I was sitting having breakfast in a quiet Bellingen cafe when a woman comes towards me with a newspaper she’s selling for $5. She tells me it’s about all the things that are happening that the government keeps from us. I know what it will say, but I pay $5 and have a look anyway. And a chat.
I ask her ‘Do you trust the government?’ She says ‘No’.
I say: ‘Neither do I.’ But for different reasons. I am reading the Quarterly Essay by Dr Joelle Gergis: Highway to Hell and wondering how the fuck we’ve let it get this bad. We’re not going to achieve the 1.5% target and at the current rate that threshold could be breached by 2028. With coastal sea rise, Mullumbimby will be beachfront in under a decade. If we’re not taken out in a heatwave first.
I glance at the stories in the newspaper I’ve just bought. From chemtrails to paedophile rings to climate denial to alien landings and beyond. It’s a terrifying landscape of fear and mistrust. Story after story about people being lied to, or manipulated, or coerced. Yet the biggest culprit in this science-free sea is missing in action. Fossil fuels. The very people who turned up to last year’s United Nations climate change conference to defend the interests of corporations, while delegates tried to work out how to stop people in the Pacific region drowning.
Follow the money. Isn’t that what they say? The big money. The Australia Institute calculated in the 2022/23 financial year Australian Federal and State governments gave the fossil fuel industry $11.1 billion in subsidies. No one is watching the gloved hand that slips into the public purse and massages political outcomes to suit their industry and investor’s whims. Why aren’t conspiracists calling out fossil fuels? Is it because they’re the authors, if not the major beneficiaries of the misinformation?
They are the perpetrators of our demise. With their fancy talk of ‘offsets’ and ‘net zero’, as they continue to mine and frack and extract. Dr Joelle Gergis says we need a renewable economy to deliver not ‘net zero’ but ‘real zero’. Even language has been coerced to smooth over the danger. Don’t plant a tree to sure up your polluting rights, just stop polluting.
And we are in serious danger. I asked Founder of the Australia Institute and author of Living Hot Clive Hamilton if we’re fucked. Not a scientific question I know. But an important one. And one that cuts through the noise. Because let’s be honest, it’s what we want to know. How bad is it really? He paused and said ‘we’re fucked, but we’re not completely fucked’. Wow. OK. A slither of hope. A moment to break the hold fossil fuels has on us before it’s too late. Leave our violent abusive dominating partner before they kill us. Right now we’re still being gaslit. Literally and figuratively. It’s a relationship built on coercive control.
We stay with fossil fuels because it’s what we know. Because we’re dependent. We’ve been lied to. We’re told we can’t survive on renewable energy but in reality we could be a renewable energy super power. These are lies the fossil fuel industry feeds us so our governments keep spending our billions making climate change worse. It’s nuts. Oh, and both major parties take fossil fuel donations too. And then are expected to make climate-informed decisions about ending the industry?
How is that not seen as corruption?
But for some reason right now we aren’t really talking about climate change. And that has me very worried.
We’re in a cost-of-living crisis right now, Yes.
But soon with the catastrophic impacts of climate change, we will be in an actual living crisis.
And it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it. Because it will happen regardless of whether you do or not.
And will the fossil fuel industry be here to hold our hands and pay for the damage they’ve done?
Nope. They will have fucked off to Mars and left us for dead.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
