Australia's Fires Won't Stop Burning
Even as the country fights bushfires, it cant stop dumping planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere. Updated 3:00 p.m. ET on Jan. 4, 2020. Australia is caught in a climate spiral. For the past few decades, the arid and affluent country of 25 million has padded out its economyotherwise dominated by sandy beaches and a bustling service sectorby selling coal to the world. As the East Asian economies have grown, Australia has been all too happy to keep their lights on. Exporting food, fiber, and minerals to Asia has helped Australia achieve three decades of nearly relentless growth: Oz has not had a technical recession, defined as two successive quarters of economic contraction, since July 1991. But now Australia is buckling under the conditions that its fossil fuels have helped bring about. Perhaps the two biggest kinds of climate calamity happening today have begun to afflict the continent. The first kind of disaster is, of course, the wildfire crisis. In the past three months, bushfires in Australias southeast have burned millions of acres, poisoned the air in Sydney and Melbourne, and forced 4,000 tourists and residents in a small beach town, Mallacoota, to congregate on the beach and get evacuated by the navy. A salvo of fires seems to have caught the worlds attention in recent years. But the current Australian season has outdone them all: Over the past six months, Australian fires have burned more than twice the area than was consumed, combined, by Californias 2018 fires and the Amazons 2019 fires. Read: The Amazon cannot be recovered once its gone The second is the irreversible scouring of the Earths most distinctive ecosystems. In Australia, this phenomenon has come for the countrys natural wonder, the Great Barrier Reef. From 2016 to 2018, half of all coral in the reef died , killed by oceanic heat waves that bleached and then essentially starved the symbiotic animals. Because tropical coral reefs take about a decade to recover from such a die-off, and because the relentless pace of climate change means that more heat waves are virtually guaranteed in the 2020s, the reefs only hope of long-term survival is for humans to virtually halt global warming in the next several decades and then begin to reverse it. Meeting such a goal will require a revolution in the global energy systemand, above all, a rapid abandonment of coal burning. But theres the rub. Australia is the worlds second-largest exporter of coal power, and it has avoided recession for the past 27 years in part by selling coal. Though polls report that most Australians are concerned about climate change, the countrys government has so far been unable to pass pretty much any climate policy. In fact, one of its recent political crisesthe ousting of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the summer of 2018was prompted by Turnbulls attempt to pass an energy bill that included climate policy. Its current prime minister, Scott Morrison, actually brought a lump of coal to the floor of Parliament several years ago while defending the industry. He won an election last year by depicting climate change as the exclusive concern of educated city-dwellers , and climate policy as a threat to Australians cars and trucks. He has so far attempted to portray the wildfires as a crisis, sure, but one in line with previous natural disasters. Read: Five big trends that increased Earths carbon pollution In fact, it is unprecedented. This seasons fires have incinerated more than 1,500 homes and have killed at least 23 people, Prime Minister Morrison said on Saturday . * There were at least twice as many fires in New South Wales in 2019 as there were in any other year this century, according to an analysis by The New York Times . Climate change likely intensified the ongoing epidemic: Hotter and drier weather makes wildfires more common, and climate change is increasing the likelihood of both in Australia. Last year was both the hottest and driest year on record in the country. Perhaps more than any other wealthy nation on Earth, Australia is at risk from the dangers of climate change. It has spent most of the 21st century in a historic drought. Its tropical oceans are more endangered than any other biome by climate change. Its people are clustered along the temperate and tropical coasts, where rising seas threaten major cities. Those same bands of livable land are the places either now burning or at heightened risk of bushfire in the future. Faced with such geographical challenges, Australias people might rally to reverse these dangers. Instead, they have elected leaders with other priorities. Australia will continue to burn, and its coral will continue to die. Perhaps this episode will prompt the more pro-carbon members of Australias Parliament to accede to some climate policy. Or perhaps Prime Minister Morrison will distract from any link between the disaster and climate change, as President Donald Trump did when he inexplicably blamed Californias 2018 blazes on the states failure to rake forest floors. Perhaps blazes will push Australias politics in an even more besieged and retrograde direction, empowering politicians like Morrison to fight any change at all. And so maybe Australia will find itself stuck in the climate spiral, clinging ever more tightly to coal as its towns and cities choke on the ash of a burning world. * This story originally misstated that at least 18 firefighters had died this fire season. In an earlier estimate, 18 people in total had been confirmed dead; three of them were volunteer firefighters.