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Raising Hell: Issue 41: Apocalypse, No (*Terms and Conditions Apply)

"To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say," - Bertolt Brecht, German poet, director and political exile

Raising Hell: Issue 41: Apocalypse, No (*Terms and Conditions Apply)

This last fortnight was perhaps one of the most significant humanity has lived through in recent times. Though the sentiment might read like hyperbole, it was the reality of COP26, a global summit where world leaders were supposed to ratchet up efforts to halt and reverse climate change after decades of fucking around. They did not.

When all was said and done, the planet’s leadership kicked the can down the road and promised to come back next year to really make a go of it. In Australia, meanwhile, it was as if it never happened. Climate change was a non-event; the Prime Minister who didn’t want to go until the Queen started talking smack about him in the press flew back home and announced an electric vehicle strategy that did nothing to support the transition to electric vehicles. A week or so later, Woodside Energy was announcing that they had decided to push ahead with the development of the Scarborough gas field, a move that would released 1.6 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over its three-decade lifetime - roughly equivalent to 15 coal plants. Woodside’s CEO, Meg O’Neill didn’t even mention the words “climate change” in her press release while the deal was written up in the Australian Financial Review as a triumph of girl bossdom. You could almost hear the confetti scatter as you read the headline.

In some ways this sequence of events were an entirely perfect expression of a nation — and a species — willing to gamble with collapse.

If you’ve been paying attention — and I don’t blame you if you haven’t — it’s hard to connect the dots on this stuff and not give in to despair. Those under 40 live knowing they will eventually inherit a carbon-shocked future — assuming Rupert Murdoch and Peter Thiel aren’t actually vampires — which raises the question: why bother?

Much has been written on this exact theme over the last few decades. There are scientists that don’t want to lay it out for fear of losing their funding or being seen as alarmist, and centrist pundits at pains to tell people to trust in the process or the market to bring down emissions. Personally, I have found most of these, to put it politely, unpersuasive. A problem can’t be fixed if you don’t know what the harm is and processes are not neutral.

The thing that has long helped me nix the feeling of hopelessness was a sentiment best expressed in an old column by Amber A’Lee Frost in The Baffler. Her method is to inject a sense of historical perspective before focusing on the need to be practical where and when it counts. She writes:

“It’s normal and rational to feel scared and hopeless sometimes—it’s a sign that you’re paying attention. And you’ll likely cycle in and out of those feelings your whole life. But the work still needs doing, and providence is contingent on faith in a future. So read nutritiously, socialize, take breaks, step back, compartmentalize, enjoy what you can of life, and refuse to despair. Stoicism must sustain us during the lean times, but cool heads and hopeful hearts are what make for the best comrades.”

Given *everything*, I think this is worth repeating now for those who need it, especially as everything seems so big. Whether it’s Australia’s rank indifference to climate change, or anything else happening in the country, "doing something” is possible beyond shitposting to social media. Even if it’s as simple as working to stop your local sports club from taking fossil fuel money like the mums of Surf Life Saving WA, or asking fairly blunt questions of federal politicians when they turn up to public forums, even small acts of courage help.

And with that odd optimistic note, I’ll leave you until next fortnight.

For the Fortnight: November 10 to November 23

Reporting In

Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …

Projects

You Hate To See It

A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…

  • What Politicians And Baby Diapers Have In Common

    Climate crisis? What climate crisis! As world leaders - and oil and gas executives - gathered in Glasgow for the COP26 international summit that represented a last chance to do something to prevent catastrophic effects - after the oil and gas industry spent decades injecting propaganda into the public discourse - from climate change, those who know about such things hoped that good, centrist reason will win out. Of course, Australia did it’s part to make that happened. Whether it was the Santos-sponsored Australia pavilion that relied heavily on coffee-diplomacy, or the country’s long-promised “net-zero modelling” that “may has well have been written in crayon”, was released after the COP26 summit has basically wound up, didn’t actually represent a plan for net-zero and didn’t bother modelling the benefits of adapting to climate change, it was little wonder that when it came to the crunch the leaders of our first nation decided to commit us all to die atop of a mountain of coal in defence of business interests.

  • The Biggest Thing Since Double-Entry Book Keeping

    Of course when up against the wall, you can always rely on our largest corporations and governments to look for an easy way out. Warming oceans might be causing a special kind of gastro to grow in oysters and has made the Plague - yes, that The Plague - more likely to come back with a vengeance, but the majority of emissions reductions plans rely on fancy accounting tricks that ultimately allow those offering such credits to clear more land - if the promised forests get planted at all.

  • Whose Government Is It Anyway?

    And at the same time the federal government was negotiating the potential extinction of the human species at COP26 - or at least the collapse of society as increasingly unpredictable weather makes it impossible for the systems we have created to managed the production of food, sanitation and fire to function - it was revealed the NT government was busy negotiating with a private investment firm Fortune Agriculture to rewrite its water allocation lawns in their favour. Under the deal, the company sought a change to the law in order to allow it to bleed the land dry by extracting 40,000 megalitres of water to irrigate a fruit farm on Shingleton Station, in the middle of a semi-arid region.

  • The Quiet Australians Are All Jabbed

    Where once the distant threat of Islam was the cause celebre among Australia’s reactionary right, today the pub-fascist set have found a target closer to home in the form of vaccines and collective action. On Monday the hodge-podge collection of reactionaries which staged a mock hanging of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in Melbourne, followed up with a protest march in capital cities across the countries. Participants sporting InfoWars t-shirts and slogans about the illuminati unironically called for a “Nuremberg Trials” in response to the Victorian government’s pandemic law. Of course, none of this should come as any surprise in a culture that has spent the last four decades steeping in a Ayn Rand-esque political vision has caused warped ideas about “freedom” to trickle on down into wellness culture and inchoate conspiracy theories. Still, it is fun to consider what the reaction would have been if it were left-leaning protest groups which had staged the public hanging. No doubt the Prime Minister would have also greeted them with kid gloves.

  • Well, It’s Been Fun

    If we’re going down, might as well go down in a blaze of glory, no?

    (Image: Zach Wolfe)

Failing Upward

Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…

  • Look, we don’t want to tell anyone how to do their job - we here at Raising Hell can barely function at our own. All we’ll say to Channel 7’s Matthew Doran is that when your journalistic outfit forks out a million bucks (equivalent to say… 2004 X-boxes) to send you on the 23-hour flight to London to interview Adele, at least make the effort to listen to her latest album. What else are you doing on that flight? Watching the in-flight movie?

    Of course, despite making international headlines nothing will happen to the television reporter, just as nothing happened to him after another questionable lapse in judgement that occurred in 2018 when he was reportedly putting together a TV package about how Victorian neo-Nazi Blair Cottrell really doesn’t like African migrants for unspecified reasons. At the time of writing Doran has been suspended for a fortnight presumably until memory of this kerfuffle blows over — much to the chagrin of hard-working journalism grads and precariously employed freelancers who would quite literally step over his corpse for a chance to come in house.

    If there is one silver lining however, it’s that the Other Matthew Doran, a Canberra-based political reporter with the ABC, has actually listened to the new Adele album and would certainly have given a better interview - as comedian Nina Oyama delighted in pointing out.

Good Reads, Good Times

To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…

  • It’s an oldie, but I saw someone talking about this incredible work of journalism detail from Denise Nestor telling the story of how Stewart Resnick, a New Jersey-born lawyer bent rivers to his will, drank aquifers dry and flattened California’s landscape to build the world’s biggest-ever agricultural empire. It’s a big’un but incredibly well-written.
  • If you haven’t read it - and can get access to it - I strongly recommend this story in The Saturday Paper about the long career about Brian Fisher, a man who has spent the last two decades weaponising math to help the Australian government lie about climate change.
  • Another incredible read from the last fortnight is a review by James Butler in the London Review of Books titled, “A Coal Mine for Every Wildfire” that begins with the provocative question: “Where are all the ecoterrorists?”
  • Speaking of, a generous subscriber shared a link to this other London Review of Books piece by James Mann titled “Who Holds the Welding Road” that I can’t recommend enough if you’re interested in what’s possible from a green transition.
  • And if you wanted a light, fluffy read to keep your spirits up, check out this Guardian feature examining how Trump aligned-Republicans are positioning themselves to return the former US President to office in 2024 - whatever the outcome of the vote.

Before You Go (Go)…

  • Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal or through encrypted message Wickr Me on my account: rorok1990. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
  • And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!
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Jamie Larson
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