South Wind

Australia’s master storyteller timed it well. This year of chaotic weather and soaring temperatures – exceeding for the first time science’s safety limit – is also the year of Juice, Tim Winton’s new novel about our overheated Earth.

A recurring thread in Winton’s writing has been the complex relationship between people and nature, including awareness of a changing climate. But this is the first time he has confronted head-on this all-encompassing issue, and it’s been well worth the wait. Juice is a book for the ages.

A year ago Winton described to a Melbourne audience how his old view of writers like himself as “priests of culture” had been changed by the growing climate crisis. In a world “where every decent thing is in danger of being commodified, and all human potential is now in jeopardy”, he now sees an obligation to deliver meaning and beauty to his readers. 

Both are present in the book, but they’re hard and harsh, in a fire-scarred Ningaloo landscape a few centuries in the future that’s too hot to sustain much life. Residents of a hamlet and scattered homesteads, forced underground by a scorching summer sun, scrape by on food grown in the still hot winters, and on precious “juice” – energy from sun and wind.

The desolate setting suggests a story that’s tough going, but Juice is classic page-turning Winton, utterly absorbing from start to finish. The nameless protagonist, a weathered, ageing man, is on the run, having lost his family, abandoned his uninhabitable home and taken a child into his care. He meets another fugitive, who at the point of a crossbow forces the pair into an abandoned mineshaft.

Under some duress, the man tells his life story, recounting how his hard life on the land became harder still when he joined a global resistance force tasked with taking revenge on those who had enriched themselves from fossil fuels, now living in luxury in remote fortresses. 

As a warrior he gains access to archives that tell the history of preceding centuries. He discovers how the failure of today’s generations – ours – to stop burning gas, oil and coal damned him to a life of sorrow and ashes.

The story moves at a cracking pace through his training and multiple missions to distant parts of the planet, interspersed with the travails of producing food in a deteriorating climate, a tender love story, and the birth of a child. 

In public appearances Winton, a professed pacifist, comes across as a gentle soul. But in a podcast for The Monthly a couple of weeks ago he confessed to feeling, over the seven years it took to write the book, a raft of new emotions – “incandescent fury, deep foreboding, sorrow, alarm” – at the damage being wrought by business-as-usual.

With worse to come, says Winton, current trends will render Australia’s top half unliveable within a lifetime. “Where are all these people going to go – white fellas and black fellas alike? They’re going to come to Geelong, and Canberra, and Melbourne. It’s all very well to stand around in parliament and gloat about the fact that you’ve stopped the boats. How are you going to stop the utes?”

Winton is scathing about the response of Australian authority to climate protest, referencing a young Perth mother arrested at her home in front of her children for writing three words in chalk on a public walkway “as if she’s a terrorist… a war criminal will get a better rap than a climate protester.”

Neither the market nor technology will save us, says Winton. What will save us is solidarity, decency, the genius of collective humanity. “Everyone needs to answer the question, whose side are you on – the side of life, or the side of money?”

Winton’s bottom line is this: “We live on a miracle… a world infused with creativity and the miraculous fact of organic life.” Optimism is for him a discipline serving to make life bearable, based on his “determined belief… that the people who were made by the world are essentially good and want to do good”. Hence the book’s surprising, uplifting end.

Winton’s international reputation in general fiction coupled with his powerful voice for the downtrodden, familiar to any reader of his wonderful 1992 novel Cloudstreet and infusing most of his work since, makes Juice a special addition to the growing global cli-fi canon.

CLIMATE signals from the far south are central subjects of a major Antarctic research conference at the University of Tasmania from today, covering research on climate extremes and tipping points in the Antarctic system. See the program here.<https://leishman.eventsair.com/aarc/program>

“There is no such thing as ‘the government’,” says Project 2025, that US blueprint for rule by corporation in the United States – and for that matter, the world. “There are just people who work for the government and wield its power … to serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second.”

As a former government employee I have issues with that, but for now I’ll just add the words that seem to have been overlooked: “…just like people who run big business and wield its power.”

Tasmania has a centuries-long history of blurred lines between private and public, never more so than over control of land. It started with the colonial government granting huge acreages (completely disregarding those who already lived there) to “suitable” settlers.

Last month planning minister Felix Ellis introduced a bill enabling him to remove individual planning decisions from local government and have them assessed by what he described as “independent” development assessment panels (DAPs).

This will deny elected councillors a say on certain selected land projects, removing community rights to appeal decisions and empowering the minister to remove high-profile proposals from normal council processes – even after councils have begun their assessment. These could include a cable car on kunanyi/Mt Wellington, big subdivisions and high-rise CBD buildings.

And DAPs will be anything but independent. Members will be hand-picked behind closed doors, won’t hear evidence in public and won’t have to explain decisions in writing. Community input will only happen after developers and government agencies have had their say, in private.

The minister disguises this radical power shift, removing local councils from the approvals process, by describing it as a home-building measure. “Importantly, the Bill streamlines the delivery of homes for Tasmania’s most vulnerable,” he said in announcing the legislation. 

Addressing the housing crisis by subverting the assessment process might seem acceptable to your average political fixer, but it’s a breach of the time-honoured rule that local communities have a place at the table when final decisions are being taken on matters directly affecting them. 

Next week, a meeting of the Local Government Association of Tasmania will debate a two-pronged motion to support the DAP Bill, but subject to amendment. Many in local government are unhappy with the minister’s claim last month that “critical housing or job-creating projects are being blocked by ideologically motivated councillors”.

Deregulation and outsourcing have long been buzzwords in Australia, where big slices of public sector work have been outsourced to unsupervised, poorly regulated private suppliers. It’s safe to assume the Trump resurgence is a portent of more job-cutting to come here – a seductive message in frontier societies like ours (and the US), where for some “the government” is less an essential service than an intolerable burden.

Populist slogans around the concept of “small government” resonated strongly in the US election. Trump disavowed Project 2025 but no-one takes that seriously. He plans to cut staff in key environmental, climate, health, scientific and other agencies, and appears likely to dismantle some of them altogether.

Along with the political party that he now owns, Trump is a principle-free zone. The most troubling outcome of his emphatic win is the licence it will give to others to follow his lead, here in Australia as much as anywhere. Political, economic, social and environmental implications are historic.

Politically, he won despite fomenting a violent insurrection to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate election. His social policies are already fostering division, distrust and fear by scapegoating migrants and other minorities, notably transgender people.

His policy on the environment is to ignore it. The environment is not a skyscraper, a golf course, a private jet or a seaside mansion, so why should he bother? In his eyes the planet’s just fine; hence his “drill, baby, drill” policy to ramp up fossil fuel extraction. The door is now open for a re-elected Trump to do incalculable damage, in his own country and globally.

Last week two Launceston climate action stalwarts stood up for the planet. Police were called to the main city branch of the ANZ bank to remove veteran protesters Rev Jeff McKinnon and Dr Scott Bell, who had presented customers with an uncomfortable truth: that since the 2015 Paris Agreement the bank has lent over $20 billion to the fossil fuel industry. The two face court in December.

I salute them for their courage, but feel dispirited too. After the Right’s greatest triumph of the modern era, bankrolled by billionaires keen to share the spoils, it’s hard to escape the feeling that I’m just going through the motions here. But it’s an old habit, hard to shake off.

As another tumultuous US presidential campaign reaches its climax, at least as traumatic and certainly more consequential than last time, something vastly bigger threatens to derail all the plans of mere candidates in a mere election.

Donald Trump keeps saying climate change is a hoax. In 2017 his first official act as president was to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. He promises to do the same again, while also defunding climate-focused agencies and institutions.

The public, over there and here in Australia, can choose to believe Trump or the agencies he so despises, such as our own world-leading CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), which last week jointly released Australia’s eighth biennial State of the Climate Report.

The day the report came out, a catastrophic rain event in Spain gave substance to its key message that an exceptionally warm global ocean driving more extreme weather will challenge governments, communities and economies around the world. The horrifying toll of death and destruction has been pinned to authorities’ failure to warn people to move quickly to higher ground.

Jaci Brown, Hobart-based head of CSIRO’s Climate Science Centre, told the ABC we should expect more of this, more often. Asked if there was anything positive in what’s happening now, she said old climate scepticism had gone. “People understand this is real, and now they’re asking, what does this mean for me and what can I do about it?”

Hardly anyone asks that on the US campaign trail, and they’re all in Kamala Harris’s team, which argues that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act is lowering carbon emissions by supporting renewable energy. But Harris still opposes curbs on oil and gas. 

Trump is less nuanced. In what science calls this “critical decade” of accelerating warming causing climate chaos, he calls for the aggressive obstruction of climate mitigation efforts and an end to environmental controls, summed up in his catchcry, “drill, baby, drill”.

Some of Trump’s conservative allies have publicly backed this approach in a 900-page document called Project 25. Also in its sights are equal opportunity, social inclusion, a multi-cultural society, immigration, women’s reproductive rights, “big government” and free and fair elections.

How that all plays out on election night and beyond – starting Wednesday our time – is anyone’s guess. Here’s mine:

An Electoral College majority for Trump will see Harris concede defeat, to the dismay of advocates for democracy, social inclusion, women’s and migrants’ rights, climate action and nature conservation. On taking office Trump will pardon himself along with others jailed and indicted in the wake of the 2021 Capitol invasion, and then get on with dismantling government institutions.

In all other scenarios – an unclear outcome or a clear Democratic win – Trump will declare foul and go full throttle on overturning a favourable Harris vote.

Having already launched court challenges and moved to ban neutral observers (a red flag if ever there was one), Republicans plan to disrupt local vote counting, refuse to certify results and use state legislatures to determine outcomes regardless of counting. The current Republican majority in the House of Representatives may break convention and refuse to certify the election.

Trump surrogates have expressed high confidence in victory and ruled out a win by Harris, which looks like a deliberate ploy to prime supporters for mass denial and protest. And unlike in 2020 Elon Musk, the world’s richest person – on a promise of a job under Trump – is using his X platform to reinforce Trump’s victory narrative.

Stopping Trump is no panacea. “The America we thought we knew is not coming back,” Australia Institute US specialist Emma Shortis said at the weekend. “A Harris victory might give the United States a temporary reprieve from its current woes, but the divisions and instability of American politics will not be resolved any time soon.”

While Trump’s divisive rhetoric remains as potent as ever in Republican heartland, especially among men, I can’t see it prevailing against Harris’s principled stance on minority groups and her relatively sane economic, education and health policies. She should secure a majority in both the popular vote and the electoral college. That said, Congressional endorsement and inauguration are no longer the simple formalities we always thought they were.

The US election still matters. Our overheated, war-ravaged world doesn’t need what The Economist calls the “unacceptable risk” of another Trump presidency. Setting aside its disturbing implications for democracy and the rule of law, the supercharge that it would deliver to accelerating global emissions in these critical years may be the straw that breaks the back of a stable climate.