Scorched by burning questions, our answer should not be inaction

Consider, for a moment, how many words your eyes tend to skip over when you read – if you still do – articles about the catastrophe we are, right now, in the midst of. My list would look something like this: floods; fire; record temperatures; ice melting; mass extinction; bleached coral; 1.5 degrees; 2 degrees; IPCC report; drought; heatwave; tipping point.

There are more, but I’d like you to keep reading.

All these terms mean only one thing, really: the world is getting very, very hot, and we are not doing enough to stop it. Nor does it seem much like we want to do enough to stop it. We know it’s getting hot, we are bored by the fact and that is why we allow our eyes to skip forward on the page, in an attempt to find something we have not read a hundred times before. Many young people, these days, simply avoid the news altogether.

I am writing this – and, full warning, this paragraph will bore you – at the end of a truly crazy period. The world has likely just seen its hottest two weeks on record. Nobody alive has lived through a hotter period. The people of Phoenix, Arizona endured almost three weeks with temperatures above 43 degrees. Climate change has combined with El Nino to produce almost literally unbelievable conditions. (At least all this gave me a new phrase: “heat dome”. This is apparently hot air trapped by the atmosphere. For now, my eyes slow down when I come across it; that will no doubt stop soon.)

As others have noted, such facts seem now barely to register in Australia. Even when the imagery matches our own – like the recent images beamed in from New York of smoky skies – we seem not to flinch. It is possible to read this optimistically: a pointer to the possibility our government is finally doing something, even if many remain sceptical on that front. I tend towards the bleaker reading: we have simply given up, accepted this is our reality.

The question of how to approach climate change – with gloom or optimism – is a vexed one. The American commentator Ezra Klein recently wrote of the ways in which a world that has addressed climate change is actually more exciting: better cars, warmer homes, cleaner air. Politically, he wrote, we can’t rely on doom to convince people: “The green future has to be a welcoming one, even a thrilling one. If people cannot see themselves in it, they will fight to stop it.”

I suspect Klein has a point. The thing that nags at me, though, is the sense that somewhere along the way we became incapable of talking properly about the stakes involved. Last week the UN secretary-general spoke of recent events: floods, fires, hurricanes, smoke and starvation. And then said: “All this when temperatures have risen 1.1 degrees celsius. Yet current polices are taking us to an increase of 2.8 degrees. This is madness.” He also said action meant “concrete steps to phase out fossil fuels”. How many of us think fossil fuels in this country will be phased out any time soon? What I am really struck by is our failure even at the step before that one: to talk properly, often, about the consequences of not doing so.

The debate over the Indigenous Voice to Parliament has suffered from a similar blind spot. Much like the media coverage of the 2019 election campaign, where there was so much talk about the cost of acting on climate change and so little about the costs of not acting, so much of the debate these past few months has been about the (speculative, often false or exaggerated) potential dangers of change.