“People just chasing philosophical butterflies” was how New England MP Barnaby Joyce described the federal department of climate change last week, adding for good measure that far from changing the climate, “a lot of the people within it couldn’t change a tyre.”
Philosophical butterflies? Joyce likes to label climate mitigation “ideology” – a political belief. In the same interview he placed himself in a political movement that “started overseas”, listing some European countries as sources. He didn’t mention Donald Trump’s America, which was wise in light of America’s disastrous Iran “excursion” (Trump’s word).
But he shares with Trump’s interior secretary Doug Burgum a belief that there’s no need to cut carbon emissions. This is how Burgum justified the Trump administration’s February edict that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant: “When we breathe, we emit CO2. Plants need CO2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO2.”
Veteran US environmental writer Bill McKibben likened that statement to telling a drowning person you won’t help them because “water is a building block of life”. He added that the edict was “one of the signal moments in America’s descent into idiocracy”.
The Iran war is helping everyone see the danger of something central to the MAGA cause: relying on fossil fuels for energy. Trump’s ignorance of physical reality – including the changing climate he dismisses as fakery – is now on full display. The emperor has lost his clothes.
Trump’s war has changed the debate about solar and wind power. For years the Opposition and other conservative parties, in lock step with the global Right everywhere, have disparaged measures to ramp up clean energy and studiously avoided promoting electrified transport. Now, the advantages of vehicles that don’t need petrol or diesel have become painfully clear to all.
It should be no great leap from there to appreciate the real reason we’re into clean energy. The Middle East war is a shaping up as a disaster, but as disasters go it’s a minnow alongside the unfolding catastrophe that is the global climate.
It’s become one of my annual rituals to discuss every March the World Meteorological Organisation’s “State of the Climate” report. This year’s came out a week ago, and a warning to those bored by repetition, yes, this year’s is much the same as last year’s – only worse.
Needless to say the report got little publicity, despite the efforts of United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres. “The global climate is in a state of emergency,” said Guterres at the WMO launch. “Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits. Every key climate indicator is flashing red… Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record.
“When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act.… Oceans are absorbing epic levels of heat, fuelling ever stronger storms. Glaciers and sea ice are vanishing. And sea levels are relentlessly rising.”
Following an earlier decade of frustrated effort by his predecessor, Ban Ki Moon, and nine years into his job as UN chief, Guterres must be fed up trying to draw the attention of political leaders to what is happening under their noses. You could sense the despair, even desperation, in his voice as he spoke.
This will likely be the last WMO report he launches; his second five-year term is to end in December. By that time, meteorologists and other climate scientists expect the world to be well into a powerful new warming phase.
Following the La Niña which in Tasmania helped keep last summer’s temperatures within tolerable limits, a powerful El Niño is now forecast to follow quickly in its wake. Added to background warming, this will surely have a big impact on our lives as 2026 rolls on.
The WMO findings, said Guterres, “are written into the daily lives of people. In families struggling as droughts and storms drive up food prices; in workers pushed to the brink by extreme heat; in farmers watching crops wither; in communities and homes swept away by floods.”
He concluded: “In this age of war, climate stress is also exposing another truth: Our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security.
“Now more than ever, we must accelerate a just transition to renewable energy. Renewables deliver climate security, energy security and national security. Climate chaos is accelerating and delay is deadly. The way ahead must be grounded in science, common sense and the courage to act.”
As Trump’s war spreads across the Arabian Peninsula to Yemen and the Red Sea (another shipping choke-point), science and common sense are nowhere to be seen. Just when we needed them most.