Merchants of Death

Pearls and Irritations - Julian Cribb

In extending the life of Australia’s North West Shelf gas project till 2070, the federal and WA Governments have knowingly signed the death warrants of four million human beings.

Author Julian Cribb AM is an Australian science writer and author of six books on the human existential emergency. His latest book is “How to Fix a Broken Planet” (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

When a small child is confronted with a reality it does not like, it covers its eyes. Australia’s politicians, Labor, Liberal and National, are no better. 

In this country, and others, there is a powerful political consensus to deny the reality they have been informed about in countless, tested, scientific reports. 

This is a consensus to ignore the truth in favour of a manufactured political fantasy that will, ultimately, destroy Australia as a nation, along with most other countries, as global food and water systems collapse and chaos ensues.

Denial of reality is today an acknowledged form of psychosis, a universal mental illness, if you like. It occurs whenever “seemingly intelligent and sane adults vehemently deny truths despite a body of irrefutable evidence”. It infects politics in particular, in both democracies and autocracies.

While its more extreme forms are on daily display in countries such as Russia, the US, North Korea and Israel, the political process everywhere is to some degree contaminated by it.

Thanks to this global hallucination, between now and 2070, Australia will release an extra 78 billion petajoules of methane — euphemistically known as “natural gas” — with the warm approval of almost every government and most politicians.

Further, Australia plans to mine another 75 billion tonnes of coal, whose carbon emissions will in turn will claim a further 75 million human lives.

This calculation is based on the “ thousand tonne rule", which estimates that for every thousand tonnes of fossil fuels mined, the resulting climate chaos kills one person somewhere on Earth.

Climate deaths due to storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, disease and starvation are thought to average about a million a year at present, rising by 250,000 a year between now and 2050, according to the UN World Health Organisation. WHO warns that climate is a “threat multiplier” that nullifies the benefits of advanced healthcare, nutrition and clean water even in advanced countries. In other words, the death toll will rise exponentially as climate chaos accelerates.

That one small country should knowingly encompass more human deaths than World War II is an abomination. That it should do so while pretending, like a small child hiding its eyes, that there is nothing here to see is a stark metric of the moral turpitude of our governing class. No politician can pretend they have not been warned of the consequences of their actions. The warnings have come, thick and fast and ever stronger, for more than 50 years.

According to the World Meteorological Office, there is a 70% chance that between now and 2030, average global temperatures will exceed 1.5-degrees Celsius above pre-fossil fuel levels. The limit set by the 2015 Paris Agreement to avert catastrophe will be shattered. The world could suffer its first +2 degree year by 2029.

At present rates, by 2100, the world will be +3.5 degrees if we implement all the pledged climate measures – and +4.5 degrees if we don’t. Bear in mind that all global heating predictions so far have been overtaken by reality much sooner than expected.

Global temperatures averaging +3-4 degrees Celsius are significant because that is the point at which worldwide crop failures and food system collapse become unavoidable. 

There will also be catastrophic water scarcity in many heavily populated or drier regions, including Australia. But also the Middle East, South Asia, North Asia, Central Asia, Central America, the US and southern Europe.

With the failure in the global food system comes failure in governments worldwide. And with that comes war, both civil and international. We know that much from history. With those events comes the collapse in the global economic system, which is based on imaginary “wealth” in any case. And with that, the refugee tsunami will swell into billions.

So opening up a few new gas wells, oil wells or coalfields is no longer a trivial act, or something to celebrate. It is an act of calculated, premediated, mass murder – and nobody who retains a shred of rationality can deny that. It unleashes incalculable horrors on society worldwide, from which Australians, and especially our children, will not be exempt.

It is a declaration of war on our grandchildren, ensuring for them a world that is functionally uninhabitable for centuries to come.

From now on every fossil fuel project proposed in Australia must be accompanied by a human impact statement, estimating the number of lives it will end or ruin, the consequences for food, water and peace – to set against the big dollar claims of greedy miners, politicians and media.

Australia, which proudly played a key role in helping to establish the United Nations and Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s, cannot, must not, be implicated in the ongoing act of human auto-genocide.

Instead of being merchants of death, we must reclaim our former ideals, as leaders of a caring, peaceful and sustainable world to bequeath to our descendants.

Footnotes

• North West Shelf gas extension approved until 2070 – The Guardian
• IPCC Sixth Assessment Report – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Climate Change Risk Assessment 2021 – Chatham House
• Denialism and its impact on climate policy – National Institutes of Health
• Australia’s gas expansion and the carbon budget – Climate Analytics
• Australia Energy Policy Review 2023 – IEA
• The Thousand Tonne Rule and climate mortality – The Lancet Planetary Health
• Climate Change and Health – World Health Organization
• Climate Threats to Global Health – WHO Climate Report
• 70% chance of exceeding 1.5°C by 2030 – World Meteorological Organization
• Tracking Global Temperature Rise – NOAA Climate.gov
• Emissions Gap Report 2023 – UNEP
• Climate models underestimate actual warming – Nature
• Risk of multiple breadbasket failures – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• World Water Development Report 2023 – UN Water
• Climate and Conflict – Council on Foreign Relations
• Climate Change and Displacement – UNHCR