De rerum natura

As his first act as the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, voted in as the leader of the Liberal Party, has signed away consumer carbon tax. Six years prior, in 2019, he was a UN Special Envoy for Climate Change. In 2021, he launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. In March 2021, in an interview on CBC’s Rosemary Burton Live, he said,

There’s a recognition that the advice of scientists should be listened to. They advised on the risks of pandemics and we didn’t fully listen to them anywhere in the world. They’ve been advising for a long time of the risks on climate change. It is time to listen.

And instead, to repeat, his first act once he became prime minister, within hours of his swearing in ceremony, was to repeal consumer carbon tax. What gives?

In the last Australian federal election, held on the 21st May 2022, the incumbent Liberals, headed by Scott Morrison, and their coalition partners the Nationals, took a beating. Many voters defected to Labor, which won a majority of seats, the first majority since 2007. Others, especially in the Liberal heartlands of Australian suburbia, defected to a loose grouping of so-called teal independents; the colour teal supposedly invoking their blue (i.e. conservative) politics mixed in with a sprinkling of green.

Given the timing, the federal government’s handling of COVID-19 was, of course, on the ballot paper. However, much of the Australian response to COVID-19 was covered by state governments, not federal. The true issue at hand was Scott Morrison – in particular his shambolic lack of leadership during Black Summer and the ensuing floods. Morrison’s behaviour was hardly surprising, given that in 2017 he brought a lump of coal to parliament to instigate a self-induced show-and-tell, ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you.’ Yet when the worst fires Australia has ever seen raged, Morrison was found hiding in Hawaii.

A month prior to the election, on the 9th April 2022, I partook in Salvage, a community arts project held in Lithgow, a town in New South Wales circa 150 km west of Sydney. Audience and performers gathered together to come to terms with the fire, to grieve. Many had fought to save their property, to help neighbours, to support those most desperately in need; all had witnessed the devastation. A circle of women recreated their knitting of clothes for burnt koalas and other critters of the bush; recordings of local community members recalled their experiences during the aftermath; a huge burnt log lay in the middle of the town hall, nature’s charred carcass the focus of it all. No photos, videos or visual representations of fire were present. Songs were sung, poems were recited, flyers for a missing person were distributed, a photo of Scott Morrison bedecked in Hawaiian tourist attire grinning smugly from the strips of paper.

I had first bumped into one of Salvage’s organisers, Sue, around Christmas time in 2019 on a train in the UK. My partner and I expressed our reservations about our imminent move to Australia, given the then hellish conditions. Sue proceeded to show us hour-old photos of mushroom clouds, which did little to avail us of our worries. Once in Sydney, we waded through flooded streets, and in early 2020, Sue, together with James, another Salvage organiser, took us out to near Lithgow to see the black cliff faces, the landscape scorched as far as the eye could see. Later, I worked for a software company which provided mapping services for fire agencies in Australia. We were told to refrain from using any photos of Black Summer, due to the deep trauma of those months. Five Christmases after that chance train encounter, my partner gifted me Highway to Hell by Joëlle Gergis.

Highway to Hell is the 94th issue of Quarterly Essay, an Australian publication with not only a self-explanatory name, but also sufficient heft to affect the Australian national discourse. In Highway to Hell, Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, laments the willful ignorance of the Australian elite and public to the problem of climate change. Fact after fact is dispensed to bolster the reality too dire to confront. Even with the change in government, too many simply fluctuate between outright denial and sticking their heads in the sand. In 2024, Anthony Albanese, leader of the incumbent Labor party, chose to expand four coal mines. However, once flames start sucking the oxygen from our lungs, both denial and wishful thinking become less tenable coping strategies.

In 2016, fires surrounded Fort McMurray, the heart of Canada’s bitumen industry. In a press conference held on the 3rd May at 11:00 am, Darby Allen, the municipal fire chief, said, ‘People need to go to work: Mum needs to take the kids to school, Dad takes the guys to the ballgame afterwards – but just be cognisant that this is a serious situation.’ By 6:49 pm, much of Fort McMurray was on fire and there were evacuation orders for the entire town. By the evening, an interview with the CBC showed Allen as a changed man.

I – I would say it’s been the – it’s been the worst day of my career. And I am uh – you know, the whole uh – the people here are devastated. Everyone’s devastated. The community is gonna be devastated. This is going to go on; this is gonna take us a while to come back from, but we – we’ll come back.

We’ve had a devastatin’ day. Um – Fort McMurray has been overrun by wildfire.

Fire Weather by John Vaillant published in 2023 gives a blow-by-blow account of what came to be known as The Beast. (I thank Rob, a family friend, for the book recommendation.) Fire Weather constitutes three parts, Origin Stories, Fire Weather and Reckoning. The first part introduces the reader to the vistas and history of Alberta, and how bitumen, a tar-like substance which after much wrangling can potentially be turned into a usable fuel, came to be extracted, creating Mordor-like scars in the Earth north of Fort McMurray. The second part covers the fire: the shock, the incomprehension, the bravery, the fear. There are no prizes for correctly guessing what Reckoning is about. By repeatedly prefacing the Fort McMurray fire with humans’ capacity to destroy their habitats and ability to remain oblivious to imminent ruin, by the time Vaillant tells the story of 2016, readers are prepared for the inevitable. Yet the ferocity of the phenomenon still astounds. Even after Vaillant invokes the Lucretius problem, first coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – namely that a little river may seem to one, who has never seen a larger, the greatest – it remains difficult to grasp the scale. But the repeated examples are effective, especially when coupled with more simple thought experiments, reduced to more manageable sizes. (Particularly graphic was the idea of a Chevy Silverado’s exhaust being directed right back into the vehicle, which would kill the driver and all passengers within minutes. Directed into the driver’s living room, all would be dead within the hour.) The repeated foreshadowing followed by the horror means that by the time Reckoning comes around, it is impossible to downplay the severity of our lot. In late September 2015, seven months prior to the Fort McMurray Fire, then the governor of the Bank of England, the Albertan Mark Carney said, ‘The challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come… Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.’

‘How can we scientists get the message effectively across?’ seems to be the primary question which haunts Joëlle Gergis. With Fire Weather, John Vaillant shows a possible way. And to those who still refuse to listen, we must say, we have to embrace reality to change it effectively. To do otherwise is either cowardly or foolish.

C’est fous. C’est simple. C’est fous. Point final.

Mark Carney, it may be wise to listen to your own words. You may learn something.