The climate crisis isn’t for future generations. It’s here and now.

This letter follows an Environment and Climate Change Virtual Town Hall on August 19, 2020, featuring Terri Butler & Mark Butler and hosted by Ged Kearney.

“Nancy and Brian Allen stand outside as high winds push smoke and ash from the Currowan Fire toward Nowra, New South Wales, Australia, on January 4, 2020.” — source

Thanks Ged for hosting the town hall last night, and thanks Mark and Terri for answering questions there. I think these events are really important and it’s great to see that you’re taking the difficult questions as well as the soft ones.

My question came at the end of the piece and I didn’t quite get to ask it; Ged summarised it as we only had a few minutes left but (no offense Ged!) she missed the spirit of it by a pretty wide margin, framing it around hope & remaining positive in the face of the climate crisis. That’s… not what the question was about.

My question was:

There’s been talk tonight about giving hope to young people who are despairing about climate. I’m 35 and full of despair myself. I had family members fleeing bushfires; I breathed a lot of smoke. The climate crisis is here now and even if we were to act immediately, the climate won’t turn around for decades. We’ll see more natural disasters, crop failures, political instabilities. My own life will be cut short by this crisis, by years at least, even in the best case scenario. I believe that you care about addressing the climate crisis, but so far the discussion — here tonight, and everywhere — has been very detached and abstract, and it makes me feel like I’m going crazy. My question is: do you see the climate crisis as a threat to your own life?

Mark, your answer to Ged’s question included the observation that our inaction is failing “future generations”. This is absolutely true, but honestly it does imply an answer to my question in the negative: that you don’t see the crisis as something that is or will affect you personally.

My attitude toward Labor has really softened over the last few years — I used to be a staunch Green, but I have come to accept that there are people in the ALP who are genuinely earnest about addressing the climate crisis, and I fully believe that you (Ged, Mark and Terri) are part of that cohort. But while I believe you’re earnest, I still can’t see that you’ve accepted how extremely big, and extremely present the climate crisis is.

I don’t know how much smoke I inhaled this summer. I had a mask and I managed to stay indoors most of the time, and my apartment is pretty well-sealed. It was still enough to make me feel ill for a few days. I don’t know what that does to my life expectancy, but I can’t imagine it helps, especially if this is repeated every year for the rest of my life. I personally will die sooner from the climate crisis, even if you narrow “the climate crisis” to only include bushfire smoke.

It is well and good to have someone in parliament who is motivated by a fear of letting future generations down. But that’s only a tiny factor of what’s at stake: we will see the collapse of society within our own lifetimes. And our own lifetimes — mine and yours, Ged, Mark and Terri — will be cut short by it. We can already see the start of it. The fires here and abroad. The droughts, the floods, the storms, the tsunamis, the crop failures. They’re here now, they’ll only get worse, and that’s just the immediate effects.

Within the next decade we will see an unprecedented climate refugee crisis. Perhaps, if the crop failures in Australia are severe enough, we will be the refugees ourselves. We might seem safe enough now, but, it’s 2020: you have seen how quickly things can change.

There’ll be social unrest and a worldwide mental health crisis as more and more people come to see our climate action as too little, too late. Not just climate action protesters — people who have genuinely given up. I don’t know what a society looks like when it hits a critical mass of people who, with good reason, believe that humanity is doomed. But there’s a pretty good chance we’ll find out.

And then there’s the left-field, non-obvious stuff that the climate crisis will come up with. For example, did you know that rising temperatures are driving Anopheles mosquitoes further south each year? That, as part of the climate crisis, Queensland will have to start contending with seasonal malaria outbreaks? Now you do.

These are not doom and gloom projections for 2100. These are doom and gloom observations of things that are happening today, things that will happen in the next ten years. Not problems for your children, or your children’s children. Problems for you.

I don’t want to be told about how our youth are afraid that our parliament isn’t acting fast enough. I want to be told about how our parliament is afraid that our parliament isn’t acting fast enough. I don’t need representatives who take the climate crisis seriously. That is the bare minimum. I need representatives who take the climate crisis personally.