a dangerous lie.
Tim Winton highlights this in the documentary series about the Ningaloo Reef. Speaking on Soul Search he says, ‘…So much of the way we live our life now is designed to keep walking by, to turn our heads and not see… We run our entire economy and most of our politics based on that… Let’s just press on as though we’re living this other life. You walk past the poor, you walk over scorched earth, you just keep pressing on into some kind of imagined future which seems to involve shopping.’
The lie is a pernicious reassurance, it nods to us when we say it is too hard to change the way we live now. Like the prisoners in Dawe’s poem, we simply cannot imagine life being otherwise. We cannot imagine catastrophic change unless and until it is our house that burns down, or our home that is flooded, then flooded again. In business as usual we meet the victims briefly, then the news cycle moves on and people whose lives are hamstrung by bureaucracy and insurance companies are no longer interesting.
The memorably ugly Gas and Fuel buildings have been erased from our city skyline, but the companies who extract the gas are far from gone. And even though the Victorian government managed to rule that new homes cannot be built connected to gas, the industry is making sure we believe we can’t do without them. The ever-popular Masterchef is now sponsored by ‘renewable gas’. Who knew there was such a thing? It’s a step up from the ‘natural gas’ that was so compellingly rolled out through our city and suburbs in the 1970s.
Author, Jock Serong documents the deceptive double speak of the ‘community consultations’ currently running in the southwest of Victoria for multiple projects proposed for further extraction of gas. He says the company spokespeople use the language of ‘testing’, stepping carefully away from the reality that it is seismic blasting.
Licence to blast for 180 days with their undersea air cannons costs a mere $8000 and is called a Special Prospecting Authority. Serong notes, that the regulator of these permits, the National Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator ‘is a revolving-door operation that has employed resources industry executives and has seen its own staff migrate into that lucrative world.’
The permit process is an insult to the consciences of coastline communities who value the health of the oceans and further offence to first peoples who understand their responsibility for Sea Country. Gunditjmara woman Yaraan Couzens says ‘The seismic blasting is a song of death.’
The tentacles of that lucrative world entangle our current capacity to fight our way out of fossil fuel dependence.
The influence of lobbying forces of the fossil fuel industry, and the dark compromises they have leveraged, inspire a kind of horror. Their spell is woven from the comforting assurance that we don’t really have to change, that we should stay with the fuels we know – ‘Where we have always been, where we will end our days.’
Gergis, quotes recent research from the Australia Institute that the government collects more money from the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) than it does from Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT). In 2022-2023 $4.9 billion was collected in student loan repayments and less than half of that from PRRT at $2.3 billion. As the executive director of the Australia Institute, Richard Denniss said, ‘….in Norway, they tax the fossil fuel industry and give kids a free university education, in Australia we subsidise the fossil fuel industry and charge kids a fortune to go to university.’ [5]
In 2020/2021, nurses paid more than three times the income tax than the gas industry paid in income tax and PRRT combined.[6]
For most of the last three years I worked in the spiritual/pastoral care team of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, one of the largest public hospitals in Australia. I saw the intense requirements and expertise of nursing and medical care close up. I met many patients who arrived to the hospital from situations of serious hardship, especially in regional Victoria. I hear government after government cry poor on health and education funding. The statistics above leave me with a fury that barely knows how to find expression.
Psalm 12 is headed in the NRSV as a ‘Plea for Help in Evil Times.’ Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase is resonant with the behaviour of Fossil Fuel interests. ‘We can talk anyone into anything! Our lips manage the world.’
The cynical manipulations of those who pull the levers of power are rarely traceable or stated overtly. The discussions around corporation board rooms are signed off in policies of deliberate deception and knowingly harmful extraction.
Anyone who wants to speak publicly and works for government departments has to go through layers of permissions that ultimately weaken and neutralise any statement which creates alarm. The neutered language that remains is essentially another form of spin.
Poet Brian Walters writes in his collection Brink, ‘No amount of spin/ Can stop the world from turning.’ The world turns, but its future temperatures are being decided right now in places opaque to the person on the street. There is no chance that the turning world will be ‘Where we have always been, where we will end our days
[1] Joelle Gergis, Quarterly Essay, p.24, Issue 94, 2024
[2] Joelle Gergis, Quarterly Essay, p.18, Issue 94, 2024
[3] Joelle Gergis, Quarterly Essay, p.36 Issue 94, 2024
[4] Joëlle Gergis, Quarterly Essay, p.26 Issue 94, 2024
[5] Joëlle Gergis, Quarterly Essay, p.57, Issue 94, 2024
[6] Joëlle Gergis, Quarterly Essay, p.57, Issue 94, 2024