As record fires rage, the country’s leaders seem intent on sending it to its doom.
Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious
- Great Barrier Reef is dying, its
- world-heritage rain forests are burning, its
- giant kelp forests have largely vanished,
- numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the
- vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.
The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.
Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more.
All this, and peak fire season is only just beginning.
As I write, a state of emergency has been declared in New South Wales and a state of disaster in Victoria, mass evacuations are taking place, a humanitarian catastrophe is feared, and towns up and down the east coast are surrounded by fires, all transport and most communication links cut, their fate unknown.
An email that the retired engineer Ian Mitchell sent to friends on New Year’s Day from the small northern Victoria community of Gipsy Point speaks for countless Australians at this moment of catastrophe:
“All
we and most of Gipsy Point houses still here as of now. We have 16 people in Gipsy pt.
No power, no phone no chance of anyone arriving for 4 days as all roads blocked. Only satellite email is working We have 2 bigger boats and might be able to get supplies ‘esp fuel at Coota.
We need more able people to defend the town as we are in for bad heat from Friday again. Tucks area will be a problem from today, but trees down on all tracks, and no one to fight it.
We are tired, but ok.
But we are here in 2020!
Love
Us”
The bookstore in the fire-ravaged village of Cobargo, New South Wales, has a new sign outside: “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.”
And yet, incredibly, the response of Australia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their country but to defend the coal industry, a big donor to both major parties — as if they were willing the country to its doom. While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mines expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports. The prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, went on vacation to Hawaii.
Since 1996 successive conservative Australian governments have successfully fought to subvert international agreements on climate change in defense of the country’s fossil fuel industries. Today, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of both coal and gas. It recently was ranked 57th out of 57 countries on climate-change action.
In no small part Mr. Morrison owes his narrow election victory last year to the coal-mining oligarch Clive Palmer, who formed a puppet party to keep the Labor Party — which had been committed to limited but real climate-change action — out of government. Mr. Palmer’s advertising budget for the campaign was more than double that of the two major parties combined. Mr. Palmer subsequently announced plans to build the biggest coal mine in Australia.
Since Mr. Morrison, an ex-marketing man, was forced to return from his vacation and publicly apologize, he has chosen to spend his time creating feel-good images of himself, posing with cricketers or his family. He is seen far less often at the fires’ front lines, visiting ravaged communities or with survivors. Mr. Morrison has tried to present the fires as catastrophe-as-usual, nothing out of the ordinary.
This posture seems to be a chilling political calculation: With no effective opposition from a Labor Party reeling from its election loss and with media dominated by Rupert Murdoch — 58 percent of daily newspaper circulation — firmly behind his climate denialism, Mr. Morrison appears to hope that he will prevail as long as he doesn’t acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster engulfing Australia.
Mr. Morrison made his name as immigration minister, perfecting the cruelty of a policy that interns refugees in hellish Pacific-island camps, and seems indifferent to human suffering. Now his government has taken a disturbing authoritarian turn, cracking down on unions, civic organizations and journalists. Under legislation pending in Tasmania, and expected to be copied across Australia, environmental protesters now face up to 21 years in jail for demonstrating.
“Australia is a burning nation led by cowards,” wrote the leading broadcaster Hugh Riminton, speaking for many. To which he might have added “idiots,” after Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack blamed the fires on exploding horse manure.
Such are those who would open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide.
More than one-third of Australians are estimated to be affected by the fires. By a significant and increasing majority, Australians want action on climate change, and they are now asking questions about the growing gap between the Morrison government’s ideological fantasies and the reality of a dried-out, rapidly heating, burning Australia.
The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchiks were all-powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern. In Australia today, a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront.
Mr. Morrison may have a massive propaganda machine in the Murdoch press and no opposition, but his moral authority is bleeding away by the hour. On Thursday, after walking away from a pregnant woman asking for help, he was forced to flee the angry, heckling residents of a burned-out town. A local conservative politician described his own leader’s humiliation as “the welcome he probably deserved.”
As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, “the system as we knew it became untenable,” he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?
Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety
Promising to cut “red tape,” business-friendly politicians evidently judged that cost concerns outweighed the risks of allowing flammable materials to be used in facades. Builders in Britain were allowed to wrap residential apartment towers — perhaps several hundred of them — from top to bottom in highly flammable materials, a practice forbidden in the United States and many European countries. And companies did not hesitate to supply the British market.
.. panels known as cladding and sold as Reynobond PE, consisted of two sheets of aluminum that sandwich a combustible core of polyethylene. It was produced by the American manufacturing giant Alcoa, which was renamed Arconic after a reorganization last year.
Arconic has marketed the flammable facades in Britain for years, even as it has adjusted its pitch elsewhere.
.. Flames in an ordinary fire burst out of windows, moving from the inside out. Grenfell Tower burned in reverse, moving inward from the building’s exterior. The flames quickly tore upward in streaks through the facade, filling apartments with toxic black smoke. Torrents of orange and red branched out of the first streaks and shot upward. The flames encased the building in a cylinder of fire.
“I have never seen such a phenomenal fire, a building engulfed top to bottom in flames,” Dany Cotton, the London fire commissioner, said later that day. More than 200 firefighters battled the blaze. They brought 40 fire engines and other vehicles.
.. “Committing hundreds of my firefighters into a building that at points looked like it couldn’t possibly stand up due to the level of fire — I actually felt physically sick with anxiety about what was happening,” Ms. Cotton added. But the firefighters went in.
.. an architectural style known as Brutalism, and the original concrete structure, built without cladding, was designed to contain a fire in one apartment long enough for firefighters to prevent it from spreading very far. But the building’s floor plan gives a picture of what happened. Refrigerators in most apartments appear to have been positioned against an exterior wall, next to a window and just a few inches from the cladding installed in the renovation.
When the refrigerator on the fourth floor burst into flames, the fire ignited the flammable cladding and shot up the side of the building.
.. The first well-known use of aluminum cladding on a high-rise was on the Alcoa Building, in Pittsburgh, erected as the manufacturer’s headquarters. Makers of cladding promoted it as both aesthetically striking and energy-efficient, because the aluminum surface reflects back heat and light. Demand for cladding surged with rising fuel costs and concerns about global warming
.. No aluminum cladding made with pure polyethylene — the type used at Grenfell Tower — has ever passed the test
.. The aluminum sandwiching always failed in the heat of a fire, exposing the flammable filling. And the air gap between the cladding and the insulation could act as a chimney, intensifying the fire and sucking flames up the side of a building.
.. As a result, American building codes have effectively banned flammable cladding in high-rises for nearly two decades.
.. British schoolchildren study the Great Fire of London, in 1666, the way American pupils might learn about the Boston Tea Party or the first Thanksgiving.
.. London’s original great fire leapt across wooden buildings. And since then, British building codes have focused primarily on the principle of stopping the spread of flames between buildings or, within larger structures, between units.
With fire prevention in Britain, “you put all your eggs in one basket,”
.. London’s original great fire leapt across wooden buildings. And since then, British building codes have focused primarily on the principle of stopping the spread of flames between buildings or, within larger structures, between units.
With fire prevention in Britain, “you put all your eggs in one basket,”
.. London’s original great fire leapt across wooden buildings. And since then, British building codes have focused primarily on the principle of stopping the spread of flames between buildings or, within larger structures, between units.
With fire prevention in Britain, “you put all your eggs in one basket,”
.. shifted instead to a system of self-policing.
.. In 2014, the Fire Protection Research Foundation, an organization in the United States, counted 20 major high-rise fires involving cladding. In at least a half-dozen — in France, Dubai, South Korea, the United States and elsewhere — the same type of panels installed at Grenfell Tower caught fire. A 2014 fire in Melbourne, Australia, resulted in multiple investigations into the dangers of combustible cladding. Another fire broke out in Dubai, around a 60-story skyscraper, on New Year’s Eve of 2015, and yet another, around a 70-story skyscraper there, this April.
But in Britain, still no changes were made. “The construction industry appears to be stronger and more powerful than the safety lobby,”
.. The organization had promised residents of Grenfell Tower that the renovation last year would improve both insulation and fire safety.
.. The cladding itself was produced by Arconic, an industry titan whose chief executive recently stepped down after an unusual public battle with an activist shareholder.
.. “As soon as the building is higher than the firefighters’ ladders, it has to be conceived with an incombustible material,” a caption says.
Trump’s inability to tolerate critics may be his biggest problem
One thing we can be sure of: At some point Trump will decide Schumer is a “loser” or “the worst” or whatever childish insult comes to mind because Schumer and Trump do not share objectives. As self-evident as it may be, Trump operates in a world in which someone’s worth (whether it is Schumer or Ryan or Russian President Vladimir Putin) is a direct reflection of whether he is saying nice things about Trump.
This may be one reason he relies so heavily on his children; they know better than to insult him or to challenge him in ways that prompt him to lash out. (They are, in a word, enablers.)
.. For a textbook narcissist, there is no objective, ideology, aim or vision other than satisfaction of his own ego. It makes him a sitting duck for flatters — and may make him a very isolated president, very quickly.
.. Now, when Schumer delays the confirmation process or maybe even derails a nominee (perhaps the secretary of state pick, ExxonMobil Chief Executive Rex Tillerson, with the help of dismayed GOP hawks), Trump won’t be whispering sweet nothings to any Democrat. He’ll be flailing away on Twitter, denouncing Schumer & Co. as he does anyone who gets the better of him.
.. Likewise, if, for example, the GOP House refuses to do his bidding on a tariff bill or won’t pass an overstuffed infrastructure bill consisting of tax breaks for billionaire developers, Trump’s newfound affection for Ryan will evaporate as well. He’ll be back to calling Ryan “very weak and ineffective” or “a man who doesn’t know how to win.” His new cordial relationship with Mitt Romney? If Romney starts speaking up about Russia, Trump surely will revert to labeling him a “catastrophe” who was “just trying to stay relevant.”
.. Sooner or later, everyone is bound to be a “loser” or “horrible,” according to Trump. That makes it tricky to sustain ongoing relationships for four years with these people. Unlike on reality TV, he cannot fire Schumer, Ryan or McConnell.
.. If there is a vast majority in both houses for additional sanctions, does Trump declare 90 percent of lawmakers to be “terrible” or “a disaster”? (Maybe he pulls another Trump tactic — gaslighting the press and public, pretending he wasn’t opposed to sanctions.)
The Trump strategy for success? Fire everyone.
Despite what you may learn watching “The Apprentice,” you can’t just fire your way to success.
.. Well, they’ll probably be different generals, to be honest with you,” Trump retorted, later adding that current personnel have led to “the worst and you could even say the dumbest foreign policy.”
At no point did Trump provide guidance on what he’d be looking for in new military advisers — other than, of course, a public endorsement of Trump — or what his or their secret master plan for defeating the Islamic State should look like... Just a few weeks earlier, Trump suggested he might soon be cleaning house in the country’s intelligence agencies, too. On Fox News, he said he didn’t trust the U.S. intelligence community and planned not to use “the people that are sort of your standards.”It’s not just the national security apparatus that deserves to be purged, in Trump’s view. As president, he would also cleanse the entire executive branch of career civil servants appointed during President Obama’s tenure.