"Denial, obfuscation, concession, inaction: In the space of two weeks, Scott Morrison has laid out the emergency-response playbook for pat-earthers everywhere. This is how we should expect conservatives to treat Patient Earth as the climate emergency worsens: as the site of successive wounds to be treated reactively and in isolation, rather than a sick organism in need of urgent, holistic preventive care. These isolated disaster-recovery efforts will continue until, guess what? It will be too late to do anything. And by then, the planet will be lost to us. "
"By the time I arrived back in Sydney, a few days before Christmas, the haze over the city had abated, but the smell of smoke as I exited the airport was both powerful and alarming—alarming because the climate had altered but people’s lives, apparently, had not. Whether this displayed admirable human adaptability or meek acquiescence before an unconscionable new ecological reality, I couldn’t tell. I grew up in Sydney and lived here for almost three decades before moving to the United States. Nothing about this air, this fire season, was normal. On the way out of the airport, I noticed an Australian flag flying at half-mast. With a mawkishness that was only a little self-conscious, I took it as an omen for the country’s vital prospects. "