During my nearly 40 years as a journalist, the climate crisis has been a constant, creeping refrain – from the first greenhouse conference in the late 1980s and the first IPCC report in the early 90s. There was the Hawke governments' plan to cut emissions by 20% below 1988 levels by 2005, and the subsequent walking back of that plan. Then on through the decades of bitter political division and debate and policy failures; the proposal for an Emissions Trading Scheme under John Howard; Kevin Rudd's "great moral challenge of our generation"; the ill-fated Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the Gillard ETS, the relentless campaign against it by Tony Abbott and the wasted decade of what's become known as the "Climate Wars" that followed.
On and on we stumble. In Australia this has been a story of power and political ambition and realpolitik triumphing over the national interest, even as the dire evidence stacks up, even as our own lived reality tells us precisely where this is heading. The Black Summer of 2020 proved climate collapse is no longer a future event.
It's now a present, frightening reality. In fiction, your characters can say what you want them to and then if you don't like them, you can just kill them off Science tells us the world's climate is changing and personal experience is starting to show us just how devastating that might be. After six decades on the planet, if you know a place well enough, you start to notice subtle changes.
The landscape begins to shift, .
