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The politics of climate change: an elemental blindness prevents us grasping the full significance of climate change.

Article Excerpt
The handling of the recent proposal of Bob Brown's to phase out coal exports over a short period of time illustrates the way in which climate change will be neutralised politically in this country. It will be shaped into manageable bits that leave the political realm in a recognizable form. The denunciatory roar from the Liberal Party was only drowned out by the insistence of Kevin Rudd that the proposal was absurd.

Of course, the particular proposal should be subject to critique and alternative approaches considered. But this dismissal was of a different order. It was the kind that indicates, yes, climate change is now one of the 'issues' for the next election, but within definite limits. To paraphrase John Howard, we should not take the more extreme possibilities too seriously or we will begin to damage our economy. There are many versions of this phantom recognition that climate change can no longer be ignored. At best emotional rhetoric is joined with leaving serious responses on the shelf--apart from, that is, various gestures to satisfy a fast-changing public opinion. But there is also a sense in which our politicians are telling us what we want to hear.

None of us can quite believe the new reality as the evidence mounts that the transformations of weather and the rise in the level of the oceans are likely to be profound, even allowing for a serious turnaround in practical attitudes. 'Profound' is actually likely to be an understatement given that our world, taken for granted for 10 000 years, may well lose its defining qualities. The focus of every cultural creation myth that we know, this world lies at the center of our selves at the level of our being. It was the moderate temperatures of the Holocene period that allowed agriculture to emerge and develop. This is also a world that we have exploited to its limits. Endless escalation of demands upon the environment, firstly via ever-expanding economic growth and secondly by population growth, have generated effects beyond what can be sustained--this, even if the conditions of the Holocene were...

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