Dear Friend,
A 620 km long human chain from the northern part of Kerala to the south was formed on Republic Day by the CPI(M) led Left Democratic Front, to register the protest against the ‘unconstitutional: Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). People from all walks of life including newly weds participated in the human chain.
The dishonesty of the intellectual class along with lack of imagination of the political class led to the plight that India is in. An India - Pakistan nuclear war is possible more than ever in history
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7 Million Form A Human Chain Across Kerala To Protest Against CAA
by Countercurrents Collective
A 620 km long human chain from the northern part of Kerala to the south was formed on Republic Day by the CPI(M) led Left Democratic Front, to register the protest against the ‘unconstitutional: Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). People from all walks of life including newly weds participated in the human chain.
Call After Political Defeat!
by Dr Prem Singh
The dishonesty of the intellectual class along with lack of imagination of the political class led to the plight that India is in. An India - Pakistan nuclear war is possible more than ever in history
Coronavirus impacts the gold, oil, tourism, crop markets
by Countercurrents Collective
Coronavirus is
impacting the gold, oil, tourism crop markets. Virus fears has driven sell-off in stocks, oil, yuan. The death toll from the virus has risen to at least 80, and confirmed cases in the U.S. rose to five on Sunday. Case has been detected in Canada also. Thailand has so far confirmed eight cases, with five already discharged and the remainder hospitalized. Thai officials said about 48 people are being monitored for possible infection. The outbreak spread rapidly over the last seven days. It has infected people in Hong Kong, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, France, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea, Macao and Nepal. There have also been three confirmed cases in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Coronavirus is impacting the gold, oil, tourism crop markets. Virus fears has driven sell-off in stocks, oil, yuan.
The death toll from the virus has risen to at least 80, and confirmed cases in the U.S. rose to five on Sunday. Case has been detected in Canada also. Thailand has so far confirmed eight cases, with five already discharged and the remainder hospitalized. Thai officials said about 48 people are being monitored for possible infection. The outbreak spread rapidly over the last seven days. It has infected people in Hong Kong, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, France, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea, Macao and Nepal. There have also been three confirmed cases in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
As of Friday, the Chinese government has issued a travel ban, which means a severe economic impact on China and its business partners is inevitable. China has expanded travel ban to 16 surrounding cities of Wuhan, the center of the virus-“storm”, with a combined population of more than 50 million people, including Huanggang, a neighboring city to Wuhan with 7.5 million people.
Gold
Gold prices rose to their highest in more than two weeks on Monday as equities slipped on growing concerns that a China virus outbreak could impact China’s economy, prompting investors to dump riskier assets and look for safe havens.
Spot gold rose 0.6% to $1,579.11 per ounce by 0433 GMT. Earlier in the session, prices rose to their highest since Jan. 8 at $1,586.42.
U.S. gold futures climbed 0.4% to $1,578.30.
Asian stocks slipped with residents of Hubei province, where the disease originated, banned from entering Hong Kong amid global efforts to halt the rapid spread.
Investors are “looking out for the new risk (coronavirus) coming into the markets and running for the exits in equity markets, that’s the cause for gold to move higher,” Stephen Innes, chief market strategist at AxiCorp, said.
“The virus is going to hurt the Chinese economy to a certain degree,” he added.
“The continuation of the gold rally will rely on developments for good, or for ill, of the Wuhan virus situation,” Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst, OANDA, said in a note.
“From a resistance point of view, the next level to watch is $1,600 an ounce.”
“Any economic shock to China’s colossal industrial and consumption engines will spread rapidly to other countries through the increased trade and financial linkages associated with globalization,” Stephen Innes, chief Asia market strategist at Axitrader, wrote in a note Monday. “I’m starting to think cash is the right place to be for the next few weeks.”
Investors now await the U.S. Federal Reserve’s first policy meeting of the year scheduled on Jan. 28-29, where it is widely expected to keep rates unchanged.
Hedge funds and money managers cut their bullish positions in COMEX gold contracts in the week to Jan. 21, data showed on Friday.
Silver rose 0.6% to $18.20, having earlier touched its highest since Jan. 8 at $18.32.
Palladium dipped 1.9% to $2,382.12 an ounce, while platinum fell 0.7% to $994.91.
Stocks, Oil, Yuan
Deepening fears about the economic and human impact of the deadly coronavirus sent stocks, crude oil and yuan tumbling Monday, and spurred haven assets higher.
Futures on Chinese shares fell more than 5% and the yuan erased this month’s trade-deal driven gains in wake of news that the virus continues to spread, with no peak in sight.
Contracts on the S&P 500 Index fell more than 1% before paring losses, while Japanese equities and European futures retreated over 1%. Ten-year Treasury yields and West Texas crude both hit their lowest levels since October. The yen climbed.
Beijing also suspended the sales of package tours, hitting firms around the world that rely on Chinese travelers’ spending. Air transport providers were the worst performers in Japan’s session, while stocks in Thailand slid as much as 3%.
The moves come on a day with limited trading options in Asia, as holidays closed markets in locations including China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Australia.
Fears over the global economic impact of the deadly virus sent oil prices plunging more than two percent on Monday to extend last week’s sell-off.
Crude prices fell more than 2% to multi-month lows on Monday.
Saudi Arabia’s energy minister sought to calm the market.
The Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al-Saud said on Monday he was watching developments in China and said he felt confident the new virus would be contained.
Markets are being “primarily driven by psychological factors and extremely negative expectations adopted by some market participants despite (the virus’s) very limited impact on global oil demand,” he said.
“Such extreme pessimism occurred back in 2003 during the SARS outbreak though it did not cause a significant reduction in oil demand,” Prince Abdulaziz said.
He also said he was confident the kingdom and other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), along with producers in a group known as OPEC+, had the capability to respond and steady the oil market if needed.
OPEC+, which includes Russia and other producers, has been withholding supply to support oil prices and recently increased its agreed output reduction by 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 1.7 million bpd through March.
Prince Abdulaziz said on Friday the aim of OPEC+ was to cut seasonal inventory builds that typically occur in the first half of the year. All options were open when OPEC+ meets in Vienna in March, he said.
“The outbreak of coronavirus is a risk,” Tim Leelahaphan, a Standard Chartered Bank economist in Bangkok, wrote in a note. “The strong Thai baht may also affect tourism growth. That is unlikely to help an already-slowing economy.”
The China government has closed all theme parks including Hong Kong Disneyland, Ocean Park, Shanghai Disneyland and Disneytown, and the country’s movie theaters are also shuttered. Concerts are not being held, and even McDonald’s and Starbucks are closed in certain cities. In the special administrative region of Macau, casinos are still open. However, dealers have to wear masks, and the government may soon shutter the venues, which are mostly owned by U.S.-based companies.
On Saturday, the trade association of Chinese travel agencies also said that it would suspend overseas tour groups and flight/hotel vacation packages for Chinese citizens, effective Monday.
The virus outbreak came at the worst possible time for the Chinese economy, as its weeklong Lunar New Year holiday is usually a time of mass migration by the population. Public celebrations have been scaled back or cancelled as a result of the disease outbreak.
Disney will offer refunds to those who booked tickets and resort stays through its official platform.
Airlines are still in service, although there are no flights directly from Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus outbreak. But cruise lines are also banning Wuhan residents or passers-by in that city to board.
Thai stocks drop most since 2016
Thailand’s stock market tumbled on the prospect of economic turbulence after China banned outbound group tours.
The SET index slid as much as 3% on Monday, the most since 2016, with tourism shares among those bearing the brunt of the drop. The baht weakened in line with emerging-market currencies on concern about the fallout from the virus.
Chinese holidaymakers – many on group tours – spent almost $18 billion in Thailand last year, more than a quarter of all foreign tourism receipts, government data show. The industry as a whole contributes 21% to gross domestic product, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.
“There’s going to be a significant drop in the number of Chinese coming to Thailand in what should be a peak period,” said Win Udomrachtavanich, chairman of Ktb Securities (Thailand) Pcl in Bangkok.
Investors should avoid tourism-related stocks like Airports of Thailand Pcl and hotel operators, which are likely to under-perform the market in the next three months, Win said.
Airports of Thailand declined as much as 5.9%, the most since 2016. The nation’s Tourism & Leisure equity index fell to the lowest level in six years. Oil companies were under pressure too partly on the risk of weaker travel demand. Thai Oil Pcl slumped to the weakest price since 2015.
Thai tourism Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn said tourism revenue losses could reach 50 billion baht ($1.6 billion) if China’s curbs are in place for three months.
Crop futures slump
Crop futures traded in Chicago sank amid reports that the infection was spreading more quickly, threatening demand in the world’s largest consumer of agricultural commodities and the biggest soybean importer.
Soybeans dropped below $9 a bushel for the first time since early December and have lost more than 6% this month.
Corn was down over 1% and wheat fell 2% as selling gripped global financial markets in a deepening risk-off mood.
The lockdown on movement and travel in many areas in China and the preference among the country’s people to stay at home looks set to hammer demand in a nation already ravaged by African swine fever, which has slashed hog herds, and reduced consumption of livestock feed, such as soybean and rapeseed meal.
China is the world’s top producer and consumer of rice and wheat, and the second biggest for corn.
The proliferation of the virus, the hit to demand and the disruption of transport and the economy add another blow to agricultural markets hoping for more Chinese purchases of the U.S. farm products after the signing of the U.S. trade deal earlier this month.
Hong Kong’s city leader Carrie Lam declared a state of emergency and said all primary and secondary schools would close until February 17, two more weeks in addition to next week’s Lunar New Year holiday.
How Is Washington ‘Liberating’ Free Countries
by Andre Vltchek
There are obviously some serious linguistic issues and disagreements between the West and the rest of the
world. Essential terms like “freedom”, “democracy”, “liberation”, even “terrorism”, are all mixed up and confused; they mean something absolutely different in New York, London, Berlin, and in the rest of the world.
There are obviously some serious linguistic issues and disagreements between the West and the rest of the world. Essential terms like “freedom”, “democracy”, “liberation”, even “terrorism”, are all mixed up and confused; they mean something absolutely different in New York, London, Berlin, and in the rest of the world.
Before we begin analyzing, let us recall that countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States, as well as other Western nations, have been spreading colonialist terror to basically all corners of the world. And in the process, they developed effective terminology and propaganda, which has been justifying, even glorifying acts such as looting, torture, rape and genocides. Basically, first Europe, and later North America literally “got away with everything, including mass murder”. The native people of Americas, Africa and Asia have been massacred, their voices silenced. Slaves were imported from Africa. Great Asian nations, such as China, what is now “India” and Indonesia, got occupied, divided and thoroughly plundered.
And all was done in the name of spreading religion, “liberating” people from themselves, as well as “civilizing them”.
Nothing has really changed.
To date, people of great nations with thousands of years of culture, are treated like infants; humiliated, and as if they were still in kindergarten, told how to behave, and how to think.
Sometimes if they “misbehave”, they get slapped. Periodically they get slapped so hard, that it takes them decades, even centuries, to get back to their feet. It took China decades to recover from the period of “humiliation”. India and Indonesia are presently trying to recuperate, from the colonial barbarity, and from, in the case of Indonesia, the 1965 U.S.-administered fascist coup.
But if you go back to the archives in London, Brussels or Berlin, all the monstrous acts of colonialism, are justified by lofty terms. Western powers are always “fighting for justice”; they are “enlightening” and “liberating”. No regrets, no shame and no second thoughts. They are always correct!
Like now; precisely as it is these days.
Presently, the West is trying to overthrow governments in several independent countries, on different continents. From Bolivia (the country has been already destroyed) to Venezuela, from Iraq to Iran, to China and Russia. The more successful these countries get, the better they serve their people, the more vicious the attacks from abroad are, the tougher the embargos and sanctions imposed on them are. The happier the citizens are, the more grotesque the propaganda disseminated from the West gets.
*
In Hong Kong, some young people, out of financial interest, or out of ignorance, keep shouting: “President Trump, Please Liberate Us!” Or similar, but equally treasonous slogans. They are waving U.S., U.K. and German flags. They beat up people who try to argue with them, including their own Police Force.
So, let us see, how the United States really “liberates” countries, in various pockets of the world.
Let us visit Iran, a country which (you’d never guess it if consuming only Western mass media) is, despite the vicious embargos and sanctions, on the verge of the “highest human development index bracket” (UNDP). How is it possible? Simple. Because Iran is a socialist country (socialism with the Iranian characteristics). It is also an internationalist nation which is fighting against Western imperialism. It helps many occupied and attacked states on our planet, including Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia (before), Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, to name just a few.
So, what is the West doing? It is trying to ruin it, by all means; ruin all good will and progress. It is starving Iran through sanctions, it finances and encourages its “opposition”, as it does in China, Russia and Latin America. It is trying to destroy it.
Then, it just bombs their convoy in neighboring Iraq, killing its brave commander, General Soleimani. And, as if it was not horrid enough, it turns the tables around, and starts threatening Teheran with more sanctions, more attacks, and even with the destruction of its cultural sites.
Iran, under attack, confused, shot down, by mistake, a Ukrainian passenger jet. It immediately apologized, in horror, offering compensation. The U.S. straightway began digging into the wound. It started to provoke (like in Hong Kong) young people. The British ambassador, too, got involved!
As if Iran and the rest of the world should suddenly forget that during its attack on Iraq, more than 3 decades ago, Washington actually shot down an Iranian wide-body passenger plane (Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus-300), on a routine flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai.In an “accident”, 290 people, among them 66 children, lost their lives. That was considered “war collateral”.
Iranian leaders then did not demand “regime change” in Washington. They were not paying for riots in New York or Chicago.
As China is not doing anything of that nature, now.
The “Liberation” of Iraq (in fact, brutal sanctions, bombing, invasion and occupation) took more than a million Iraqi lives, most of them, those of women and children. Presently, Iraq has been plundered, broken into pieces, and on its knees.
Is this the kind of “liberation” that some of the Hong Kong youngsters really want?
No? But if not, is there any other performed by the West, in modern history?
*
Washington is getting more and more aggressive, in all parts of the world.
It also pays more and more for collaboration.
And it is not shy to inject terrorist tactics into allied troops, organizations and non-governmental organizations. Hong Kong is no exception.
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, China, Venezuela, but also many other countries, should be carefully watching and analyzing each and every move made by the United States. The West is perfecting tactics on how to liquidate all opposition to its dictates.
It is not called a “war”, yet. But it is. People are dying. The lives of millions are being ruined.
*
[First published by China Daily – Hong Kong]
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Five of his latest books are “China Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries, Saving Millions of Lives”, “China and Ecological Cavillation” with John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. His Patreon
The Fate of the Earth – See Page Five
by Tom Engelhardt
And here’s what I began to wonder on this newest version of planet Earth: Are we all in some sense Australians, whether we know it or not? I don’t mean that as an empathetic statement of solidarity with the suffering people of that land (though I do feel for them). I mean it as a statement of grim fact. Admittedly, it won’t be fire for all of us. For some, it will be rising sea levels, flooding of a never-before-experienced sort, storms or heat waves of a previously unimagined ferocity, and so on.
Let me betray my age for a moment. Some of you, I know, will be shocked, but I still read an actual newspaper. Words on real paper every day. I’m talking about the New York Times, and something stuck with me from the January 9th edition of that “paper” paper. Of course, in the world of the Internet, that’s already ancient history — medieval times — but (as a reminder) it came only a few days after Donald Trump’s drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani.
So you won’t be surprised to learn that its front page was essentially all Iran and The Donald. Atop it, there was a large photo of the president heading for a podium with his generals and officials lined up on either side of him. Its caption read: “‘The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it,’ President Trump said Wednesday at the White House.” Beside it, the lead story was headlined “U.S. and Iranians Lower Tensions, at Least for Now.” Below were three more Iran-related pieces, taking up much of the rest of the page. (“A President’s Mixed Messages Unsettle More Than Reassure,” etc.)
At the bottom left, there was a fifth Iran-related article. Inside that 24-page section of the paper, there were seven more full pages of coverage on the subject. Only one other piece of hot news could be squeezed (with photo) onto the bottom right of the front page. And whether you still read actual papers or now live only in the world of the Internet, I doubt you’ll be shocked to learn that it focused on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, already involved in a crisis among the British Royals that was almost Iranian in its intensity. The headline: “In Stunning Step, Duke and Duchess Seek New Title: Part-Timers.”
Had you then followed the “continued on page A5” below that piece, you would have found the rest of the story about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (including a second photo of them and an ad for Bloomingdales, the department store) taking up almost all of that inside page. If, however, you had been in a particularly attentive mood, you might also have noticed, squeezed in at the very bottom left of page 5, an 11-paragraph story by Henry Fountain. It had been granted so little space that the year 2019 had to be abbreviated as ’19 in its headline, which read in full: “’19 Was the 2nd-Hottest Year, And July Hottest Month Yet.”
Of course, that literally qualified as the hottest story of the day, but you never would have known it. It began this way:
“The evidence mounted all year. Temperature records were broken in France, Germany and elsewhere; the Greenland ice sheet experienced exceptional melting; and, as 2019 came to a close, broiling temperatures contributed to devastating wildfires that continue in Australia. Now European scientists have confirmed what had been suspected: 2019 was a very hot year, with global average temperatures the second highest on record. Only 2016 was hotter, and not by much — less than one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit.”
As Fountain pointed out, however briefly, among the records broken in 2019, “The past five years have been the five warmest on record” (as had the last decade).
In another world, either that line or the actual headline should reasonably have been atop that Times front page in blazing letters. After all, that’s the news that someday could do us all in, whatever happens in Iran or to the British royal family. In my own dreamscape, that piece, headlined atop the front page, would have been continued on the obituary page. After all, the climate crisis could someday deliver an obituary for humanity and so many other living things on this planet, or at least for the way of life we humans have known throughout our history.
If you live online and were looking hard, you could have stumbled on the same news, thanks, say, to a similar CNN report on the subject, but it wasn’t the equivalent of headlines there either. Just another hot year… bleh. Who’s going to pay real attention when war with Iran lurks just beneath the surface and Harry and Meghan are heading for Canada?
To give credit where it’s due, however, a week later when that climate news was confirmed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it did finally hit the front page of the January 16th edition of the paper Times. Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this if it had been the day’s blazing headline, but that honor went to impeachment proceedings and a photo of the solemn walk of the seven House impeachment managers, as well as the clerk and sergeant-at-arms, delivering those articles to the Senate.
That photo and two stories about impeachment dominated the top of the page. Trump’s “phase 1” trade deal with China got the mid-page area and various other stories (“Warren Confronts the Skeptics Who Fear Her Plans Go Too Far”) were at page bottom. Stuck between the impeachment headliners and the Warren story was, however, a little insert. You might think of it as the news equivalent of a footnote. It had a tiny chart of global temperatures, 1880 to 2019, a micro-headline (“Warmer and Warmer”), and a note that read: “In the latest sign of global warming’s grip on the planet, the past decade was the hottest on record, researchers said. Page A8.” And, indeed, on that page was Henry Fountain’s latest story on the subject.
As it happened, between the 9th and 16th of January, yet more news about our heating planet had come out that, in a sense, was even grimmer. A new analysis found that the oceans, sinkholes for the heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, had also experienced their hottest five years on record (ditto for the last decade). In their case, however, 2019 was the very hottest, not the second hottest, year so far. And that, too, was a Times story, but only online.
Two Kinds of Time
Now, I don’t want you to misunderstand me here. The New York Times is anything but a climate change-denying newspaper. It has some superb environmental and global-warming coverage (including of Australia recently) by top-of-the-line journalists like Somini Sengupta. It’s in no way like Fox News or the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s fervently climate-denying media organization that happens to control more than 70% of newspaper circulation in burning Australia.
The situation I’ve been describing is, I suspect, far more basic and human than that and — my guess — it has to do with time. The time all of us are generally plunged into is, naturally enough, human time, which has a certain obvious immediacy for us — the immediacy, you might say, of everyday life. In human time, for instance, an autocratic-minded showman like Donald Trump can rise to the presidency, be impeached, and fall, or be impeached, stay in office, and pass on his “legacy” to his children until something new comes along to make its mark, fail or end in its own fashion, and go the way of… well, of all of us. That’s human history, again and again.
And then there’s the time-scape of global warming, which exists on a scale hard for us mortals to truly take in. After all, whatever Donald Trump might do won’t last long, not really — with two possible exceptions: the use of nuclear weapons in an apocalyptic fashion or the help he’s offering fossil-fuel companies in putting yet more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, while working to limit the development of alternative energy, both of which will only make the climate crisis to come yet more severe.
Otherwise, his time is all too human. With our normally far less than century-long life spans, we are, in the end, such immediate creatures. Climate change, even though human-caused, works on another scale entirely. Once its effects are locked in, we’re not just talking about 2100 or 2150, dates hard enough for us to get our brains (no less our policy-making) around, but hundreds of years, even millennia. Though we’ve known about climate change for many decades now, we’re dealing with a time scale that our brains simply aren’t prepared to fully take in.
When weighing an Iranian drone assassination or a presidential impeachment or the latest development in election 2020 against news of the long-term transformation of this planet, no matter how disastrous, the immediate tends to win out, whether you’re a New York Times editor or just about anyone else.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it’s been so difficult to truly grasp the import of the warming of this planet, because its effects have, until now, generally been relatively subtle or challenging to grasp. When The Donald is in the White House or Harry and Meghan cause a stir or an Iranian major general is assassinated, that’s riveting, graspable, headlines. Those heating waters, those warming temperatures, the bleaching of coral reefs, the melting of ice shields in Greenland, the Arctic, and the Antarctic leading to rising sea levels that could one day drown coastal cities, maybe not so much, not deep down, not where it truly counts.
The Burning
The real question is: When will climate change truly enter human time — when, that is, will the two time scales intersect in a way that clicks? Perhaps (but just perhaps) we’re finally seeing the beginning of an answer to that question for which you would, I suspect, have to thank two phenomena: Greta Thunberg and Australia’s fires.
In August 2018, all alone, the 15-year-old Thunberg began a Friday school strike in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm to make a point: that however all-encompassing the present human moment might seem, she understood in a way that mattered how her future and that of her peers was being stolen by the adults in charge of this planet and the climate crisis they were continuing to feed. The movement of the young she sparked, one that’s still sparking, was a living, breathing version of those two times intersecting. In other words, she somehow grasped and transmitted in a compelling way how a future crisis of staggering proportions was being nailed in place in human time, right at that very moment.
And then, of course, there was — there is — Australia. But one more thing before I get to the devastation of that country. I began writing this piece in New York City on a weekend in January when the temperature hit a record-breaking 65-69 degrees, depending on where in the metropolitan area you were measuring. (A couple of hundred miles north in Boston, it hit 74 degrees!) It was glorious, spring-like, idyllic, everything a human being in “winter” could want — if, that is, you hadn’t made it past Meghan and Harry or Suleimani and Trump, and so didn’t have a sense of what such records might mean on a planet threatening to heat to the boiling point in the coming century. We’re talking, of course, about a world in which Donald Trump and crew were responding to climate change by attempting to open the taps on every kind of fossil fuel and the greenhouse gas emissions that go with their burning. Meanwhile, despite the news that, by 2100, parts of the North China plain with its hundreds of millions of inhabitants could be too hot for habitation, China’s leaders were still pushing a global Belt and Road Initiative that involves the building of at least 63 new coal-fired power plants in 23 countries. Huzzah! And remember that China and the United States are already the top two emitters of greenhouses gases.
Of course, tell that to the Australians whose country, by the way, is the world’s third largest exporter of fossil fuels. For the last month or more, it’s also been a climate-change disaster area of a previously unimaginable sort. Even if you haven’t taken in the acreage that fire has already destroyed (estimated to be the size of South Korea or the state of Virginia) — fire that, by the way, is making its own weather — you’ve certainly seen the coverage of the dead or hurt koalas and roos, right? Maybe you’ve even seen the estimate by one scientist — no way to confirm it yet — that a billion creatures (yes, 1,000,000,000) might already have died in those fires and it’s still not the height of the Australian summer or fire season.
In some fashion, as a climate-change disaster, Australia seems to have broken through. (It probably doesn’t hurt that it has all those cute, endangered animals.) Looking back, we earthlings may someday conclude that, with Greta and with Australia burning, the climate crisis finally began breaking into human time. Yes, there was that less than Edenic November of 2018 in Paradise, California, and there have been other weather disasters, including hurricanes Maria and Dorian, that undoubtedly were heightened by climate-change, but Australia may be the first time that the climate-change time-scape and human history have intersected in a way that truly mattered.
And although, in the midst of winter, this country isn’t burning, we do have something else in common with those Australians: a nation being run by arsonists, by genuine pyromaniacs. After all, earlier in his coal-fired career, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison brought a literal lump of coal into that country’s parliament, soothingly reassuring the other members that “this is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.”
In the election he won in 2019 (against a Labor Party promoting action on climate change), he was in big coal’s back pocket. And like our president, his government has been messing with international attempts to deal with the climate crisis ever since. Again like our president, he’s also been an open denier of the very reality of climate change and so one of a crew of right-wing global leaders seemingly intent on setting this planet afire.
Climate-Change Previews?
Years ago, in my apartment building, someone dozed off while smoking in bed, starting a fire a couple of floors below me. I noticed only when the smoke began filtering under my door. Opening it, I found the hall filled with smoke. Heading downstairs wasn’t an option. In fact, a couple who had tried to do so were trapped on my floor and I quickly took them in. I barely had time to panic, however, before I heard the sirens of the first fire engines. Not long after, the doorbell rang and two firemen were there, instructing me to open all the windows and stuff towels at the bottom of the door to keep the smoke out. I’m sure I’ve never been so happy to greet someone at my door.
That fire was, in the end, contained inside the apartment where it started and I was in no danger, but peering into that smoke-filled hallway I would never have known it. The memory of that long-lost afternoon came back to me in the context of burning Australia, a country where fire fighters had been desperately at work for weeks without being able to douse the hundreds of blazes across that drought-stricken land, which has also recently experienced record high temperatures. It’s been the definition of a living nightmare.
And here’s what I began to wonder on this newest version of planet Earth: Are we all in some sense Australians, whether we know it or not? I don’t mean that as an empathetic statement of solidarity with the suffering people of that land (though I do feel for them). I mean it as a statement of grim fact. Admittedly, it won’t be fire for all of us. For some, it will be rising sea levels, flooding of a never-before-experienced sort, storms or heat waves of a previously unimagined ferocity, and so on.
Still, right now, Australia is our petri dish and unless we get rid of the arsonists who are running too many countries and figure out a way to come together in human time, we’re likely to enter a world where there will be no fire fighters to save us (or our children and grandchildren). Climate change, after all, looks to be nature’s slo-mo version of nuclear war.
In movie terms, think of Australia as the previews. For most of us, the main feature is still to come. The problem is that the schedule for that feature may not be found in your local paper.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Originally published in TomDispatch.com
Copyright 2020 Tom Engelhardt
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