As countries, including Australia, drag their feet on climate action, Australia burns. Nearly half a billion of its flora and fauna have been reduced to cinders—some species, native only to Down Under, now face certain extinction. A third of the land on the island that is the only natural home to some unique animals, some of which had been brought back from the brink of getting wiped out, has been scorched by the bushfires which have been raging since late December, NASA images show. But, visuals of neither singed and raw koalas nor of a charred baby roo whose remains hung from a wire fence have done anything to cause the Australian government to get real on climate change. Instead, 10,000 camels will be shot because they drink too much water and fire-ravaged Australians of the Homo sapiens kind can ill-afford to share water with ‘lesser’ mammals.
The irony is climate denialism is thriving like never before in the country. Given how research shows that conservatives are more likely to be climate sceptics than progressives—worse, there is also research showing that presenting scientific information to climate-sceptics causes them to dig in their heels—it is not surprising that Australia’s right-wing political parties are mainstreaming denialism from podiums. Even PM Scott Morrison is guilty. This is affecting solutions, since it would mean more government intervention. Denialism gets more “favourable exposure” in mainstream media while, Ispos polling shows, Australia lags other countries in acknowledging the threat of climate change. It isn’t just Australia, the US is headed by a climate denier and Brazil by a man who has blamed the loss of the country’s forests to, believe it or not, climate activists. If this is the path the big economies insist on taking, the world will fry.