Kimberley Flood disaster.
Vehicles cross between floodwater on Great Northern Highway at Roebuck Plains, between Broome and Port Hedland.
As northern WA reels from the aftermath of our worst floods ever, the south of our State is bone-dry and highly prone to major bushfires. The era of unnatural disasters is upon us.
In my 40 years in the emergency services, I’ve never seen anything like the extent and scale of damage that the flooding in northern WA has caused to communities, business, and infrastructure. Experts are saying that rebuilding could take years, and the cost of the disasters will continue to mount.
The science is clear: climate change, fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels, is driving a frightening increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather disasters. With an atmosphere that is warmer, wetter and packing more energy, tropical cyclones such as Ellie can become more intense and destructive, dumping more rainfall. It has been heartening to see our elected politicians acknowledging the facts too.
2022 will be remembered as the year of the Great Deluge, when record-breaking rain and floods lashed large parts of Eastern Australia, causing untold devastation for Australians and our economy. Climate change, driven by the burning of coal, oil and gas, was a major factor in the Great Deluge. It is consigning Australia to an era of climate disasters that we are not prepared for. This report is a stark warning that this is not over yet, and a call for all levels of government to speed up their emission reductions and disaster preparation efforts.The Great Deluge
Climate change also exacerbates the hot, dry conditions that lead to longer and more dangerous bushfire seasons — a bleak reality for towns in the south-west, which have been battling bushfires for months now.
The extraordinary tally of official disaster declarations for the country already this summer — 29 of those in our State alone — is eye-watering.
I worry about the increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events we face due to climate change, but what really keeps me up at night is the fact that our emergency services and communities are being overwhelmed.
This is partly because the scale and intensity of disasters is much worse than the relatively tamer environment emergency services were set up to deal with many decades ago. We’re still tackling these monsters as if it is the 1990s, not 2023. On top of that, our communities and legacy infrastructures are in the firing line and face difficulty dealing with the new reality.
That’s why we’ve seen, with increasing frequency, external agencies such as the Australian Defence Force and even the Surf Lifesavers brought in to help relief efforts.
The second reason I worry for the safety of Australians in this changing climate is that we’re increasingly seeing extreme weather disasters occur in quick succession, or even simultaneously, like the recent flooding and bushfires at either end of our State.
Mal Cronstedt is the former deputy commissioner of WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services
The south’s bushfire season is nowhere near over, nor is the wet season up north and risk of further extreme downpours this year. On any given day, emergency responses are challenging due to the huge distances in WA, and the remoteness of many communities. As weather extremes intensify, I don’t envy the tough decisions emergency services have to make about where to deploy limited personnel and resources.
I am part of a group of almost 40 former high ranking emergency chiefs who have been advocating to bring Australia’s disaster response into the 21st century. The Emergency Leaders for Climate Action recommend an immediate overhaul of our climate risk assessment models, more funding for emergency services, land use planning reforms, and building more disaster-proof infrastructure.
Redoubling our mitigation efforts through, for example, well planned and executed bushfire hazard reduction burns, are also critical to help keep our communities out of harm’s way.
But if we could choose just one thing, the single most important thing, to confront this mammoth challenge ahead of us, it’s strong, rapid action on climate change. It’s a no-brainer — just as you have to turn off the stove to stop a pot from boiling over, we absolutely must stop emissions and temperatures from rising to prevent disasters from getting worse.
This means urgently adopting renewable energy sources, phasing out fossil fuels, and working to decarbonise other sectors such as transport and the built environment.
When firies and their emergency services colleagues hear an alarm, they immediately leap into action to attend to the emergency, whatever it is. Now, we are sounding the alarm and calling for climate action — it’s time for business and politicians to respond with the urgency we need to avoid far more harm to our communities.
Mal Cronstedt is the former deputy commissioner of WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services and is a member of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action.
There is nothing that Davos loves more than a good buzzword, and in 2023 that buzzword was “polycrisis.”
The folks at this year’s World Economic Forum adopted the term after historian Adam Tooze popularized it in his inaugural Financial Times columnlast year. At its annual meeting last week, the WEF released its “Global Risks Report 2023,” warning that “eroding geopolitical cooperation will have ripple effects across the global risks landscape over the medium term, including contributing to a potential polycrisis of interrelated environmental, geopolitical and socioeconomic risks relating to the supply of and demand for natural resources.”
This warning generated a lot of hand-wringing on the narrow streets of Davos. Little wonder — a “polycrisis” sounds pretty bad! But it also sounds to some like a confusing and redundant neologism. In the opening Davos panel, historian Niall Ferguson rejected the term, explaining it as “just history happening.” In a bit of hot FT-on-FT action, columnist Gideon Rachman characterized polycrisis as one of his least favorite terms, asking, “Does it actually mean anything?”
As someone who has written a book about zombie apocalypses and taught a course about the end of the world, I have a smidgen more sympathy for the polycrisis concept. I think its proponents are trying to get at something more than just history happening. They are putting a name to the belief that a more interconnected, complex world is vulnerable to an interconnected, complex global catastrophe.
The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries
Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend – such as a stable climate, fertile soils, and a protective ozone layer. The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a playfully serious approach to framing that challenge, and it acts as a compass for human progress this century. Doughnut Economics
The report warns that even countries topping the SDSN’s SDG Index for Europe – Finland, Sweden, and Denmark – face significant challenges in achieving several SDGs, with progress stalling on many of the social and health indicators, including poverty, life expectancy, and unemployment. At the same time, it recognizes that the negative impacts of multiple crises have been “somewhat contained” compared to the rest of the world where financing constraints have been badly aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. SDGs
That is a legitimate concern. Just because the concept of a polycrisis is real, however, does not mean that the logic behind a polycrisis is ironclad. Some of it echoes 1970s concerns about resource depletion combined with an increasing population — in other words, neo-Malthusianism gussied up to sound fancy. A lot more of it can be reduced to concerns about climate change, which are real but not poly-anything. Those warnings about a polycrisis might be well-intentioned, but they also assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist.
The future will not be crisis-free by any stretch of the imagination — but the notion of a polycrisis might do more harm than good in attempting to get a grip on the systemic risks that threaten humanity.
There’s one more point here that’s relevant. Economists such as Branko Milanovic argue that flattening out growth—whether that’s “post-growth” or “de-growth”—is not going to be possible because people won’t accept it. But that’s not the choice. The choice is that either we end up with unmanaged decline, which would be catastrophic, or a managed levelling out of our economies, shaped by a shift in social values and expectations. We need some politicians who are willing to be honest about this. This article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.
The history of the idea of the polycrisis
As with many buzzwords foretelling despair, the origins of polycrisis can be blamed on the French.
In their 1999 book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium,French complexity theorist Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern warned of the “complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the planet.” Other academics began using the term in a similar way. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker adopted the term to characterize the cluster of negative shocks triggered by the 2008 financial crisis.
So far, so redundant — none of these initial references really seem to mean much beyond “A Big, Bad Catastrophe.” Tooze’s initial column and Substack post, however, referenced the work of political scientists Michael Lawrence, Scott Janzwood, and Thomas Homer-Dixon. They work at the Cascade Institute, a Canadian research center focusing on emergent and systemic risks. In a 2022 working paper, they provide the fullest etymology of “polycrisis” and what they mean by it.
So what the hell is a polycrisis? The quick-and-dirty answer is that it’s the concatenation of shocks that generate crises that trigger crises in other systems that, in turn, worsen the initial crises, making the combined effect far, far worse than the sum of its parts.
The longer answer requires some familiarity with how complex systems work. Complex systems can range from a nuclear power plant to Earth’s ecosystem. In tightly wound and complex systems, not even experts can be entirely sure how the inner workings of the system will respond to stresses and shocks. Those who study systemic and catastrophic risks have long been aware that crises in these systems are often endogenous — i.e., they often bubble up from within the system’s inscrutable internal workings.
For example, when Lehman Brothers declared Chapter 11 in September 2008, few observers understood that Lehman’s bankruptcy would cause panic in money market funds. That was a relatively risk-free asset class seemingly far removed from the subprime mortgage debt that felled Lehman.
Except the Reserve Primary Fund, the oldest money market fund in the country, had invested some of its assets at Lehman, which had enabled it to offer a slightly higher rate of return. With those investments frozen by Lehman’s bankruptcy, the Reserve Primary Fund had to “break the buck” and price its fund below a dollar — hitherto unthinkable for a fund that was seen as pretty secure. That caused credit markets everywhere to seize up, and the Great Recession unfolded. The crisis cascaded so quickly that it was impossible for regulators and central banks to get out in front of the disaster wave.
The folks who warn about a polycrisis argue that it is not just components within a single system that are tightly interconnected. It is the systems themselves — health, geopolitics, the environment — that are increasingly interacting and tightly coupled. Therefore, if one system malfunctions, the crisis might trigger other systems to fail, leading to catastrophic negative feedback effects across multiple systems and affecting the entire world. Or, as Lawrence, Janzwood, and Homer-Dixon put it in their paper:
The core concern of the concept is that a crisis in one global system has knock-on effects that cascade (or spill over) into other global systems, creating or worsening crises there. Global crises happen less and less in isolation; they interact with one another so that one crisis makes a second more likely and deepens their overall harms. The polycrisis concept thus highlights the causal interaction of crises across global systems.
Think of rising commodity prices triggering the Arab Spring in 2010. Or think of the vicissitudes of the Covid-19 pandemic helping to trigger both the stresses in global supply chains and social dysfunction. These are examples of one systemic crisis generating another systemic crisis. Imagine all the myriad crises that climate change can trigger — from food scarcity to new pandemics to a surge in migration. The Cascade Institute paper defines a polycrisis as when three or more systems wind up being in crisis at the same time.
Given all the interconnections in the current moment, a polycrisis is not hard to conceive. To contemplate it is to be overwhelmed by catastrophic possibilities. Here, look at Tooze’s chart:
Or, if you prefer sci-fi narratives as a means to better comprehension, watch this clip from Amazon Prime’s The Peripheral, which talks about a cluster of events called “The Jackpot” in a way that sounds awfully similar to a polycrisis.
On the sociopolitical side of the ledger, it is noteworthy that as societies emerge from the pandemic, indicators of social dysfunction might start to subside. Political populism has actually been trending downward for the past year or so. Even skeptics of democracy have noticed that autocracies have been facing greater challenges as of late than democracies.
Malthusian arguments rest on producers being unable to keep pace with growing demand, and modern history suggests that the Malthusian logic has been proven wrong time and again. Homer-Dixon in particular has been a strong proponent of neo-Malthusian arguments, positing for decades that resource scarcity would lead to greater international violence. So far, the scholarly research testing his claim has found littleempiricalsupport for the hypothesis.
Predicting the unpredictable
The deeper flaw in the polycrisis logic is the presumption that one systemic crisis will inexorably lead to negative feedback effects that cause other systems to tip into crisis.
If this assumption does not hold, then the whole logic of a single polycrisis falls apart. To their credit, the Cascade Institute authors acknowledge that this might not happen, but they posit: “it seems more likely that causal interactions between systemic crises will worsen, rather than diminish, the overall emergent impacts.”
At first glance, this seems like a plausible assumption to make. Remember, however, that the proponents of a polycrisis also assert that the systems under stress are highly complex, leading to unpredictable cause-and-effect relationships. If that is true, then presuming that one systemic crisis would automatically exacerbate stresses in other systems seems premature at best and skewed at worst.
Indeed, over the last year there have been at least two examples of one systemic crisis actually lessening stress on another system.
China’s increasingly centralized autocracy generated a socioeconomic disaster in the form of “zero Covid” lockdowns. Xi Jinping kept that policy in place long after it made any sense, accidentally throttling China’s economy. The timing of China’s lockdown was fortuitous, however, as stagnant Chinese demand helped prevent an inflationary spiral from getting any worse. China’s exit from zero-Covid will likely also be countercyclical, jump-starting economic growth at a time when other regions tip into recession.
Another weird, fortuitous interaction has been the one between climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Europe aided Ukraine and resisted Russia’s blatant, illegal actions, Russia retaliated by cutting off energy exports. Many were concerned that Russia’s counter-sanctions would make this winter extremely hard and expensive for Europe.
Climate change may have provided a weird geopolitical assist to Europe, however. The warming climate is likely connected to Europe’s extremely temperate fall and winter. That, in turn, has required less electricity for heating, leaving the continent with plenty of energy reserves to last the winter. Russia’s ability to wreak havoc on the European economy has been circumscribed.
None of this is to say that systemic crises cannot exacerbate each other. Just because a polycrisis has not happened yet does not mean one is not on the horizon. Just as one buys insurance to guard against low-probability, high-impact outcomes, policymakers and elements of civil society need to guard against worst-case scenarios.
As a term of art, however, “polycrisis” distracts more than it adds. It mostly seems like a device to make people care about the Really Bad Things that climate change can do, without turning people off by warning them yet again about the hazards of climate change.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School and is the author of Drezner’s World.
Although United States President Joe Biden vowed on the campaign trail to phase out federal leasing for fossil fuel extraction, his administration approved more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years than the previous Donald Trump administration did in 2017 and 2018
According to the Center for Biological Diversity’s analysis of federal data released on January 25, the Biden White House greenlit 6430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in 2021 and 2022 — a 4.2% increase over Trump’s administration, which rubber-stamped 6172 drilling permits in its first two years.
Today I tabled our ‘Fight for Australia’s Coastline’ bill in the Senate – a bill to permanently protect King Island, the Otways/12 Apostles and PEP-11 from new oil and gas exploration.
“Two years of runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership by President Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland,” said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires phasing out fossil fuel extraction, but instead we’re still racing in the opposite direction.”
Of the drilling authorised so far by the Biden administration, nearly 4000 permits have been approved for public lands in New Mexico, followed by 1223 in Wyoming and several hundred each in Utah, Colorado, California, Montana, and North Dakota.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, these “Biden-approved drilling permits will result in more than 800 million US tons of estimated equivalent greenhouse gas pollution, or the annual climate pollution from about 217 coal-fired power plants.”
Just last week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told the elites gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos that “fossil fuel producers and their enablers are still racing to expand production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival”.
Australia: New coal and gas projects will erase Albo's climate gains several times over | RenewEconomy https://t.co/WHogPcPA8j
Reams of scientific evidence show that pollution from the world’s existing fossil fuel developments is enough to push temperature rise well beyond 1.5°C above the preindustrial baseline. Averting calamitous levels of global heating necessitates ending investment in new oil and gas projects and phasing out extraction to keep 40% of the fossil fuel reserves at currently operational sites underground.
As a presidential candidate, Biden pledged to ban new oil and gas lease sales on public lands and waters and to require federal permitting decisions to weigh the social costs of additional planet-heating pollution. Although Biden issued an executive order suspending new fossil fuel leasing during his first week in office, his administration’s actions since then have run roughshod over earlier promises, worsening the deadly climate crisis that the White House claims to be serious about mitigating.
“The president and interior secretary have the power to avoid a climate catastrophe, but they need to change course rapidly.”
The US Department of Interior (DOI) argued on August 24, 2021 that it was required to resume lease auctions because of a preliminary injunction issuedby US Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee who ruled in favor of a group of Big Oil-funded Republican attorneys general that sued Biden over his moratorium. In a memorandum of opposition filed on the same day, however, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted that while Doughty’s decision prevented the Biden administration from implementing its pause, it did not compel the DOI to hold new lease sales, “let alone on the urgent timeline specified in plaintiffs’ contempt motion.”
Just days after Biden called global warming “an existential threat to human existence” and declared Washington’s ostensible commitment to decarbonisation at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the DOI ignored the DOJ’s legal advice and proceeded with Lease Sale 257. The nation’s largest-ever offshore auction, which saw more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico offered to the highest-bidding oil and gas giants, was blockedin January 2022 by a federal judge who wrote that the Biden administration violated environmental laws by not adequately accounting for the likely consequences of resulting emissions.
Despite Biden’s pledge to cut US greenhouse gas pollution in half by the end of this decade, the DOI’s Bureau of Land Management held lease sales in several Western states in 2022, opening up tens of thousands of acres of public land to fossil fuel production. The DOI has so far announced plans for three new onshore oil and gas lease sales in 2023. The first will offer more than 261,200 acres of public land in Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming to the highest-bidding drillers. The second and third will put a total of 95,411 acres of public land in Nevada and Utah on the auction block.
In addition, the Biden administration published a draft proposal last summer that, if implemented, would permit up to 11 new oil and gas lease sales for drilling off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico over a five-year period.
The president’s 2021 freeze on new lease auctions was meant to give the DOI time to analyse the “potential climate and other impacts associated with oil and gas activities on public lands or in offshore waters.” Nevertheless, the agency’s long-awaited review of the federal leasing program effectively ignored the climate crisis, instead proposing adjustments to royalties, bids, and bonding in what environmental justice campaigners described as a “shocking capitulation to the needs of corporate polluters.”
The US Geological Survey has estimated that roughly 25% of the country’s total carbon dioxide emissions and 7% of its overall methane emissions can be attributed to fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters. According to peer-reviewed research, a nationwide prohibition on federal oil and gas leasing would slash carbon dioxide emissions by 280 million US tons per year.
The Biden administration “has not enacted any policies to significantly limit drilling permits or manage a decline of production to avoid 1.5°C degrees of warming”, the Center for Biological Diversity lamented. The White House even supported the demands of right-wing Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (West Virginia) — Congress’ leading recipient of fossil fuel industry cash and a long-time coal profiteer — to “add provisions to the Inflation Reduction Actthat will lock in fossil fuel leasing.
The Australia Institute has slammed the proposed expansion of a New South Wales coal mine, saying the cost of emissions to the climate would exceed any economic benefit. https://t.co/VIf23jvACZ
— AsTomGoesBy 🌏⚖️#SecularSociety (@AsTimeGoesBy0) January 25, 2023
On numerous occasions, including earlier this month, progressive lawmakersand advocacy groups have implored the Biden administration to use its executive authority to phase out oil and gas production on public lands and in offshore waters. A petition submitted last year came equipped with a regulatory framework to wind down oil and gas production by 98% by 2035. According to the coalition that drafted it, the White House can achieve this goal by using long-dormant provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act, Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and the National Emergencies Act.
“The president and interior secretary have the power to avoid a climate catastrophe, but they need to change course rapidly,” McKinnon said Wednesday. “Strong executive action can meet the climate emergency with the urgency it demands, starting with phasing out fossil fuel production on public lands and waters.”
The weather event that caused floods across much of the country is breaking down, but it may soon be replaced by an El Niño pattern of intense heatwaves and drought. By Joëlle Gergis.
My latest in the @SatPaper: ‘For communities still struggling to get back on their feet after repeated natural disasters, many Australians no longer need a weather forecast to know which way the wind is blowing’. https://t.co/Gyc5x2HzOJ
The Bureau of Meteorology’s seasonal forecast is now an anxiously awaited event; we have become accustomed to bracing ourselves for news of what type of natural disaster is up next.
As the end of the 2022-23 summer approaches, the sustained La Niña event in the Pacific that has drenched much of the country since spring 2020 is finally starting to weaken, with neutral conditions predicted to return by autumn. But given that the northern monsoon is currently under way, we aren’t in the clear just yet. The tropical cyclone season officially runs until the end of April, so the likelihood of heavy rainfall events and associated flooding is still high. Historically many of the most destructive floods in Australian history have occurred in February and March as ocean temperatures reach their summer peak. This was graphically illustrated by the east coast floods of 2022, which saw the disastrous inundation of the northern New South Wales town of Lismore. A study of past flooding along the east coast since 1860 reported that the highest death tolls from freshwater flooding historically occur in February, so emergency services have a nerve-racking month ahead.
2022 will be remembered as the year of the Great Deluge, when record-breaking rain and floods lashed large parts of Eastern Australia, causing untold devastation for Australians and our economy. Climate change, driven by the burning of coal, oil and gas, was a major factor in the Great Deluge. It is consigning Australia to an era of climate disasters that we are not prepared for. This report is a stark warning that this is not over yet, and a call for all levels of government to speed up their emission reductions and disaster preparation efforts. The Great Deluge
The 2022-23 wet season has already seen above-average rainfall across much of northern Australia. So far, we have witnessed this in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia and northern Queensland in January, with record-breaking flooding in some regions already having major impacts on communities and critical infrastructure such as roads and housing. Given that the northern monsoon still has another three months to run, recovery operations can’t begin before then, leaving communities in yet another region of Australia displaced and traumatised by a seemingly unending sequence of natural disasters that are increasingly becoming the new normal in our country.
During the wet season, we typically expect a heightened risk of flooding, damaging winds and destructive storm surges across Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. When La Niña events occur, our region experiences an above-average number of tropical cyclones and other severe low-pressure systems. Right now, warmer-than-average ocean temperatures are present across northern Australia, especially in the Coral Sea, where conditions recorded in December 2022 were the second hottest since records began in 1900. The warmer the ocean is, the more moisture is available to intensify cyclonic systems that naturally occur during the wet season. Because there is more heat trapped in the ocean from the burning of fossil fuels, normal seasonal storms are becoming more amplified.
Climate Change, driven by the burning of coal, oil and gas is supercharging our weather systems. While climate change affects all Australians, the risks are not shared equally. In the most extreme instances, areas may become uninhabitable. Uninsurable Nation
While tropical cyclones are predominantly confined to the northern parts of the country, powerful systems can also affect areas further south as decaying low-pressure systems. For example, on March 28, 2017, Cyclone Debbie made landfall at Airlie Beach in the Whitsunday region of north Queensland, weakening as it travelled south as a tropical low, causing severe flooding and infrastructural damage all the way down to south-east Queensland and northern NSW. The storm resulted in an estimated $1.7 billion in insurance claims, with the Insurance Council of Australia ranking it as the second-most expensive cyclone in the nation’s history, after Cyclone Tracy in 1974.With the impacts of the Black Summer bushfires still relatively fresh in our collective memory, the possibility of another severe bushfire season – in a climate that has warmed 1.47 degrees since 1910 – is a terrifying prospect.
The decaying tropical cyclone hit the Lismore region hard, with the Wilsons River rising to near-record heights. In contrast to the historic floods of 1954 and 1974 that arose from sustained La Niña conditions, almost all of the extreme rainfall from ex-tropical Cyclone Debbie fell within 24 hours. The heaviest rainfall in the Wilsons River catchment was registered at Terania Creek, which received a torrential downpour of 619 millimetres in just 24 hours.
If an extreme rainfall event of a similar magnitude were to occur this year, the consequences for a town such as Lismore, which is still trying to recover from repeated flooding in 2022, would be catastrophic.
‘I’ve been waiting for an IPCC scientist to write this book. Where does someone charged with delivering the globe the stark existential truths find their hope; how do they navigate a path forward? How wonderful that Joelle, a nature lover with a poet’s sensibility, has been the one to do it.’ Sarah Wilson, author of This One Wild and Precious Life
Acknowledging that the world as we know it is coming apart is an act of courage. If I live to look back at this troubled time, I want to say that I did all that I could, that I was on the right side of history. The question is, do you want to be part of the legacy that restores our faith in humanity? Humanity’s Moment
Human-caused global warming is resulting in changes to historically defined seasonal patterns and natural climate cycles – they are now operating under conditions 1.2 degrees warmer than they were during pre-industrial times. About 90 per cent of heat accumulated from the burning of fossil fuels has been absorbed by the world’s oceans, resulting in profound changes in the Earth’s climate. Ocean heat content – as measured by the energy absorbed by the upper 2000 metres – reached a new all-time high last year, extending the run of record heat observed since 2019.
This build-up of excess heat is influencing the behaviour of natural patterns of weather and climate variability in complex ways that scientists are trying to describe as new conditions unfold. In 2021 the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Sixth Assessment Report” concluded that it is now an “established fact” that human activity has led to an increase in the frequency and intensity of weather extremes such as severe heatwaves and heavy rainfall events in many parts of the world, including Australia. Understanding the interactions between human-caused global warming and naturally occurring cycles operating in the Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans is an area of active research that influences our ability to accurately predict the conditions we experience from season to season in our region.
Over the past three years, an intensification of easterly trade winds pushed warm surface waters into the western Pacific, resulting in prolonged La Niña conditions. While protracted La Niña episodes lasting two or more years are less common than standard events that usually last about nine to 18 months, these longer sequences have occurred before. For example, the most notable wet periods in Australian history took place during the protracted La Niña episodes of 1954-1957, 1973-1976 and 1998-2001. It’s worth knowing that there is evidence from geologic records to suggest that protracted La Niña and El Niño events can last as long as three to seven years and, in rare instances, as long as a decade. While these indirect measures of past events, derived from coral and tree-ring records, may be less accurate than direct ocean temperature measurements, they provide our best estimates of events in the pre-industrial period, when instrumental weather observations were not possible.
Currently there is a 50-50 chance that an El Niño will develop by spring. When La Niña conditions decay, it is possible that a relaxation or reversal of the easterly trade winds could release the accumulated heat trapped in deeper layers of the western Pacific Ocean, triggering an El Niño event. When this happens, the ocean surface releases more heat into the atmosphere, with the associated rainbands shifting east. This causes hot and dry weather to prevail over Australia as our rainfall is displaced towards the Pacific Islands. During these events, there is a higher risk of intense heatwaves, bushfires and drought conditions over much of the country.
While it is still too early to predict ocean temperatures in the second half of this year, historical records indicate that it is not uncommon for El Niño events to develop following La Niña events, and vice versa. This “phase flipping” has happened several times in the past. For example, the protracted La Niñas of 1954-1957 and 1973-1976 were followed by El Niño events in 1957-1958 and 1977-1978, respectively. After sustained wet conditions that stimulated prolific growth of vegetation, both of these El Niños resulted in major bushfires in places such as NSW during the years 1957 and 1977.
With the impacts of the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020 still relatively fresh in our collective memory, the possibility of another severe bushfire season – in a climate that has warmed 1.47 degrees since 1910 – is a terrifying prospect. Given we have just been through three very wet years, these conditions won’t develop overnight, but prolonged heat will eventually dry out the landscape, priming it to burn.
Even if an El Niño doesn’t establish this year, it is only a matter of time until one does. As these naturally occurring events tend to develop every two to seven years, and our last major one was in 2015-2016, the pendulum will eventually swing back towards hot and dry conditions. Recently released analysis of global temperatures shows that 2022 was the sixth-warmest year since global observations began in 1880 – even during La Niña conditions, which typically cool surface temperatures. In fact, the trend in global warming now means that La Niñas are hotter today than El Niños were 30 years ago.
It’s a confronting reality to take in. Since global temperatures are steadily rising – the 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2010 – the presence of an El Niño will almost certainly set new records as the planet’s relentless warming trend continues.
For communities still struggling to get back on their feet after repeated natural disasters, many Australians no longer need a weather forecast to know which way the wind is blowing.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 28, 2023 as “La Niña’s endgame”.
A spate of articles have argued protection of the environment is incompatible with population and economic growth. But they do not address how to stop this growth and its public acceptability, nor how more determined efforts to protect the environment can succeed.
Over the last few weeks Pearls and Irritations has posted several articles asserting that continuing economic and population growth is incompatible with environmental sustainability on the planet. According to Mark Diessendorf if this growth continues it is likely to lead to the “collapse of civilisation within a few decades”.
The one dissident voice has been Roger Beale, a former Secretary of the Australian Government Environment Department. Beale argues that where governments take action to protect and improve the environment, that of itself encourages innovation that limits further environmental damage. As examples, Beale cites action to replace ozone depleting substances, and the drop in the cost of renewable energy so that it will replace carbon pollution.
I too agree with Beale but repeating Beale’s arguments will probably not be any more successful in satisfying the critics. On the other hand, my problem with the critics, is that while I agree with them about the importance of protecting the environment, they offer no realistic alternative set of policies that could limit population growth and/or economic growth. I will demonstrate that conclusion by considering first, future population growth, and second, the implications of the widespread human desire for further improvement in material living standards.
Future population growth
It is next to impossible for governments to control population growth. A partial exception has been China. It brutally enforced a ‘one child’ policy, but it eventually realised it risked growing old before it became rich. Now that individual families are allowed to make their own decisions about how many children they have China’s women have disappointed the government by failing to lift the birth rate, and its population has now started to decline.
Most importantly, the key to voluntarily reducing birth rates, besides access to birth control, is women’s education and empowerment, and a welfare safety net to look after people in their old age. All are highly correlated with economic growth. Consequently, almost all developed economies birth rates are now well below the net reproduction rate necessary just to stabilise their populations. That in turn means that most of their populations can be expected to decline too.
That low birth rate is also true of Australia, but our population will continue to increase so long as immigration continues around its present level. However, Australian immigration represents a redistribution of the global population and does not add to that total.
In sum, to the extent population growth is a source of environmental pressures, it is likely that this problem will largely resolve itself over time in response to economic growth –in the developed countries first, and then others as their living standards rise.
The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend – such as a stable climate, fertile soils, and a protective ozone layer. The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a playfully serious approach to framing that challenge, and it acts as a compass for human progress this century. Doughnut Economics
Material living standards
As Beale said, “We are simply never going to be able to convince humans that they should not strive for better material living conditions.” It is all very well for other commentators, who are comfortably off in the top quarter of the income distribution, and own their home, to say no further increase in living standards is necessary. But such views are very much a minority.
Living standards are always a key election issue even in a high-income country like Australia, with ‘struggling families’ demanding more. And of course, at least half the world’s population has living standards well below what is acceptable in the developed economies.
Most of the other articles in this series did not address how governments could reconcile the demands for improved material living standards with their demand for zero economic growth. In fairness, Diessendorf did however address this key issue, asserting that instead of trying to convince humans to forego their aspirations for higher living standards through economic growth, “some redistribution of wealth and income, both between and within countries, … could allow better living standards for the vast majority of people.”
I agree, in principle, redistribution could meet peoples’ aspirations for improved living standards. But surely it is incumbent upon those who make this argument to then consider the scale of redistribution necessary and how practically it could be achieved. Otherwise proclaiming that the environment can be saved by redistribution is a diversion and not a solution.
But when we look at some facts, in Australia the highest quintile (the top 20%) in the distribution of equivalised disposable household income has an income 5.05 times the income of the lowest quintile. Whilst internationally, Australian GDP per capita is 289% of the world average.
That means that if redistribution in Australia was to give the two bottom quintiles of households the same average disposable income as the middle third quintile, then the disposable incomes of the top two quintiles would need to be cut by another quarter, over and above the redistribution that the top two quintiles are already paying for through the existing tax system. And even after that redistribution, the top 20% would still have an average household disposable income that was almost twice that of the bottom 60%.
While, a major redistribution of this order might produce a fairer and more cohesive society, how do we achieve it in a world where we cannot even stop stage 3 of the tax cuts?
Similarly, if the alternative to continuing economic growth is redistribution to produce international income equality, then Australia’s contribution could reduce the value of the GDP Australia retained to not much more than a third of its present value per person. Again, that would represent a massive loss of living standards for each and every Australian.
In other words, it is extremely doubtful that any government, let alone governments collectively, could achieve or would want to achieve the scale of redistribution necessary to satisfy the material aspirations of all populations.
Conclusion
But if redistribution is not the realistic alternative to more economic growth to satisfy peoples’ aspirations for higher living standards then there is no alternative to further government regulation to protect the environment along the lines that the Albanese Government is proposing.
I appreciate the argument against that approach is that insufficient progress towards environmental protection has been achieved so far. But that is an argument for trying harder and taking more difficult decisions to stop particularly harmful activities, rather than stopping all further population and economic growth.
Furthermore, we are making progress. An outstanding Australian example is the take-up of renewable energy, where for the first time in the last December quarter renewable energy accounted for more of the East Coast electricity generation than black coal.
Globally progress in limiting carbon emissions is also being made. Back in 2013 only 20 jurisdictions had a price on carbon of just US$0.67 per tonne, covering just 8% of global emissions. By the end of 2022, the number of jurisdictions had risen to 58, accounting for 22.5% of global emissions, and the price was around US$7.77 per tonne – almost 8 times higher than 2013.
But this is also an example of where more can and should be done. For carbon pricing to wean us off fossil fuels, the IMF has calculated that the carbon price needs to be around US$75 by the end of this decade, while at the end of last year the world’s average price was only around US$5.29.
The main problem is that (i) too many countries (including Australia) still do not have a mandated carbon price, and (ii) most of the world’s emissions – from land clearing, cars, and industry – are pumped into the atmosphere without any cost to the polluter.
So, we all need to do more. But pricing carbon and replacing it with other non-polluting forms of energy is manageable, and certainly much more readily accomplished than massive redistribution of incomes, both within and between countries.
To the extent that initiatives to protect the environment come at a cost to economic activity, and that is not always the case (cf the lower costs of renewable energy), that extra cost will lower material living standards, but by nowhere near as much as trying to stop all economic growth. Reforms should therefore focus on that relatively small extra cost that we should be prepared to pay to protect the environment.
In short: where there is the necessary will, there is a way to protect the environment without resorting to measures that will never gain public acceptance and are unnecessary.
Michael Keating is a former Secretary of the Departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Finance and Employment, and Industrial Relations. He is presently a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.
We’ve all heard about the global push to cap temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which scientists agree is critical to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. But this goal alone is not enough to safeguard humanity from the harmful consequences of a warming climate, diminishing biodiversity and increasingly degraded ecosystems. To ensure those most vulnerable do not take the brunt of these impacts, climate plans must also include environmental justice targets, according to seminal research on the topic.
The Earth Commission, an international team of natural and social scientists and five working groups of additional experts, was formed in 2019 in an effort to create “the first holistic attempt to scientifically define and quantify a safe and just corridor for people and planet,” according to the organization.
Last week at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, the Commission announced the upcoming launch of its first piece of research, which it describes as the first quantitative, science-based attempt to factor justice into the way we understand the environment and act to protect it.
The research, which will be published in the coming months, defines what the Commission calls “safe and just Earth System Boundaries.” Researchers liken these boundaries to the 1.5-degree cap for climate, but for a much broader set of environmental factors that underpin the stability of societies, economies and human well-being.
“By centering justice at its heart, this new science represents a quantum leap in our ability to understand Earth’s capacity to sustain life, and the role we humans play as guardians of our only home and each other,” Johan Rockström and Joyeeta Gupta, two of the three co-chairs of the Commission and lead authors of the research, wrote in a blog last week.
The world is on a collision course with 1.5 degrees Celsius
To say we as a global community have our work cut out for us is an understatement. Even as researchers with the Earth Commission challenge countries, localities and companies to think more broadly with their environmental plans, we’re already falling short of the primary target we all agreed upon: the push to cap temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius under the globally ratified Paris Agreement on climate change.
According to some estimates, a strong El Niño pattern could push the world past the 1.5-degree threshold as soon as next year. Researchers warn the results could be catastrophic.
“If the world breaches 1.5C, we are likely to trigger at least five tipping points, including the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet and loss of the world’s tropical coral reef systems,” Rockström and Gupta wrote in their blog. “This will be devastating for future generations. It will literally change the world, and yet every month we use 1 percent of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5C.”
Environmental justice targets are needed — not only for the most vulnerable, but for everyone
U.N. research found that 90 percent of deaths from natural disasters over a 20-year period from 1996 to 2015 occurred in low- and middle-income countries. Further, people in lower-income countries are more likely to depend on nature for their livelihoods, leaving them more vulnerable as ecosystems degrade.
It’s factors like these that drove the formation of the Earth Commission and the push from researchers in favor of environmental justice targets. “Planetary stability is not possible without a justice approach,” Gupta, a professor of environment and development at the University of Amsterdam, told the Guardian.
The so-called Earth System Boundaries defined in the research seek to maintain a stable environment while setting minimum levels of access to resources like food, water and energy that ensure a “dignified life” for all.
“The initial papers are expected to launch a debate about the fairest as well as the safest way to use the planet’s remaining space for development,” observed Jonathan Watts, global environment editor of the Guardian. “Or in the cases where boundaries have already been crossed, to minimize impacts.”
The researchers underscore that establishing environmental justice targets is not a form of charity from rich to poor. Rather, environmental justice targets are critical to protect people all over the world — and future generations.
“This breakthrough science, which moves beyond climate, can be operationalized by everyone,” Rockström and Gupta wrote. “If we do nothing, or the bare minimum at this pivotal moment, we and our children — even if they are wealthy — will live in a danger zone.”
“I think we have to see that something is dying,” Michelle Furrer, the manager of a Swiss guesthouse, told The New York Times, looking out at the rain as it washed away what little snow had accumulated in the alpine ski resort of Sattel-Hochstuckli. “We have to accept that, and then we can try to build — to find something else.”
BY MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS
"I think we have to see that something is dying" 💔
The innkeeper’s comments were not that different from what needed to be said down the road at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, too, the recognition is dawning that the war in Ukraine and other geopolitical worries, post-pandemic economic disruptions and the ongoing threat of climate change were all exposing something fundamentally wrong about the world economy and how it is structured. The question is how many decision-makers will actually accept that fact, and then “try to build — to find something else.” The economic ministers may prove to be less serious than the innkeeper.”
The annual meeting brings finance ministers and major players in the world economy to the glitzy, insanely expensive Swiss resort. There, as titans are wont to do, they strategize about how to manage the future.
“In its most promising light, Davos can be a place to build consensus on solutions for global challenges like poverty, inequality and climate change,” says Eric LeCompte, executive director of JubileeUSA, a religious advocacy group that seeks to address the structural causes of poverty and inequality. “The dark side of the World Economic Forum is that it is self-selecting and largely represents the voices of the super-rich. Many people who attend are not elected and come from extremes on the right and the left. The actual voices of the most affected by poverty, inequality and climate change are largely absent.”
Honesty is the key word for Rupert Read’s new book Do You Want to Know the Truth? Rarely is this book what one would consider ‘light’ reading. Collecting some of Read’s most prominent writings over the last few years with an original introduction and conclusion which serve to tie the writings together, Read delivers perhaps his most damning account of the coming future of climate chaos, yet does so with compassion and a call to action so forceful that the reader can’t help but be motivated to be part of the change we so desperately need. Read challenges you from the first few pages and asks you a single question – do you really want to know the truth? If the answer is ‘yes,’ as it must and will be for a great many people, then you will have to deal with the pandora’s box that comes with confronting the depressing truths of climate change. Indeed, pandora’s box is an apt metaphor for this book. After agreeing to confront the truth the reader will go through a slew of difficult chapters that will challenge the outlook of even the most infectious of optimists. Nevertheless, Read makes sure you are left with one thing: hope. A commendable strength of this book is that it is written with sympathy and empathy from a man who clearly wishes that his words weren’t true. The subject of climate degradation is a difficult one to discuss, and indeed that is why so many people willingly ignore it or at least don’t confront the difficult repercussions of it, and Read knows this. The result is that the reader is not left alone to confront the most horrifying of truths; the author is aware of the hurtful nature of confronting climate reality, and is always sure to recommend action so as to not to leave the reader in a state of despair. Indeed, often Read recounts his personal struggles in facing up to ecological collapse, and this empathetic writing style acts as a companion to a reader who may be realising the dire nature of our epoch for the first time. Discussions around our climate-change-impacted future are extremely difficult to have, but they are also so vital. This book offers a resource that could encroach the subject to people who have so far avoided it precisely because it is sympathetically written. The writing is stark, as can be expected given the subject matter, but the real triumph of this book is Read’s ability to seek out causes for hope in a sea of hopelessness. Where others could easily fall into paralysed nihilism or despair, especially after chapters like “why I had to tell my students that I fear for them” and “what else would you have me do,” Read urges us to recognise that an honest reflection of climate collapse could be an invigorating tool for advancing the global climate movement. Indeed, Read recognises that a central tenet of organisations such as Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for a Future was their call to tell the truth, unabated and unabridged, to the public. The success of those organisations lends weight to the argument that truth-telling has a real power to cut through the endless tirades of rubbish espoused by politicians and world leaders and inspire real change. If you agree with Read’s synopsis of the situation, then you are faced with another question; why isn’t this being treated as an emergency? Read documents government responses to other emergencies such as the COVID pandemic or the Russian invasion of Ukraine showing the abundance of resources that can be mobilised at short notice if the situation is treated with the appropriate gravitas. The issue is a lack of will from governments to face up to the climate emergency and take the appropriate actions. Indeed, Read argues we should stop referring to it as an ‘emergency’ until we are ready to treat it as such. The trick, then, is to be able to convince governments to view climate change with the same level of importance as these other emergencies, and to do this you need the mass mobilisation of the public, which Read also explores and advocates for. It is easy to answer ‘no’ to Read’s question of whether you want to know the truth. It would be lovely if we could bury our heads in the sand, pretend that climate chaos is not here or does not affect us, and not open the pandora’s box of climate honesty, but in the end we must face up to our duty as responsible citizens to confront the truth, because only from such truth can we decide where to go next. Herein lies the importance of this book; it’s not one to curl up in front of the fire with this Christmas, it’s not a page-turner thriller where you can’t wait to find out what happens next, it’s not comfortable reading. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is uncomfortable reading, because the truth is uncomfortable, but that’s precisely why it needs confronting. Do You Want to Know the Truth is a vitally important piece. To stand staring into our future which will be undoubtably worsened by climate breakdown can be intimidating and unnerving, but to confront the truth is also essential and potentially liberating. If you can bravely answer ‘yes’ to the title and accept the whirlwind that comes with it because you believe deep down that knowing the truth is the right thing to do, then this book is for you. It is a rare piece where the insights within may just change who you are and what you are willing to do. Do You Want to Know the Truth is available as an Ebook for free on a pay-what-you-want basis.
There was some movement on climate change. A coalition of trade ministers at the meeting announced some agreements on aligning trade policy with sustainable development goals. “As trade ministers, we need to deliver both economic results and sustainable results … we should have done this years ago, but this is the time for action, and it’s time to start these sorts of coalitions,” Julio José Prado, Ecuador’s production minister, told The Washington Post. He called the effort “way overdue.”
Others worried that not enough is being done. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres denounced fossil fuel companies in fierce terms, saying the corporations are “racing to expand production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival.”
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was even more emphatic than Guterres, saying, “We are right now in Davos where basically the people who are mostly fueling the destruction of the planet, the people who are at the very core of the climate crisis, the people who are investing in fossil fuels etcetera, etcetera and yet somehow these are the people that we seem to rely on solving our problems.”
LeCompte also thinks more attention needs to be paid to implementing the global minimum corporate tax. “Currently the developing world loses about a trillion dollars a year because of corruption and tax evasion and tax avoidance. Curbing global tax avoidance and evasion is critical for getting countries the revenues they need to build infrastructure, end poverty and address climate change,” he told me. “We’ve made strides on moving Congress to pass legislation that can help stop global tax evasion and corruption. We moved the G20 to agree on global corporate minimum tax. While the G20 global minimum corporate tax agreement is really critical, we need to increase the tax rate and we need to move forward implementation.”
Not all the news from Davos was grim. It appears the crypto bubble has burst. “Last May, the dressed-up shop fronts that line both sides of the Promenade street running through the Swiss ski resort were dominated by crypto firms, rolling in bitcoin,” reported Reuters. “Now there are just a handful and the executives who have made it to Davos have swapped their hoodies for blazers, despite sub-zero temperatures outside”
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said, “Bitcoin is a hyped-up fraud, it’s a pet rock.”
The problem with Davos is that we need a global response to the issues we face, but the kinds of perspectives one gets from finance ministers and financial tsars are narrow, crimped, too deeply vested in particular interests and ideologies to think imaginatively about how to move forward. They are not wrong, and their perspectives contain important expertise, but they lose the forest for the trees. The deeper need is to reimagine how we assess the economy in terms of the well-being it confers on those who participate in it, especially the poor, that is beyond their grasp. The “Commonhealth,” as my philosophy professor Paul Weiss used to call it, can’t emerge from the neoliberal paradigm that still holds sway.
Pope Francis is clear that we need global solutions — he called, after all, for “one world with a common plan in Laudato Si’,” Anthony Annett, author of Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy, said in an interview. “But he’s also deeply suspicious of globalization — in Fratelli Tutti, he noted that: ‘ “Opening up to the world” is an expression that has been co-opted by the economic and financial sector.’ It seems unlikely that the corporate titans gathering at Davos are making this distinction.”
“I lift up my eyes toward the mountains; whence cometh my help?” asks the psalmist. Davos may be in the mountains, but there does not appear to be much help coming from there.
HBO’s latest drama The Last of Us portrays a future plagued by fungi that turn humans into zombies. The Frontlineexplores the actual fungi that threaten public health.
The cause of death is a polycrisis, and it’s not coming. It’s already here. We’re living in it. What the world faces now dwarfs in comparison to the world our fossil fuel-obsessed leaders are creating by delaying climate action. https://t.co/ZTW01CBq5D
Zombie enthusiasts have been glued to their televisions for the past two Sundays to watch HBO’s latest series The Last of Us. The show, an adaptation of the bestselling namesake video game, takes place in an apocalyptic world where climate change has fueled a global fungal infection that has turned most humans into flesh-eating zombies. The survivors are left navigating a highly militarized society where monsters and war run rampant.
Nowadays, we don’t have to look far to imagine a deadly infectious disease. Look at COVID-19, the virus that brought the world to a standstill in 2020 and continues to kill hundreds (if not thousands) a day. The total death toll looms over 6 million, yet here we are, carrying on with business as usual as if lives aren’t being ravaged every day by a virus our governments could’ve stabilized years ago.
Could climate change facilitate the creation of something worse: a parasitic fungal disease that turns us into zombies like The Last of Us? The seven scientists interviewed for this story all said no, that’s highly unlikely. The climate crisis is, however, already increasing the threat humans face from other sorts of fungal infections, the researchers clarified. What makes this threat all the more dangerous is that it isn’t operating alone.
What’s coming is a polycrisis—a monster worse than the fictitious zombies we obsess over because, this time, it’s real. The wave of crises won’t stop just because we’re already in one. In our world of fossil fuel pollution and corporate greed, crisis breeds more crises. With respect to public health, world leaders need to prepare for future outbreaks that will be embedded in this web of disasters, especially if they are going to protect society’s most vulnerable.
In The Last of Us, a strange fungus appears, driving humans to cannibalistic and violent behaviors. This is how it eventually spreads: the infected attacking the living.
In the video game, the fungus originates in South America where it infects crops before spreading elsewhere via spores, the microscopic particles fungus release to reproduce. The latest episode on Sunday seemed to confirm a popular theory on how the fungus first spreads in the game: that people are exposed through flour originating in Jakarta, Indonesia, before they infect one another.
Viewers get a glimpse of what the initial infection looks like in the show’s premiere where an old lady (the first zombie we see) has writhing branches protruding from her mouth, the mycelium threads from the fungus that has taken over her body. As the most recent episode depicted, these branches can grow larger and more elaborate in later zombie stages, eventually exploding from a person’s face. These zombies are called clickers, and the stages of infection only grow more gruesome from there.
From The Last of Us season premiere, the fungus has taken over a dead zombie. (Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO)
Though the idea of human zombies is entirely science fiction, The Last of Us is inspired by a real-world phenomenon: zombie ants. In the game, the disease is called Cordyceps Brain Infection, or CBI. Ophiocordyceps (more popularly known as Cordyceps) is a genus of fungi that includes many species, many of which are parasitic. Biologists have described about 300 species in the genus, 35 of which can manipulate host behavior, said João Araujo, a curator in mycology at the New York Botanical Garden. They estimate that some 600 species may actually have the power to function as zombie fungi.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is a tropical species that targets ants. After an ant has contact with a spore, the fungus begins to move through its insides and eventually takes over its brain. At that point, the fungus is in control, so the zombified ant travels to higher treetops in the forest canopy before exploding with spores, sprinkling the fungus below.
“Eventually, a passing-by ant will get in contact with these spores and become infected, restarting the life cycle,” Araujo said in an email.
This can happen to other bugs, too—like fruit flies, an area studied by Dr. Carolyn Elya, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. It dies similarly to the ants with the fungus, Entomophthora muscae, growing out of the fly’s exoskeleton, releasing spores into the environment.
The video game doesn’t mention climate change, but HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Usstarts with a televised interview in 1968 where a scientist declares, “There are some fungi who seek not to kill, but to control,” speaking of the zombie ant. When the scientist sitting next to him challenges whether this can happen to humans whose bodies are too warm for these species of fungi, he responds: “Currently, there are no reasons for fungi to evolve to be able to withstand higher temperatures, but what if that were to change? What if, for instance, the world were to get slightly warmer?”
Well, we live in a warmer world now. Does that mean humans are next?
Surreal how articles like this don't bother to mention exponentially accelerating global heating and biodiversity loss, and frame declining human population as a terrible thing.https://t.co/hT5YKriUXI
“This is pure fantasy (but so cool, right?),” Araujo said. “The fungus would require millions of years of genetic changes and adaptations in order to infect such a completely different group of organisms from what they are currently adapted to infect.”
Still, scientists still have a lot to uncover about these specific sorts of fungi, Elya at Harvard said in an email: “There is a ton that we don’t know about how these fungi alter host behavior. What’s great about shows like The Last of Us is that, in addition to entertaining folks, it can drive more awareness about the real natural phenomenon that inspired this story.”
“Mycology is one of the most neglected disciplines in biology and harbors one of the largest reservoirs for new discoveries.”
Our stories are not working. Whether they be the kind we tell in fiction, or the larger canvas of culture twittering away across the global village, our present reality – the seismic planetary shifts, the pandemical turmoil – evades our collective narrative comprehension. We are clearly at a critical moment in history, the consequences of which will ripple through time in unimaginable ways. In preparation for what is to come, we urgently need to view the frightening present with clarity. Only then, by extrapolating the likely future of our planet, might we begin to imagine a better world. There may not be a more qualified living writer to do this than Kim Stanley Robinson.
The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling … we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live … the age of climate change … wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. (New Yorker, 1 May 2020)
Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, attempts to articulate the societal transformations, the collective shifts in thought, that will be necessary in order to confront and therefore change the shared future of the earth and all life therein. This is by no means a novel departure for the Californian, who from as early as his Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Mars trilogy (1992–96) has contended with and, as much as a novelist might, fought against our Anthropocene moment, the trajectory of which we continue along today ‘despite the 2020 dip’ in emissions referred to early in the novel. But while much of his earlier work this century – Science in the Capital Trilogy (2004–7), 2312 (2012), Aurora (2015), and New York 2140 (2017) – deals with similar climatic and existential fears, none is as ferocious or clear-sighted as The Ministry for the Future.
Set just a few years from now and spanning multiple decades, The Ministry for the Future recounts the rise of the eponymous ministry, established in Zurich in 2025 to work with the IPCC, the United Nations, and all governments signatory to the Paris Agreement. Headed by Mary Murphy, a no-nonsense Irishwoman appointed to the unenviable task of guiding her team of experts from across a range of disciplines, the ministry’s singular purpose is ‘to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens … all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves’. Of course, Mary’s team soon discovers the present impossibility of its mission, the mere symbolism of its formation against the intractability of international policy and of the very systems through which our current world order is organised. To be blunt, neoliberalism is the primary problem. Robinson is unwavering here, the sweeping sequence of events by which the ministry attempts to trigger immense societal transformations as clear a critique of present-day capitalism as you will find in fiction.
Kim Stanley Robinson speaking with attendees at the ASU Center for Science and Imagination in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2017. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)
Although the ministry – along with Frank May, the sole survivor of the novel’s opening climate horror – provides the novel with its recurring core of radical ideas, this only scratches the surface of Robinson’s remarkable achievement, a work sufficiently radical in form to convey both the immensity and the complexity of anthropogenic climate change, a world ‘trembling on the brink’. Told almost entirely through eyewitness accounts, dozens upon dozens of interlinked characters and events, the novel’s scale is exceptionally expansive, cycling kaleidoscopically through entire worlds: Mary’s ministry, Frank’s climate-induced PTSD, ecological destruction, climate catastrophes, eco-terrorism, clandestine government operations, geo-engineering and carbon drawdown projects, riddles told from the points of view of inanimate objects and matter, climate change refugees, the reconfiguration of the world’s banks and rewilding movements, to mention just a few.
Constructing a novel, a towering future history, from more than one hundred short story-like vignettes might be disorienting, even distressing, given the subject; but in so doing Robinson appears to have arrived finally at an ideal hybrid of forms. Short-form fiction tends to occlude the long-term processes of climate change, focusing rather on what Robinson, in discussion with Gerry Canavan in 2014, referred to as ‘moments of dramatic breakdown’ precisely because these ‘are narratisable’. This might explain why post-catastrophic fatalism features so strongly in short climate fiction. But, as Robinson himself elaborated, ‘if we do that we’re no longer imagining the peculiar kinds of ordinary life that will precede and follow’ those moments. The novel form, he concluded, is generally better suited to the grander narrative demands of anthropogenic climate change because ‘the novel proper has the flexibility and capaciousness to depict any human situation … That’s what the modern novel was created to do, and that capacity never leaves it.’ By subsuming shorter, more dramatic forms of storytelling into a larger, meaningful narrative architecture, Robinson leaves little chance for soothing denialisms and the various narrative closures that pervade climate fiction more generally.
It makes for painful reading. As much as The Ministry for the Future could be seen as a work of future realism, laced with traces of disaster dystopia, it is ultimately a utopian novel. What is particularly distressing is that the meticulous, encyclopedic steps by which Robinson’s ministry ushers in a greener and more equitable – though still far from perfect – post-capitalist age feel distinctly possible, and yet just out of reach.
J.R. Burgmann isa researcher at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. He is the co-author of Science Fiction and Climate Change: A sociological approach (Liverpool University Press, 2020). His debut novel Children of Tomorrow was highly commended in the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and will be published in 2023 by Upswell. He is currently a Hot Desk Fellow at the Wheeler Centre, where he is working on his second novel Abominable.
Green Left’sSusan Price spoke to Canadian ecosocialist Marc Bonhommeabout the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), which took place in Montreal from December 7‒19.
COP15: Biodiversity loss, the sixth great extinction and the need for actionhttps://t.co/wm498XiJmH
COP15 in Montreal received far less media attention than COP27 in Egypt. Why is this?
This COP was much less publicised than the one on climate, although the current catastrophe it is supposed to fight, the sixth great extinction, is of the same magnitude.
A lot of people certainly notice and deplore the disappearance of insects, especially honeybees, or the extinction of some large mammals, especially in Africa, or the destruction of habitats, especially the destruction of the Amazon forest and forests in Indonesia due to palm oil plantations, but do not think that their impacts are as dramatic as various climate extremes that make headlines every day.
Heads of state were not even invited to COP15. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is not legally binding, not to mention the all-purpose term “sustainable” appearing 15 times, though a voluntary Paris-like follow-up mechanism was agreed on.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the equivalent of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, produced a powerful report on the subject. Out of an estimated 8 million animal and plant species on earth (including 5.5 million species of insects), the current rate of species extinction in the world is higher than the average of the last 10 million years by tens and even hundreds of times and this rate is accelerating.
Up to 1 million species are threatened with extinction, many within the next few decades. According to a report by The Guardian on COP15, “the international community did not fully achieve any of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets agreed in Japan in 2010 to slow the loss of the natural world”. Carbon Brief reported that “analysis published in February [2022] found that governments around the world spend at least $1.8 trillion each year on subsidies that exacerbate biodiversity loss and climate change. This figure is equivalent to 2% of global GDP”. The GBF agreed to suppress and/or redirect — for what purpose and to where, we don’t know — a bit more than a quarter of this amount ($500 billion).
What do you make of the refusals of rich nations to commit the necessary funds to preserve biodiversity?
The main objective of the Montreal COP was to reach an agreement on preserving 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030 (known as “30×30”) — an aim backed mainly by the wealthy old imperialist countries — rather than try to reach an agreement on how this objective should be funded — which was the main preoccupation of the dependent countries (of the global “South”).
The strategic habitats, the tropical forests and mangroves, are in the South but the money is in the “North”, which is the main culprit because of its mode of consumption. The South demanded that US$100 billion be put into a designated fund — a fraction of what is needed to implement the framework. Neither aim was achieved.
The climate mitigation fund in favour of dependent countries agreed upon by the climate COPs has not yet reached the level of US$100 billion per year from 2020. The new fund for loss and damage decided by the COP27 has yet to be filled, and the one for biodiversity seems out of the race from the starting line.
It is not the anti-diplomatic blow of the abrupt departure from the meeting room of some 60 delegations from countries of the South that changed the situation. In addition, the countries of the old imperialism sowed discord within the countries of the South by distinguishing, not without reason, the emerging countries from the other countries of the South. They say that China, Brazil and other large economies, which have grown substantially in the last 30 years since the UN’s environmental treaties were agreed upon, should be contributing a lot more.
Under a halo of victory to save the biodiversity of the planet, the countries of the old imperialism, in collusion with the emerging countries — an alliance symbolised by the China-Canada co-presidency temporarily reconciled for the circumstances — succeeded in imposing a consensus on the countries from the non-emerging South, in particular African countries. Three African nations explicitly and strongly rejected the so-called “consensus” on the GBF.
The frustration of the non-emerging countries of the South is understandable. Under the final agreement — supposed to be the equivalent of the Paris Agreement for the climate — the rich countries will put in the kitty only a ridiculous $US20 billion by 2025, which will rise to US$30 billion by 2030.
While the US$200 billion needed yearly “to implement national biodiversity strategies” will come from “public and private resources”, the small North-South subsidy will “includ[e] official development assistance”. That is not all. The private sector will also benefit from the US$500 billion in redirected yearly subsidies.
As an ecosocialist, why is preserving biodiversity so critical? What is its relationship to tackling climate change?
Given the intimate relationship between the climate crisis and that of biodiversity, hence the double priority of the Earth Summit in 1992, it is alarming that the second is so marginalised when more than 50% of the CO2 of human origin is annually absorbed by nature.
“Humans emit about 37bn tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, as well as other greenhouse gases [GHG]. By absorbing carbon, plants sequester 11bn tonnes annually, while releasing oxygen. Another 10bn tonnes of carbon dissolves into the oceans (The Economist).”
Science does not guarantee that this absorption can go on as deforestation, more forest fires, acidification and warming of oceans proceed.
On the emissions side, “the food system is currently responsible for about a third of total GHG emissions […] The largest contribution stems from agricultural production (7.1 GtCO2e [gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent], 39%) including the production of inputs such as fertilizers, followed by changes in land use (5.7 GtCO2e, 32%),” according to the UN Emissions Gap Report, 2022.
As the Guardian points out: “One of the biggest issues surrounding the 30×30 target is what it means for the rights of Indigenous peoples, who are the stewards of about 80% of the world’s biodiversity – but just 20% of its land. Historically, conservation has forced Indigenous peoples from their lands and caused countless human-rights violations. The current text of the framework recognises the rights of Indigenous peoples and the critical role that they play in conservation, but questions remain over how that part of the target will be implemented.”
At COP15, Indigenous presence was everywhere, except in decision-making bodies. The word “Indigenous” is mentioned 20 times in the GBF. Their knowledge of nature and its “services” combined with their material and political deprivation make them — in the eyes of the banks — easy and useful prey for the enhancement and protection of “natural capital” which, according to a former vice-president of Friends of the Earth, is supposed to provide “benefits worth an estimated $125 trillion to $140 trillion per year, equivalent to more than 1.5 times global GDP,” according to Le Devoir, Montréal.
Were there any positive outcomes from the summit? I read that there was no reference to stopping deep sea mining in the final agreement, for example. Did fossil fuel and mining interests dominate?
Deep sea mining — like a target for plastics reduction — is nowhere to be seen in the GBF, though some 30 deep sea mining exploration permits, covering several hundred thousand square kilometres, have already been granted worldwide by the International Seabed Authority, a UN organisation.
The overall risk from pesticides, not pesticides directly, is to be reduced by half, not three-quarters. The same with food waste. But the meat diet remains unmentioned, even though it is a key cause in the destruction of habitats which, after climate change, mainly explain biodiversity loss.
All the same, the issue of 30×30 remains central but it is far from having satisfied everybody. According to the Guardian, considering that the IPCC said that safeguarding biodiversity requires 30‒50% of Earth’s land and sea, some environmentalists think that countries should be aiming for the top-range figure of 50%, which would be equivalent to the Paris agreement’s highest ambition of limiting global warming to 1.5⁰C, compared to 30% which feels like 2⁰C.
For other environmentalists, the objective should be to protect nature everywhere: “We need 100%, we have already lost too much nature.”
It is not the stingy neoliberal states that will support the management of “protected areas” by Indigenous peoples except for an initial payment. Already, the carbon offset market is expected to grow to upwards of $50 billion by 2030, according to consultancy firm McKinsey & Co, reports the Toronto Star.
Recently, the World Bank lent Brazil $500m to meet its climate goals by “strengthen[ing] the private sector’s capacity to access carbon credit markets,” reports Carbon Brief – Reuters. We can be sure that this “protection” will tolerate exceptions for at least open-cut mining and hydropower, benefiting the all-electric new economy of “green capitalism”.
Of course, we cannot forget the resilience and the combativeness of Indigenous peoples, but they can win only if the “white” peoples overcome their racism to ally with them in the street and support them at the ballot box. The small demonstrations at COP15 do not bode well. Are we waiting to be up against the wall to mobilise?
Climate Action Australia 