Imagine if everything east of the Mississippi was on fire. Literally everything. Entire populations displaced, species being wiped out, cataclysmic infernos. And then imagine the entire world just yawning and the President saying “No big deal.”
There’s no need to really imagine that, actually, because that is pretty much exactly what is going on in Australia. And yes, there has been some media coverage, but compare an entire continent on fire to the coverage when Notre Dame caught on fire.
It’s fucking mind-boggling. I wonder if part of this is because we have to continue our denial of climate change?
PaulWartenberg
Because the people in power – half our governments – are led by climate deniers, and because most of our media can’t handle the narrative of climate change due to accusations it’s all a left-leaning Socialist Plot ™.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Morrison is getting pilloried at home. The problem, as I understand, is that outside of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, the country is loaded with the sort of rednecks akin to those that vote in huge numbers in the US South, Appalachia and the Midwest.
Cam-WA
I suspect there is an easier explanation. Notre Dame is an iconic landmark that huge numbers of people recognize, even if they’ve never been there. Australia is a continent, a long way away, not only physically, but we hardly ever in America get any coverage of what’s going on there.
Betty Cracker
It really is horrific, and I can’t explain why the catastrophe isn’t getting more domestic media attention. It’s especially baffling since there’s quite a bit of cultural cross-pollination between the US and Australia, two predominantly English-speaking countries with similar colonial roots. Maybe it is climate change denial.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@PaulWartenberg:
This. Even Australia’s own government, headed by a climate change denying far right-winger, has been trying to downplay the fires and/or any possible connection to climate change.
I hate that “global warming” got tarnished by rightists. It’s completely descriptive because global, averagetemperatures have increased. But I guess a snow ball being tossed onto the Senate floor is proof positive that it’s not happening, despite what experts are saying. That fucker Inhofe will never live to see the true consequences of climate change. He’ll never live to see the collapse of civilization as we know it
germy
Could we still have fireworks?
Dread
It’s “somebody else’s problem”.
Also, it’s not Climate Change because.
But, uh, everything’s perfectly all right now. We‘re fine. We‘re all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?
MobiusKlein
Imagine if vast sections of California were on fire, and the potus gave lectures about raking forests.
Still furious about that.
Martin
laura
If it’s not denialism – and the intention to do nothing that inconveniences the MOTU, I’ll eat a bug. My state’s fire season is about 11 months out of the year and my home town of Santa Rosa has had 2 urban firestorms in the last three years. Who amongst the nations media dare challenge denialism and prove that young swedish girl right?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Except “we” didn’t elect Trump. The Russians did.
lumpkin
I think humanity is just gradually coming around to simply accepting its fate. I really do mean that in the sense that many people (me for example) really do feel pretty much hopeless. Climate change is a potential extinction event for humans but we are institutionally incapable of addressing it. Perhaps we are simply genetically incapable. Humans have the capability to pathologically pursue their own individual desires but not the capability to cooperate on a large scale to the benefit of all of us.
Duane
It’s a made for TV natural disaster. Cable news should find it irresistible. Days of constant coverage. A ratings boon. Why that’s not happening? Yeah I smell a rat.
Litlebritdifrnt
The real tragedy is that they are estimating that 500 MILLION animals have died. 500 MILLION. Koalas are already endangered, to figure out how many we may have lost in these fires is heartbreaking. Lots of Australian citizens have been doing what they can to save them but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the ones that are dying. This is an extinction level event and no one is paying attention. At least it was the lead story on the BBC News today. For that I am grateful.
wjs
Welcome to the world that Rupert Murdoch created.
Is there a massive, complex problem that requires sacrifice, commitment, and civic participation?
If so, Murdoch has a media empire that will assess blame for this on the left, a plan to divide everyone so that nothing gets done, and a plan to put in power politicians who will make sure rich people don’t have to pay for anything. And half of the country (pick one!) will become intractably committed to making sure Rupert Murdoch is never held accountable for anything. He’s got a kid who will take over and continue this, so to heck with the next forty years.
Just put a wet towel on your head and pray for rain. Cheers!
Brachiator
From the BBC, a very useful graphic on the fires:
A visual guide to the bushfires and extreme heat.
Gin & Tonic
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): 63 million of your neighbors and co-workers voted for Trump.
James E Powell
@Duane:
I put it down to @Martin point #3 above:
Dan B
Coal has been a big part of Australia’s export business. That plus Murdoch has been the drag on addressing the climate crisis in Australia. If China would stop building coal plants in Asia it would help kneecap the Australian coal mines.
HarryBee
I care. And every day now is another heartbreak. On Ali Velshi just now, an announcement of the dozen or so human lives lost, but also the loss of half a billion animals. Trump and the climate deniers need to be dropped into NSW.
brantl
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You never know, some ex-military Aussie might just show up here, and gut him.
randy khan
Australia is, if anything, even more susceptible to big fires than California. I was there last year and the sort of broad image of everything but the big cities as desert isn’t really right – a lot of it is the kind of land that’s not quite dry enough to be desert, so there’s lots of scrub and small trees that are ripe for fires. And, based on the article, they not only have a climate change denier in charge, but he also cut the funding for firefighting, so they don’t have the resources in place.
Also, this isn’t new. We stopped in Canberra while we were there, and outside the city there’s a huge (I mean, really enormous) arboretum, still in the process of being completed, that will have 100 copses of significant tree species and also houses the national bonsai collection. The land was available for it because of a huge fire maybe 10 years ago that cleared everything off, and it’s close enough to downtown that on a decent day you can see the building where Parliament meets. (Granted, Canberra is not a city of tall buildings, but still, it’s pretty close.)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@HarryBee:
…with rakes.
Crashman06
@lumpkin: Perhaps climate change is the Great Filter.
taumaturgo
On a personal level, we are peculiarly living in the era of I, me, mine. For most of us, unless the vicissitudes come knocking at our doors living will go uninterrupted with little o no caring on our part.
the Conster
It’s too mind boggling. Literally, it breaks the brain to try and absorb the scale and devastation.
Butter Emails
This isn’t actually true – humans have acted in global concert before, even on environmental issues. The efforts to protect the Ozone layer for example. The issue is that there’s a bunch of rich fucktards feeding a massive global misinformation and propaganda effort designed to prevent any sort of international action in the interest of next quarter’s profits.
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator: Seventy-meter-high flames!
mrmoshpotato
@?BillinGlendaleCA: And vacuums. Fuck ’em.
Cheryl Rofer
I don’t know what we do about all that. We need to see a plan that is likely to be effective and can be implemented. The generalities of “we have to stop using fossil fuels” are too much and, I suspect, turn most people off. Any candidate who would dare to present an effective plan would be dead in the water.
I hate what we olds have done to the youngs.
catclub
When Douglas Adams coined the term “SEP field”
for ‘Someone Else’s Problem’ , which is how you make a sofa disappear. It clicked for me.
catclub
@mrmoshpotato: Fire tornados are also a thing. An incredibly dangerous thing.
Raven Onthill
People are environmentalist, until it becomes clear sacrifices are required, then not so much.
Booger
@Litlebritdifrnt: The reports describe koalas as ‘functionally extinct.’ I’m not sure what that means technically, but it doesn’t sound nice.
LuciaMia
I think that has more to do with it than any climate change denial.
Of course people care. And Ive been seeing and reading plenty of coverage on this disaster. Stories of people taking refuge on the beach to try and escape the fires and the suffering of wild life are horrific. And this has been going on for how long with no end in sight?
lumpkin
@Butter Emails:
The freon/ozone problem did not require large scale efforts and sacrifice. Besides, there was plenty of self interest on the side of change because there was lots more money to be made by the same people who were already making money in the chlorofluorocarbon business.
WhatsMyNym
It’s been a serious fire season for them since the beginning of October. Their government doesn’t show any signs of caring even now.
JC – I see plenty of coverage of the fires in the US press, but the fires are in isolated areas for the most part.
Bill Arnold
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The Guardian started using “global heating” 2018 (maybe earlier). I prefer this since “warming” is emotionally overloaded as something generally good. Heating is more neutral. And probably more accurate if the RCP 8.5 folks (burn all the fossil carbon) have their way. They won’t, since the powers that be would collapse civilization first[1] and also I think we’re heading towards some significant reduction in CO2 emissions through cheap solar/wind/storage/etc. (RCP 6 roughly.)
[1] open ended bad. One scenario has most clouds disappearing for many hundreds of years, until CO2 levels get back to the pre-industrial level.
Obdurodon
In addition to the explanations involving complicity or hopelessness, I think there’s a bit of a “boiling frog” syndrome. Not trying to be snarky with the name. Major fires have been a huge problem in Australia for a long time, even longer and more so than in California. Each year worse than the last. This allows people to think of it as an inexorable trend that will naturally peak and then recede, like El Niño or the seasons themselves. That’s most people’s default response. They have to be *convinced* that it’s not natural and won’t reverse itself, which is a challenge even without the true denialists sowing confusion.
Buckeye
@LuciaMia:
@Cam-WA:
Notre Dame’s wall to wall coverage was for about 48 hours and then declined when it was apparent that it wasn’t collapsing immediately. Also, it’s one structure, this is an entire continent, it was easier to cover. And frankly easier to grasp, as opposed to trying to grasp where the fires are in Australia. Even the fires in California last fall were hard to grasp for a couple of my co-workers here in SW Ohio, they just didn’t realize how widespread they were.
I think there’s a case where part of this is ‘Australia’s far far away’, but I also the ‘no one’s covering it’ to be a bit misleading. No one’s covering the way they’re supposed to be covering it, apparently.
Cheryl Rofer
Citizen Alan
I thank God every day that I don’t have children and never will. I would have killed myself already out of despair had I brought children into this world knowing how irredeemably shitty it’s going to be in another 20-30 years (or less!).
Bill Arnold
@Butter Emails:
The fucktardiest fucktards are the ones that own/control trillions of dollars fossil carbon currently in the ground. What do do? If they don’t extract and distribute it for burning, it’s money lost to them. If they don’t extract it, then others will extract/monetize theirs anyway. Those that have children/grand(N)children think, most of them, that the money will help protect their descendants. It will not; the vengeance will get high-tech medieval. IMO.
Original Lee
I think it’s a combination of Somebody Else’s Problem and information overload. I’m not specifically about media, but rather the information an ordinary American needs to get through their day.
For instance, Medicare, Medicaid, and other health insurance copay levels, coverage, networks, and deductibles change every year on Jan. 1. If you’re working, you have Open Season in November to decide whether or not to change your plan selection. If you’ve got Obamacare, you have the signup period to decide what plan you want for the next year. Then you have January to get used to all the new rules. That’s just one piece of what we have to deal with, for about 3 months, that takes up extra space in our heads.
Add in kids (if you have them) – not just food and laundry but also school and extracurriculars. And/or caregiving for elderly or disabled family. And transportation. And dwelling space stuff. And work (if you have a job or volunteer position).
There just seems to be more and more personal data that needs to be handled without even taking the news into account.
And if you try to be a responsible citizen and try to stay abreast of current developments, you have this administration, which is requiring you to learn more about things that you used to be able to take for granted but now are being ripped to shreds and stomped on. The latest example of this for me was trying to find out how the President is managing to funnel pretty damn big subsidies to farmers without Congressional approval. I mean, I never really thought about how our tax revenue gets moved around, except for procurement and paychecks. So how are the subsidy payments actually happening, because these payments total more than any ag agency budget.
Bill Arnold
@Citizen Alan:
I figure major crop failures due to changes in rainfall patterns starting within 10 years. Unreliable rainfall due to changing weather patterns means no agriculture unless there is some reliable way to irrigate. Agriculture will not be able to shift pole-ward fast enough. (Soils need to be present as well.) On top of that, major collapses of tropical ocean productivity are possible/likely within 20 years.
Starvation on a scale never seen before. Attitudes being hardened by nationalist movements to be better able to block refuge movements pole-ward. etc.
Spc123
@Dan B: the 3 dysfunctional anglophone democracies are all infected by Murdoch. Morrison also is a Pentacost – so he wouldn’t object to a little Rapturing.
Panurge
@lumpkin: What I want to know is: Why would humanity rather simply accept its fate than actually do something to assure a different one?
Another Scott
The major US media isn’t covering it much mainly because it’s overseas and they gutted their foreign bureaus decades ago. If you want foreign news, you need to go to a foreign web site:
https://www.reuters.com
https://www.aljazeera.com
https://www.bbc.com/news
https://www.scmp.com
etc.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike in NC
One 73-year-old cretin claims climate change to be a ‘Chinese Hoax’ because InfoWars told him so. Thousands of trained scientists disagree. US media says “both sides do it”.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Gin & Tonic:
A lot of them did so because they’re evil assholes but some did so because of the Russian disinformation effort in 2015-2016.
We were attacked by a hostile foreign power run by a rich, fascist, mob boss who will not stop until the entire West is destroyed, all to build up a a country’s who’s economy is as big as Italy’s and will probably be destroyed along with everyone else’s in the next 30-50 years
I know what you and Martin are getting at, but I blame the Russians at partly for this mess
Elizabelle
I hope this blows back hard on Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, and the radical rightwing types.
“We roast koalas, because we can. Suck on that, libtards.”
Not a good look for Murdoch, I think. You cannot hide fires and damage of this magnitude. Australia is just a preview.
Chuck
The best coverage I have seen is in the Guardian (but then you can say that about almost any issue). https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2020/jan/03/australia-nsw-fires-live-news-victoria-bushfires-rfs-tourist-leave-zone-south-coast-cfa-traffic-near-roads-closed-sydney-melbourne-latest-updates
K2E
I get the P.M could care less about the environment or the citizens he has turned his back on. What l don’t get is the millions lost due to a major drop in tourism. When you think of Australia koala bears & kangaroos come to mind.
Elizabelle
@Chuck: The Guardian has been terrific on climate change.
mapaghimagsik
@MobiusKlein: imagine county governments zoning land on the worst possible places for fire.