About Climate Change. I think Naomi Klein is right. Or should I say she's "correct" b/c she sure isn't TO the right.

Capitalism vs. the Climate
Naomi Klein
November 9, 2011

Link to The Nation.

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
 
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)

In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also exit the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, proudly takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches…that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to “promoting free-market solutions,” has been holding these confabs since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And the strategy appears to be working. At the end of day one, Morano—whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that sank John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign—leads the gathering through a series of victory laps. Cap and trade: dead! Obama at the Copenhagen summit: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projects a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorts the audience to “celebrate!”

There were no balloons or confetti descending from the rafters, but there may as well have been.

* * *

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate change used to be something most everyone said they cared about—just not all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably come in last.

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)

This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected. (The deniers have even found a way to dismiss a new study confirming the reality of global warming that was partially funded by the Koch brothers, and led by a scientist sympathetic to the “skeptic” position.)

The effects of this emotional intensity have been on full display in the race to lead the Republican Party. Days into his presidential campaign, with his home state literally burning up with wildfires, Texas Governor Rick Perry delighted the base by declaring that climate scientists were manipulating data “so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Meanwhile, the only candidate to consistently defend climate science, Jon Huntsman, was dead on arrival. And part of what has rescued Mitt Romney’s campaign has been his flight from earlier statements supporting the scientific consensus on climate change.

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.

* * *

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable. These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.

While Heartlanders like to invoke the specter of communism to terrify Americans about climate action (Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a Heartland conference favorite, says that attempts to prevent global warming are akin to “the ambitions of communist central planners to control the entire society”), the reality is that Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as recklessly: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia. And while some point to the dizzying expansion of China’s renewable energy programs to argue that only centrally controlled regimes can get the green job done, China’s command-and-control economy continues to be harnessed to wage an all-out war with nature, through massively disruptive mega-dams, superhighways and extraction-based energy projects, particularly coal.

It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.

Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.

1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere
 
After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.

Traditionally, battles to protect the public sphere are cast as conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without limit and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond our economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out for a radically new conception of realism, as well as a very different understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems. Changing our culture to respect those limits will require all of our collective muscle—to get ourselves off fossil fuels and to shore up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.

2. Remembering How to Plan

In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at the national and international levels. Every community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition Town movement calls an “energy descent action plan.” In the cities and towns that have taken this responsibility seriously, the process has opened rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead.

Climate change demands other forms of planning as well—particularly for workers whose jobs will become obsolete as we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. A few “green jobs” trainings aren’t enough. These workers need to know that real jobs will be waiting for them on the other side. That means bringing back the idea of planning our economies based on collective priorities rather than corporate profitability—giving laid-off employees of car plants and coal mines the tools and resources to create jobs, for example, with Cleveland’s worker-run green co-ops serving as a model.

Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather and dependence on fossil fuel inputs. Wes Jackson, the visionary founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has been calling for “a fifty-year farm bill.” That’s the length of time he and his collaborators Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann estimate it will take to conduct the research and put the infrastructure in place to replace many soil-depleting annual grain crops, grown in monocultures, with perennial crops, grown in polycultures. Since perennials don’t need to be replanted every year, their long roots do a much better job of storing scarce water, holding soil in place and sequestering carbon. Polycultures are also less vulnerable to pests and to being wiped out by extreme weather. Another bonus: this type of farming is much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture, which means that farming can once again be a substantial source of employment.

Outside the Heartland conference and like-minded gatherings, the return of planning is nothing to fear. We are not talking about a return to authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real democracy. The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world. These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption. Climate change doesn’t conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative.

3. Reining in Corporations

A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid re-regulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives: subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans).

Only a very small sector of the population sees any restriction on corporate or consumer choice as leading down Hayek’s road to serfdom—and, not coincidentally, it is precisely this sector of the population that is at the forefront of climate change denial.

4. Relocalizing Production

If strictly regulating corporations to respond to climate change sounds somewhat radical it’s because, since the beginning of the 1980s, it has been an article of faith that the role of government is to get out of the way of the corporate sector—and nowhere more so than in the realm of international trade. The devastating impacts of free trade on manufacturing, local business and farming are well known. But perhaps the atmosphere has taken the hardest hit of all. The cargo ships, jumbo jets and heavy trucks that haul raw resources and finished products across the globe devour fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. And the cheap goods being produced—made to be replaced, almost never fixed—are consuming a huge range of other nonrenewable resources while producing far more waste than can be safely absorbed.

This model is so wasteful, in fact, that it cancels out the modest gains that have been made in reducing emissions many times over. For instance, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a study of the emissions from industrialized countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol. It found that while they had stabilized, that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to move their dirty production to places like China. The researchers concluded that the rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was six times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.

In an economy organized to respect natural limits, the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport would need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy-intensive than growing it in the South and shipping it by light rail.)

Climate change does not demand an end to trade. But it does demand an end to the reckless form of “free trade” that governs every bilateral trade agreement as well as the World Trade Organization. This is more good news —for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big boxes. But the challenge this poses to the capitalist project should not be underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power.

5. Ending the Cult of Shopping

The past three decades of free trade, deregulation and privatization were not only the result of greedy people wanting greater corporate profits. They were also a response to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, which created intense pressure to find new avenues for rapid economic growth. The threat was real: within our current economic model, a drop in production is by definition a crisis—a recession or, if deep enough, a depression, with all the desperation and hardship that these words imply.

This growth imperative is why conventional economists reliably approach the climate crisis by asking the question, How can we reduce emissions while maintaining robust GDP growth? The usual answer is “decoupling”—the idea that renewable energy and greater efficiencies will allow us to sever economic growth from its environmental impact. And “green growth” advocates like Thomas Friedman tell us that the process of developing new green technologies and installing green infrastructure can provide a huge economic boost, sending GDP soaring and generating the wealth needed to “make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.”

But here is where things get complicated. There is a growing body of economic research on the conflict between economic growth and sound climate policy, led by ecological economist Herman Daly at the University of Maryland, as well as Peter Victor at York University, Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey and environmental law and policy expert Gus Speth. All raise serious questions about the feasibility of industrialized countries meeting the deep emissions cuts demanded by science (at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050) while continuing to grow their economies at even today’s sluggish rates. As Victor and Jackson argue, greater efficiencies simply cannot keep up with the pace of growth, in part because greater efficiency is almost always accompanied by more consumption, reducing or even canceling out the gains (often called the “Jevons Paradox”). And so long as the savings resulting from greater energy and material efficiencies are simply plowed back into further exponential expansion of the economy, reduction in total emissions will be thwarted. As Jackson argues in Prosperity Without Growth, “Those who promote decoupling as an escape route from the dilemma of growth need to take a closer look at the historical evidence—and at the basic arithmetic of growth.”

The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is anathema to the large corporations that dominate the global economy, which are controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater profits year after year. We are therefore caught in the untenable bind of, as Jackson puts it, “trash the system or crash the planet.”

The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty. Meanwhile, in the industrialized world, those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have to contract.

So when the Heartlanders react to evidence of human-induced climate change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it’s not because they are paranoid. It’s because they are paying attention.

6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy
 
About now a sensible reader would be asking, How on earth are we going to pay for all this? The old answer would have been easy: we’ll grow our way out of it. Indeed, one of the major benefits of a growth-based economy for elites is that it allows them to constantly defer demands for social justice, claiming that if we keep growing the pie, eventually there will be enough for everyone. That was always a lie, as the current inequality crisis reveals, but in a world hitting multiple ecological limits, it is a nonstarter. So the only way to finance a meaningful response to the ecological crisis is to go where the money is.

That means taxing carbon, as well as financial speculation. It means increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated military budgets and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. And governments will have to coordinate their responses so that corporations will have nowhere to hide (this kind of robust international regulatory architecture is what Heartlanders mean when they warn that climate change will usher in a sinister “world government”).

Most of all, however, we need to go after the profits of the corporations most responsible for getting us into this mess. The top five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade; ExxonMobil alone can clear $10 billion in profits in a single quarter. For years, these companies have pledged to use their profits to invest in a shift to renewable energy (BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding being the highest-profile example). But according to a study by the Center for American Progress, just 4 percent of the big five’s $100 billion in combined 2008 profits went to “renewable and alternative energy ventures.” Instead, they continue to pour their profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay and new technologies designed to extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels. Plenty of money has also gone to paying lobbyists to beat back every piece of climate legislation that has reared its head, and to fund the denier movement gathered at the Marriott Hotel.

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the “polluter pays” principle to be applied to climate change. Beyond higher taxes on polluters, governments will have to negotiate much higher royalty rates so that less fossil fuel extraction would raise more public revenue to pay for the shift to our postcarbon future (as well as the steep costs of climate change already upon us). Since corporations can be counted on to resist any new rules that cut into their profits, nationalization—the greatest free-market taboo of all—cannot be off the table.

When Heartlanders claim, as they so often do, that climate change is a plot to “redistribute wealth” and wage class war, these are the types of policies they most fear. They also understand that, once the reality of climate change is recognized, wealth will have to be transferred not just within wealthy countries but also from the rich countries whose emissions created the crisis to poorer ones that are on the front lines of its effects. Indeed, what makes conservatives (and plenty of liberals) so eager to bury the UN climate negotiations is that they have revived a postcolonial courage in parts of the developing world that many thought was gone for good. Armed with irrefutable scientific facts about who is responsible for global warming and who is suffering its effects first and worst, countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are attempting to shed the mantle of “debtor” thrust upon them by decades of International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans and are declaring themselves creditors—owed not just money and technology to cope with climate change but “atmospheric space” in which to develop.

* * *

So let’s summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

More than that, climate change implies the biggest political “I told you so” since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism’s “irreparable rift” with “the natural laws of life itself,” and many on the left have argued that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And of course indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers of disrespecting “Mother Earth” long before that. The fact that the airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm, with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers were right. And the people who said, “Hey, let’s get rid of all the rules and watch the magic happen” were disastrously, catastrophically wrong.

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.

But imagine, for a moment, how all of this looks to a guy like Heartland president Bast, who studied economics at the University of Chicago and described his personal calling to me as “freeing people from the tyranny of other people.” It looks like the end of the world. It’s not, of course. But it is, for all intents and purposes, the end of his world. Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.

* * *

At the Heartland conference—where everyone from the Ayn Rand Institute to the Heritage Foundation has a table hawking books and pamphlets—these anxieties are close to the surface. Bast is forthcoming about the fact that Heartland’s campaign against climate science grew out of fear about the policies that the science would require. “When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive increase in government…. Before we take this step, let’s take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I think, stopped and said, Let’s not simply accept this as an article of faith; let’s actually do our own research.” This is a crucial point to understand: it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists but rather opposition to the real-world implications of those facts.

What Bast is describing—albeit inadvertently—is a phenomenon receiving a great deal of attention these days from a growing subset of social scientists trying to explain the dramatic shifts in belief about climate change. Researchers with Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project have found that political/cultural worldview explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”

Those with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On the other hand, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry and a belief that we all get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.

For example, among the segment of the US population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views. Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes this tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition.” This refers to the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways designed to protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behaviour that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behaviour that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to watch your worldview get shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate deniers today.

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike and marginal. A few true believers always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn’t with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. We have these types on the Stalinist left, and they exist as well on the neo-Nazi right. By this point in history, free-market fundamentalists should be exiled to a similarly marginal status, left to fondle their copies of Free to Choose and Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this fate only because their ideas about minimal government, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, and ExxonMobil.

This points to the limits of theories like “cultural cognition.” The deniers are doing more than protecting their cultural worldview—they are protecting powerful interests that stand to gain from muddying the waters of the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife (possibly much more, but the think tank has stopped publishing its donors’ names, claiming the information was distracting from the “merits of our positions”).

And scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies, and who knows how much of the rest comes from coal. A Greenpeace investigation into another one of the conference speakers, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that since 2002, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests. And fossil fuel companies are not the only economic interests strongly motivated to undermine climate science. If solving this crisis requires the kinds of profound changes to the economic order that I have outlined, then every major corporation benefiting from loose regulation, free trade and low taxes has reason to fear.

With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal and dysfunctional economic status quo. One of the most interesting findings of the studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much-discussed paper on this topic by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes”) found that confident conservative white men, as a group, were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” than the rest of the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this discrepancy: “Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.”

But deniers’ relative economic and social privilege doesn’t just give them more to lose from a new economic order; it gives them reason to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change in the first place. This occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the Heartland conference display what can only be described as an utter absence of empathy for the victims of climate change. Larry Bell, whose bio describes him as a “space architect,” drew plenty of laughs when he told the crowd that a little heat isn’t so bad: “I moved to Houston intentionally!” (Houston was, at that time, in the midst of what would turn out to be the state’s worst single-year drought on record.) Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that “the world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer times.” And Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change should do what the French did after a devastating 2003 heat wave killed 14,000 of their people: “they discovered Walmart and air-conditioning.”

Listening to these zingers as an estimated 13 million people in the Horn of Africa face starvation on parched land was deeply unsettling. What makes this callousness possible is the firm belief that if the deniers are wrong about climate change, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry about. (“When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we find shade,” Texas Congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and environment subcommittee hearing.)

As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and busy themselves getting unpoor. When I asked Michaels whether rich countries have a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed that there is no reason to give money to countries “because, for some reason, their political system is incapable of adapting.” The real solution, he claimed, was more free trade.

* * *

This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mindset is a matter of great urgency, because climate change will test our moral character like little before. The US Chamber of Commerce, in its bid to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, argued in a petition that in the event of global warming, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” These adaptations are what I worry about most.

How will we adapt to the people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? Will we open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis from which they are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt ever more draconian antiimmigration laws? How will we deal with resource scarcity?

We know the answers already. The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. “Free-market climate solutions,” as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the global South, and in predominately African-American cities like New Orleans.

In The Shock Doctrine, I explore how the right has systematically used crises—real and trumped up—to push through a brutal ideological agenda designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but rather to enrich elites. As the climate crisis begins to bite, it will be no exception. This is entirely predictable. Finding new ways to privatize the commons and to profit from disaster are what our current system is built to do. The process is already well under way.

The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, before everything was broken into single “issues” to be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded NGOs. Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.” By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, breathing new life and urgency into longstanding fights against everything from free trade to financial speculation to industrial agriculture to third-world debt, while elegantly weaving all these struggles into a coherent narrative about how to protect life on earth.

But that isn’t happening, at least not so far. It is a painful irony that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a left-wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” (and, of course, those mills were the beginning of climate change). When demonstrators are cursing out the corruption of their governments and corporate elites in Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Madison and New York, climate change is often little more than a footnote, when it should be the coup de grâce.

Half of the problem is that progressives—their hands full with soaring unemployment and multiple wars—tend to assume that the big green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of those big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for the destruction of the rest of the economy). The result is that those taking on the failures of capitalism and those fighting for climate action remain two solitudes, with the small but valiant climate justice movement—drawing the connections between racism, inequality and environmental vulnerability—stringing up a few swaying bridges between them.

The right, meanwhile, has had a free hand to exploit the global economic crisis to cast climate action as a recipe for economic Armageddon, a surefire way to spike household costs and to block new, much-needed jobs drilling for oil and laying new pipelines. With virtually no loud voices offering a competing vision of how a new economic paradigm could provide a way out of both the economic and ecological crises, this fearmongering has had a ready audience.

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, like Yale’s Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract global warming), as well as playing up concerns about national security.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t work. For years, big green groups have framed climate action as a way to assert “energy security,” while “free-market solutions” are virtually the only ones on the table in the United States. Meanwhile, denialism has soared. The more troubling problem with this approach, however, is that rather than challenging the warped values motivating denialism, it reinforces them. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of short-term hubristic thinking that got us into this mess.

It is not the job of a transformative social movement to reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe—nor is it necessary. According to McCright, co-author of the “Cool Dudes” study, the most extreme, intractable climate deniers (many of them conservative white men) are a small minority of the US population—roughly 10 percent. True, this demographic is massively overrepresented in positions of power. But the solution to that problem is not for the majority of people to change their ideas and values. It is to attempt to change the culture so that this small but disproportionately influential minority—and the reckless worldview it represents—wields significantly less power.

* * *

Some in the climate camp are pushing back hard against the appeasement strategy. Tim DeChristopher, serving a two-year jail sentence in Utah for disrupting a compromised auction of oil and gas leases, commented in May on the right-wing claim that climate action will upend the economy. “I believe we should embrace the charges,” he told an interviewer. “No, we are not trying to disrupt the economy, but yes, we do want to turn it upside down. We should not try and hide our vision about what we want to change—of the healthy, just world that we wish to create. We are not looking for small shifts: we want a radical overhaul of our economy and society.” He added, “I think once we start talking about it, we will find more allies than we expect.”

When DeChristopher articulated this vision for a climate movement fused with one demanding deep economic transformation, it surely sounded to most like a pipe dream. But just five months later, with Occupy Wall Street chapters seizing squares and parks in hundreds of cities, it sounds prophetic. It turns out that a great many Americans had been hungering for this kind of transformation on many fronts, from the practical to the spiritual.

Though climate change was something of an afterthought in the movement’s early texts, an ecological consciousness was woven into OWS from the start—from the sophisticated “gray water” filtration system that uses dishwater to irrigate plants at Zuccotti Park, to the scrappy community garden planted at Occupy Portland. Occupy Boston’s laptops and cellphones are powered by bicycle generators, and Occupy DC has installed solar panels. Meanwhile, the ultimate symbol of OWS—the human microphone—is nothing if not a postcarbon solution.

And new political connections are being made. The Rainforest Action Network, which has been targeting Bank of America for financing the coal industry, has made common cause with OWS activists taking aim at the bank over foreclosures. Anti-fracking activists have pointed out that the same economic model that is blasting the bedrock of the earth to keep the gas flowing is blasting the social bedrock to keep the profits flowing. And then there is the historic movement against the Keystone XL pipeline, which this fall has decisively yanked the climate movement out of the lobbyists’ offices and into the streets (and jail cells). Anti-Keystone campaigners have noted that anyone concerned about the corporate takeover of democracy need look no further than the corrupt process that led the State Department to conclude that a pipeline carrying dirty tar sands oil across some of the most sensitive land in the country would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” As 350.org’s Phil Aroneanu put it, “If Wall Street is occupying President Obama’s State Department and the halls of Congress, it’s time for the people to occupy Wall Street.”

But these connections go beyond a shared critique of corporate power. As Occupiers ask themselves what kind of economy should be built to displace the one crashing all around us, many are finding inspiration in the network of green economic alternatives that has taken root over the past decade—in community-controlled renewable energy projects, in community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, in economic localization initiatives that have brought main streets back to life, and in the co-op sector. Already a group at OWS is cooking up plans to launch the movement’s first green workers’ co-op (a printing press); local food activists have made the call to “Occupy the Food System!”; and November 20 is “Occupy Rooftops”—a coordinated effort to use crowd-sourcing to buy solar panels for community buildings.

Not only do these economic models create jobs and revive communities while reducing emissions; they do so in a way that systematically disperses power—the antithesis of an economy by and for the 1 percent. Omar Freilla, one of the founders of Green Worker Cooperatives in the South Bronx, told me that the experience in direct democracy that thousands are having in plazas and parks has been, for many, “like flexing a muscle you didn’t know you had.” And, he says, now they want more democracy—not just at a meeting but also in their community planning and in their workplaces.

In other words, culture is rapidly shifting. And this is what truly sets the OWS moment apart. The Occupiers—holding signs that said Greed Is Gross and I Care About You—decided early on not to confine their protests to narrow policy demands. Instead, they took aim at the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis, while embodying—in highly visible ways—radically different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.

This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not a distraction from the “real” struggles. In the rocky future we have already made inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people, and a capacity for deep compassion, will be the only things standing between humanity and barbarism. Climate change, by putting us on a firm deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound social and ecological transformation.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time. The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

The Art of the Novel by Geoff Dyer

From The New York Times Book Review, November 3, 2011


In London recently there was an exhibition of paintings by Atkinson Grimshaw. The name might not ring a bell, but his paintings will be familiar to you. Victorian street scenes at twilight. The amber-lit windows of homes through the bare branches of trees — the seasons always fall or winter. Shop windows reflected in rain-slick streets. Solitary walkers. Moonlight, tattered clouds, turquoisey sky. An atmosphere of mystery, elegy, lingering anticipation.

Still not ringing any bells? Then look into my eyes and I will take you back, back in time to the 1970s (O.K., for younger readers this will involve past-life regression), when you read the orange-spined Penguin English Library editions of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” by Charles Dickens, or “The Woman in White,” by Wilkie Collins. Or the gray-green spined Penguin Modern Classics editions of “The Secret Agent,” by Joseph Conrad, and “The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James.

For me, the identification of these novels with the paintings is absolute. To reread any of them with different cover art is inconceivable: “Edwin Drood” is Grimshaw’s painting. But it goes farther because, on reflection, I realize I never finished reading “Edwin Drood” (the novel Dickens never finished writing) and never even started “The Woman in White.” But I know the paintings well enough to have absorbed the contents of the books visually, by near-synesthesia.

There is a widespread nostalgic fondness for the first Penguins, with their bands of color that made every book look the same within whichever category of writing — green for crime, purple for . . . something else? The same is true of the early Modern Classics featuring drawings, but for someone of my age — born 1958, buying and reading from the mid-1970s — these editions were the stuff of used-book stores. They all looked pretty much the same: old, dreary and therefore oxymoronically unmodern. Whereas the 1970s livery with titles and authors’ names in sharply discreet Helvetica was the pristine look of modernity — sometimes modernism — itself.

The use of different paintings meant each book was a “modern classic” in its own particular way. A side effect was that books I was reading for an education in literature doubled as an introduction to art history. Art lessons at my school meant clowning around for an hour and a half each week in the way that physics or chemistry meant being bored rigid (though science was enlivened by the unrealized hope of explosions). I have a distinct memory of being shown some Dalí paintings in a large-format book, but in terms of art history that’s as far as it went.

I saw my first-ever Hopper — or a detail of one at any rate, showing a couple in folding chairs, staring into a radioactive sky — on the cover of “One” by David Karp (who seems subsequently to have dropped from the pantheon of Modern Classics). Ditto de Chirico (a detail from “Enigma of the Hour” on Franz Kafka’s novel “The Castle”).

Since then the happiest moments in 35 years of museum-going have occurred when I’ve seen these Penguin Modern Classic paintings on a gallery wall. Especially since the cover often showed only a detail of the original. Seeing the works themselves revealed exactly what had been lost, though I invariably saw it the other way around, with the painting as an expanded version of the Penguin original.

Aside from the Grimshaws, my favorite cover was for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s paired novellas “Southern Mail” and “Night Flight,” which showed a biplane diving through a dark and turbulent sky. When I finally caught up with the painting, C. R. W. Nevinson’s “Swooping Down on a Hostile Plane,” in the Imperial War Museum in London in the 1990s, it felt like the fulfillment of an accidental 20-year pilgrimage. All that had been excluded by the crop was the hostile speck of the enemy plane on which the Penguin one was swooping. By then I knew enough about aviation to see that this plane was actually a British Sopwith Camel, which, strictly speaking, was misleading since the aircraft in both books are civilian and French. Quibbles notwithstanding, paintings like this became visual essays on the books they adorned: the equivalent, in reverse, of so-called ekphrastic poems about works of art.

From an early stage I noticed that paintings by the same artist would appear on different books by the same author. Quite reasonably Vanessa Bell (whose name meant nothing to me) provided images for both “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Waves.” (I bought the latter in about 1975 from Woolworth’s. Virginia Woolf in Woolworth’s! Quite a contrast with today when it’s a struggle to find her “Selected Diaries” in some branches of Barnes & Noble.) If the same artist showed up on books by different writers then a connection between titles was implied — a subtle, associative version of “If you liked that then you might like this” marketing. Actually, that understates matters, for the Penguin Modern Classics series seemed an unshakable guarantee of quality. When I could not get through a book — “The Waves,” for example — I took it, unquestioningly, as a sign of my inadequacy or unpreparedness. Thirty years later, my now-informed taste remains pretty much the same: I still can’t ride “The Waves.” What’s changed is the imprint’s all-powerful, canon-determining place in the market. I remember thinking, in my late teens, that if I owned every Penguin Modern Classic I would somehow have read all of modern literature. That was in the mid-1970s, slightly predating the debates about course reform and the assaults — from various corners — on the very idea of the canon. In its provincial and limited way my formation by, faith in, and subsequent growing beyond Penguin Modern Classics reproduced the collapse of the grand narratives that is a staple part of Postmodernity 101.

Not for the first time I find myself thinking what a privilege it was to grow up in a house without books — or art. Those Penguin Modern Classics did not have the allure of drugs or under-age drinking; there was nothing illegal or subversive about them (except insofar as the constant infusion of knowledge steadily undermined parental authority), but consuming them was an expression of independence and discovery. Let’s put it as modestly as possible: acquiring and reading them provided an opportunity to accomplish what every adolescent craves — going somewhere and doing something without one’s parents.

All of which makes me realize how appropriate it is that Atkinson Grimshaw should be the artist whose work stands, metonymically, for this whole experience. Those houses with their toasty windows visible through the bare-branched trees beckon and glow, elegiacally, with the promise of reading and literature itself.

Geoff Dyer is the author of “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, 1989-2010” and other books. His column appears regularly in the Book Review.

Australia. Maybe it's not as bad as this sounds.

Climate Change and the End of Australia

Want to know what global warming has in store for us? Just go to Australia, where rivers are drying up, reefs are dying, and fires and floods are ravaging the continent

by: Jeff Goodell
This story is from the October 13, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.

It's near midnight, and I'm holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the northeast coast of Australia. Yasi, a Category 5 hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds that's already been dubbed "The Mother of All Catastrophes" by excitable Aussie tabloids, is just a few hundred miles offshore. When the eye of the storm hits, forecasters predict, it will be the worst ever to batter the east coast of Australia.

I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. "Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."

As Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year's disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country's breadbasket, has suffered a dec ades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming dec ades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.

With Yasi approaching fast, disaster preparations are fully under way. At the airport, the Australian Defense Force is racing to load emergency supplies into Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters. Entire cities have shut down, their streets nearly empty as I drive north, toward the center of the storm, through sugar plantations and ranch land. Dead kangaroos sprawl by the side of the road, the victims of motorists fleeing the storm.

With the winds hitting 80 miles per hour, I'm forced to stop in Proserpine, where the windows are taped and sandbags are piled in front of doors. Palm trees are bent horizontal in the wind, and the shingles of a nearby roof blow off and shoot into the darkness. It's as if civilization is being dismantled one shingle at a time.

"Welcome to Australia, the petri dish of climate change," an Aussie friend e-mailed me the day before. "Stay safe."

In the past year – one of the hottest on record – extreme weather has battered almost every corner of the planet. There have been devastating droughts in China and India, unprecedented floods and wildfires in the United States, and near-record ice melts in the Arctic. Yet the prosperous nations of the world have failed to take action to reduce the risk of climate change, in part because people in prosperous nations think they're invulnerable. They're under the misapprehension that, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Tom Schelling puts it, "Global warming is a problem that is going to primarily affect future generations of poor people." To see how foolish this reasoning is, one need only look at Australia, a prosperous nation that also happens to be right in the cross hairs of global warming. "Sadly, it's probably too late to save much of it," says Joe Romm, a leading climate advocate who served as assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration.

This is not to say that the entire continent will sink beneath the waves anytime soon. What is likely to vanish – or be transformed beyond recognition – are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources. Instead, Australia is likely to become hotter, drier and poorer, fractured by increasing tensions over access to water, food and energy as its major cities are engulfed by the rising seas.

To climate scientists, it's no surprise that Australia would feel the effects of climate change so strongly, in part because it has one of the world's most variable climates. "One effect of increasing greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere is to amplify existing climate signals," says Karoly. "Regions that are dry get drier, and regions that are wet get wetter. If you have a place like Australia that is already extreme, those extremes just get more pronounced." Adding to Australia's vulnerability is its close connection with the sea. Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.

How bad could it get? A recent study by MIT projects that without "rapid and massive action" to cut carbon pollution, the Earth's temperature could soar by nine degrees this century. "There are no analogies in human history for a temperature jump of that size in such a short time period," says Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at Australian National University. The few times in human history when temperatures fell by seven degrees, he points out, the sudden shift likely triggered a bubonic plague in Europe, caused the abrupt collapse of the Moche civilization in Peru and reduced the entire human race to as few as 1,000 breeding pairs after a volcanic eruption blocked out the sun some 73,000 years ago. "We think that because we are a technologically sophisticated society, we are less vulnerable to these kinds of dramatic shifts in climate," McMichael says. "But in some ways, because of the interconnectedness of our world, we are more vulnerable."

With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production. Rising sea levels will wipe out large parts of major cities and cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to coastal homes and roads. The Great Barrier Reef will be reduced to a pile of purple bacterial slime. Thousands of people will die from heat waves and other extreme weather events, as well as mosquito-borne infections like dengue fever. Depression and suicide will become even more common among displaced farmers and Aborigines. Dr. James Ross, medical director for Australia's Remote Area Health Corps, calls climate change "the number-one challenge for human health in the 21st century."

And all this doesn't even hint at the political complexities Australia will face in a hotter world, including an influx of refugees from poorer climate-ravaged nations. ("If you want to understand Australian politics," says Anthony Kitchener, an Australian entrepreneur, "the first thing you have to understand is our fear of yellow hordes from the north.") Then there are the economic costs. The Queensland floods earlier this year caused $30 billion in damage and forced the government to implement a $1.8 billion "flood tax" to help pay for reconstruction. As temperatures rise, so will the price tag. "We can't afford to spend 10 percent of our GDP building sea walls and trying to adapt to climate change," says Ian Goodwin, a climate scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney.

With so much at risk, you might expect Australia to be at the forefront of the clean-energy revolution and the international effort to cut carbon pollution. After all, the continent's vast, empty deserts were practically designed for solar-power installations. And unlike the U.S. Congress, the Australian Parliament did ratify the Kyoto Protocol, pledging to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent by 2050. But it was an empty gesture. Australia remains deeply addicted to coal, which not only provides 80 percent of its electricity but serves as its leading export. Perhaps more than any other nation on earth, Australia is trapped by the devil's bargain of fossil fuels: In the short term, the health of the nation's economy depends on burning coal. But in the long term, the survival of its people depends on quitting coal. Australia's year of extreme weather has reawakened calls for a tax on carbon pollution, but it is far from clear that the initiative will pass, or, in the big picture, whether it will matter much. "What we are ultimately talking about is how climate change is destabilizing one of the most advanced nations on the planet," says Paul Gilding, an Australian climate adviser and author of The Great Disruption. "If Australia is vulnerable, everyone is vulnerable."

The morning after Yasi, I emerge from my hotel to find a few broken windows and downed trees. The flooding isn't as bad as had been feared, but the hurricane has still turned the region upside down: roofs blown off houses, trees down, sailboats in the streets, traffic backed up for miles. "This is bringing a world of hurt to people," one trucker tells me as we wait in line for the road to open.

In the following days, there is much speculation in the Aussie press about whether or not Yasi was "caused" by global warming. Most media outlets gloss over the complexities of the science – an unsurprising omission, given that Australia is home to Rupert Murdoch's media empire – and instead reassure readers that hurricanes have been hitting Queensland for thousands of years. One of the major drivers of the storm, they insist, was a particularly strong La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific.

That's true – but it's only part of the story. Thanks to record-high levels of carbon in the atmosphere, surface temperatures in the ocean near Australia last year were the highest ever recorded – nearly one degree above normal. And climate scientists have long warned that warmer oceans increase the risk of faster, more deadly hurricanes. "We realized way back in 1987 that CO2-induced warming would increase the speed limit on hurricanes," Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT, has said. "It surprised us how much power increase you got with just a little bit of increase in the sea-surface temperature."

Murdoch's papers also failed to point out that the more coal the country burns and exports, the fiercer its hurricanes are likely to become. "Unless we start reducing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere soon," says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, "the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future."

Australia, in fact, has been getting a glimpse of the global-warming future for more than two decades. What Australians call "The Big Dry" began in the early 1990s and quickly grew worse, with a dozen years of below-average rainfall. Drinking-water reservoirs for Melbourne, with a population of 4 million people, were soon depleted. Topsoil from farms started to dry up and blow away – one dust cloud was nearly 1,000 miles long and 250 miles wide. In Sydney, the dust storms were so bad they shut down the airport and ferry service, forcing people to stay indoors. In a single day, scientists estimated, several million tons of topsoil had been stripped from deserts and farms and blown out to sea. As Dianne Thorley, the mayor of a small city in the drought-stricken Murray-Darling Basin, told a reporter, "Australia is drying up, a little bit like a dried apple."

In a sense, Australia is a creation of human ingenuity. Of the six inhabited continents, Australia is the driest. Except for a tropical belt in the north and some temperate areas in the southeast, the entire place is a desert. The fact that 22 million people can inhabit the continent is a tribute to engineers, who have figured out a way to extract enough water out of the ground and collect it in enough reservoirs to allow Australians to grow tomatoes and take hot showers whenever they please. Indeed, the greatest engineering achievement in Australia may be the construction of an elaborate network of canals and waterways that transformed the Murray-Darling Basin, a formerly scrubby wasteland covering 1 million square miles in southeastern Australia, into an agricultural wonderland. The basin now produces about 40 percent of the nation's food, enabling Australia to become a major exporter of wheat.

But that engineering triumph has come at a cost. The industrial-scale farming operations that took over the basin have depleted nutrients in the soil, sucked rivers dry and replaced deep-rooted indigenous plants well-adapted to Australia's extreme climate with shallow-rooted crops that need constant irrigation to survive. As a result, all the extra water being pumped into the land has raised the water table in many places, releasing salt deposits into the soil. "Salinity is not just poisoning the soil, it is also wrecking the water supply for people downstream," says Billy Squire, an environmental activist in the basin. "It is a slow-motion disaster."

Transforming a harsh desert into farms and shopping malls has also left large parts of Australia hugely dependent on seasonal rainfall. After all, engineers can redistribute water, but they can't manufacture it. As the Big Dry dragged on, rainfall declined in the southern part of the country, where most of the people live and the majority of the food is grown, fueling the risk of catastrophic bush fires. The reasons for this change in rainfall patterns are complex, but many climate scientists believe that the Big Dry was driven by subtle shifts in the structure of Australia's atmosphere caused by the dramatic buildup of carbon pollution. "The storm track, which brings rain-bearing weather to Australia, has shifted a few degrees south," says Karoly, the University of Melbourne scientist. "Rain that had fallen on southwestern and southeastern Australia now falls on the ocean." Global warming, in other words, shifted the continent's vital rainfall out to sea.

For farmers in southeastern Australia, the minute shift in atmospheric conditions was devastating. In the Murray-Darling Basin, water reservoirs declined by two-thirds in the past decade, leading to severe water shortages for many farmers and ranchers. Thirsty cattle sickened and died. Rice yields declined by 98 percent. The basin's waterways and canals, long considered an engineering triumph, turned into a network of mudholes and dried-up creek beds. Many farmers, unable to make it, were forced to sell or abandon their land.

In desperation, local water boards authorized crazy cloud-seeding experiments in a failed attempt to "manufacture" rain. Big cities also responded by trying to come up with a technological fix. In Melbourne, officials pushed through a controversial $3.5 billion project to build one of the world's largest water-desalinization plants, capable of converting 110 million gallons of seawater into fresh drinking water every day – roughly a third of the city's water consumption. "Desalinization is a very expensive way to create drinking water," says James Bradfield Moody, the director of development at one of Australia's top science agencies. "It is no replacement for rain."

Smaller cities, unable to afford such costly projects, turned to even more desperate measures. Toowoomba, an agricultural town perched on a plateau 80 miles inland from Brisbane, found its drinking water reservoir down to only seven percent of capacity. The regional council floated the idea of building a $68 million treatment plant that would essentially turn sewage into drinking water – he first of its kind in Australia. Despite reassurances that the recycled water would be safe to drink, residents rejected the proposal, unable to get their minds around the fact that they were going to have to drink their own piss. Instead, the council voted to build a 20-mile pipeline to draw water from another reservoir. It also decided to tap the Great Artesian Basin, a deep aquifer that underlies nearly a quarter of the continent, further depleting the only source of fresh water for much of inland Australia. "It's the water equivalent of burning the furniture to heat your house," says Moody.

Last summer, it finally rained in southern Australia. In fact, it flooded. Many farmers in the region took that to mean the Big Dry was over. More likely, it was only a short reprieve. Climate models show that the drought is likely to worsen in the coming decades. "When it comes to water, we are living beyond our means in Australia," says Moody. "In the long run, the life we have created here is unsustainable without major changes."

Without water, Australia not only dries up – it also burns. Wildfires have long been a routine part of life here, and Australians considered them a manageable risk. But all that changed in late January 2009, when the temperature in Melbourne spiked to 110 degrees for three days in a row. The public transportation system literally collapsed, as steel trolley rails bowed in the heat, and hundreds of thousands of homes lost power. John Brumby, the state premier of Victoria, held a press conference warning that the coming Saturday, February 7th, would be the "worst day in the history of the state." By that point, thanks to the Big Dry, rainfall had been below normal for nearly a decade, sucking the moisture out of the soil and making trees and plants as brittle as matchsticks. "The state is just tinder-dry," Brumby warned, calling on Victorians to prepare for the worst.

In the hills above Melbourne, Jane O'Connor and her husband spent the morning clearing dry brush from around their home and watering the roof. The fire conditions were nightmarish. The temperature had hit 115 degrees – the hottest day on record. Humidity was only six percent, and a strong wind was blowing from the northwest. "We knew the situation was bad," says O'Connor, a 56-year-old publishing executive, "but we felt we were prepared for it." Even when the radio reported that fires were sweeping through the hills 30 miles away, she and her husband made no move to head for safety. "We weren't too worried," she recalls.

Then, as O'Connor watched in horror, a wall of smoke that had seemed far to the south suddenly began racing toward her home. "By the time we realized the trouble we were in," she says, "it was too late to evacuate."

The firestorm sweeping across the hillside was like nothing she – or anyone – had ever seen before. A wall of flame moving at eight miles per hour was incinerating everything in its path. O'Connor hurried to stuff wet towels under the doors while her husband soaked down the yard with a hose. But within minutes, she heard a deafening roar. Looking out the window, she saw a "hurricane of fire" – flames shooting 70 feet into the air, fanned by the high winds created by the storm's thermal vacuum. As trees burst into flames, O'Connor and her husband narrowly escaped to a nearby house that was more fire-resistant.

For the rest of the night, she and her neighbors watched the hills burn. "We could see houses igniting, diesel tanks exploding," she recalls. Officials later reported that 600 fires broke out in Victoria that day, some with flames 300 feet high capable of killing people nearly a quarter mile away. One researcher estimated that the amount of energy released by the fires in a single day was equivalent to 1,500 atomic bombs of the size dropped on Hiroshima.

The next day, when O'Connor returned to her home, nothing was standing but the chimney. The fire had been so hot it had melted the windshield of her car. "Everything we had was gone," she says. Not far from her house, nine people died in a brick home they had taken refuge in, including a mother and five children.

You might think that surviving such a harrowing encounter would make O'Connor more attuned to the risks of living on a superheated planet, but it hasn't. "I think the jury is still out on the science of climate change," O'Connor says from the safety of her air-conditioned office in Melbourne. "Australia has always had wildfires, and this could be just part of a natural cycle. I think it's too soon to tell."

Climate experts say otherwise. According to Australia's top scientists, a hotter planet equals a much higher risk of catastrophic fires. Even in a "low global-warming scenario" with modest increases in carbon pollution, catastrophic fires will ravage Victoria every five to seven years by 2020, and every three to four years by 2050. Under a "high global-warming scenario" – essentially the track the world is on today – catastrophic fires will occur every year in some regions. As Peter Marshall, a leader of the Australian firefighters union, put it in a letter to the prime minister, "The science suggests we are well on the way to guaranteeing that somewhere in the country there will be an almost annual repeat of the recent disaster."

Two days before Yasi hit, I was 45 miles off the coast of Australia, swimming with sea turtles and parrotfish on the Great Barrier Reef. The reef is a festival of color and life: corals in bright-pink mounds, blacktip reef sharks, silver jacks and angelfish. But whenever I got too carried away by the beauty of the reef, my underwater guide, David Kline, a researcher at the University of Queensland's Coral Reef Ecosystems Lab, would point to a cluster of ghostly corals and nod. I knew what he meant: These underwater skeletons had been killed off by the warming ocean – a sign of the trouble ahead for one of Australia's most important ecosystems.

Climatewise, what's happening to the reef is in many ways the opposite of a hurricane: Instead of a dramatic blowdown, it's an incremental collapse. Rising ocean temperatures, as well as the sea's increasing acidity, are slowly killing off coral reefs around the world. The Great Barrier Reef is one of the best-managed reefs on the planet – commercial fishing, a major problem in other areas, is severely restricted. But even here, the increasingly hot, acidic seas mean that the reef is unlikely to survive much beyond 2050. As J.E.N. Veron, former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, has put it: "What were once thriving coral gardens that supported the greatest biodiversity of the marine realm will become red-black bacterial slime, and they will stay that way."

For most Australians, the decline and fall of the Great Barrier Reef is impossible to imagine. "What the polar bears are to northerners, the reef is to us," says Karoly. The reef itself, which is roughly 9,000 years old, is the largest structure ever made by life on Earth, extending some 1,250 miles along the coast. It is home to an incredible diversity of life: 5,000 types of mollusks, 1,800 species of fish, 125 kinds of sharks. It is also a major economic engine for Australia, drawing 2 million visitors a year and generating $6 billion in revenue.

Exactly how the reef will decline, and what can be done about it, is the subject of much of the work at the Heron Island Research Center. The island is a narrow spit of land on the southern end of the reef, just large enough for a slightly dilapidated resort on one end and a collection of dormlike sleeping quarters and labs at the other. The station is run by the University of Queensland, and during the summer, it's overrun by scientists studying everything from shearwater mating habits to the effects of rising ocean acidity on the navigational abilities of clown fish.

Corals are strange animals. Each one is made up of flower-shaped polyps that build their skeletons on the outside, allowing tiny algae to live inside and provide energy to the coral via photosynthesis. The coral grows by excreting calcium carbonate, which provides the skeleton for new polyps. The reef itself is nothing more than a collection of millions of these polyps, and the brilliant colors of the corals are the manifestation of the different types of algae that live within them. This symbiotic relationship between the coral and algae is fragile. If the coral is exposed to bright light at the same time as high temperatures, it can cause the algae to produce toxic levels of oxygen. To survive, the coral expel the toxic algae, which leaves them pale and sick – a condition marine scientists call "bleaching." In most cases, the coral never recovers.

As the Earth heats up, bleaching has become increasingly common at reefs around the world. A mass bleaching in 1998 killed 90 percent of the corals in the Indian Ocean. Last year, reefs bleached throughout the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean and off the coasts of Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Unless we find a way to cool the planet, 95 percent of the reefs on the planet, including the Great Barrier Reef, are expected to be subject to severe bleaching by 2050.

In the long run, ocean acidification is an even bigger threat to the reef than warming seas. Acidification, which occurs as the ocean breaks down the CO2 in the atmosphere into carbonic acid, inhibits the ability of corals to create their calcium-carbonate skeletons. Kline participated in a study that showed a 40 percent decline in calcification rates of certain corals on the Great Barrier Reef in the past 30 years. By the end of the century, if nothing changes, the world's oceans are expected to be 150 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution – creating a loss of corals that will be irreversible. "The potential consequences of such acidification are nothing less than catastrophic," says Veron. "The ocean is going to suck up CO2, and there is not much we can do about it – other than get serious about cutting the amount of CO2 we dump into the atmosphere."

Beyond the reef, acidification also damages shell-creating creatures throughout the ocean, from crabs and oysters to the billions of tiny pteropods that form a key part of the marine food chain. Recent research has shown that even organisms that don't have shells, such as krill, have a difficult time surviving in more acidic waters. "One possible consequence of ocean acidification is the collapse of the food chain," says Donna Roberts, a marine biologist who heads the country's research on ocean acidification. "If the krill vanish, will the whales be able to find other food sources? What about all the fish that depend on fish that eat pteropods – can they adapt? It is not at all clear how the ocean food chain will react if you pull out the organisms at the bottom."

One likely scenario: the triumph of the jellyfish. Since jellyfish don't build shells, a world with more acidic seas may give them an evolutionary advantage. Roberts says she's already seeing a lot more jellyfish on her research trips. "One of the consequences of burning fossil fuels may be that we're creating an ocean of jellyfish," she says.

I ask Kline about this one day as we walk along the reef at low tide. Reef sharks dart ahead of us, and rays float past in the shallow water like underwater butterflies. "The reef is not going to die overnight," he says, trying to sound optimistic. "The complexity of the ecosystem will decline. It will become full of weedy, opportunistic species – a junkyard reef."

I play devil's advocate. "Some people would say, 'So we lose the Great Barrier Reef. Sad, but so what?' It's not like the human race won't go on."

Kline stops and picks up a sea cucumber – an ugly, slug-shaped animal that is endangered by overfishing. "It's true, the human race could probably survive without the Great Barrier Reef," he says. He mentions the tourist business the reef brings to Australia, the protection it provides against storms along the coast and the value of its creatures to science and medicine. "But for me, it's not that rational," he says, settling the sea cucumber gently back into the water. "It just comes down to the fact that the reef is one of the wonders of the natural world – and we're going to trash it just because we don't want to drive smaller cars or pay a little extra to put solar panels on the roof?"

When the Big Dry ended last September and it finally started raining in the town of Toowoomba, everyone practically fell to their knees in gratitude. "We were hurting real, real bad," says Tom Jenkins, the head of a farming cooperative, who shows me pictures of parched land, cracked and dry. It looks like the Mojave Desert. "Every drop of rainfall seemed like a gift," Jenkins says. "It was like our long nightmare was finally over."

But then the rains kept coming. By late December, the ground was saturated and fields were flooding. The two creeks that ran through town, both of which are usually no more than a trickle in midsummer, overflowed their concrete culverts and spilled into the streets. Water flowed into the foyer of the shopping mall at the center of town. In the countryside, roads flooded out, and hundreds of acres of watermelons – a key crop in the region – were swamped.

And still the rain kept coming. In early January, eight inches of rain fell in five days. Gas stations closed, farmers wrote off an entire season, and the city came to a halt. But incredibly, the rains did not. "I didn't know the sky could hold that much water," says Wayne Reis, who runs a furniture store in the center of town.

The fact that the sky can hold more water is precisely what happens in a warming world. "Global warming is lifting more water vapor into the air, increasing the intensity of torrential downpours," concludes a recent report from Australia's Climate Institute. A two-degree increase in ocean temperatures can boost rainfall by nearly 10 percent. But scientists can't predict where that extra rain will fall, or how far beyond the norm any given weather system might go.

On January 10th, four inches of rain fell on Toowoomba in just a few hours, and by that afternoon, what had been a manageable soaking turned into a catastrophe of such suddenness and force that it defies any attempt to describe it. Within minutes, both creeks in town swelled into a 20-foot-high wall of water. It tore through downtown, sending residents scrambling for higher ground, swamping stores in the mall and floating books in the public library. Office workers took a video of the waters rushing into their parking lot and carrying off their cars, sending them bouncing along the torrent like rubber duckies. The video, viewed some 7 million times on YouTube, became the iconic image of the Toowoomba flood.

Thousands of people, unaware of the sudden danger, were caught in the midst of their daily lives. Donna Rice, a 43-year-old mother of four, was running errands downtown with two of her children – Jordan, 13, and Blake, 10 – when her Mercedes stalled at a busy intersection. "I could see they were in trouble," says Warren McErlean, a truck driver who tried to push Rice's car out of the rising floodwaters. But the water was coming hard and fast, and it knocked him off his feet. Another man, secured by a rope to a lamppost, waded out and managed to grab Blake. By the time he came back, the raging water was flipping the Mercedes over. Rice and Jordan scrambled onto the roof of the car – "I saw the panic in their eyes," says McErlean. The rescuer grabbed them and tried to hold on, but the water was too strong. Rice and Jordan were washed away.

Within a half-hour, the water subsided. An hour later, cars were driving through the debris-strewn intersection. Rice's body was found a mile away behind a flour mill. Jordan's body was found wedged under a fig tree. The floodwaters continued down into the Lockyer Valley, bursting through smaller towns and sweeping buildings, cars and people away. All told, 22 people died from the flash floods.

Eventually, the floodwaters from Toowoomba and the surrounding region all poured into the Brisbane River, which flows through Australia's third-largest city. The river rose 15 feet above normal, breaking its banks and forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents. Low-lying areas of downtown Brisbane – "Brisvenice," people were calling it on Twitter – were soon under water. One blogger, writing by candlelight on his iPad, worried that the city seemed dangerously close to a total breakdown. "Despite the casual stoicism with which most people are addressing the flood – this 'natural disaster' – the sense that food, water, electricity and connectivity is so fragile does give pause for thought," he wrote. "How far away is this form of civilization from something deeply uncivilized?"

A few weeks after the flood, on a Saturday afternoon, religious and civic leaders in Toowoomba gather in front of the town's library to hold a service for the residents killed in the catastrophe. "No one thought anything like this could happen here," Bill Cahill, a member of the regional council, tells me. A stolid, respectable citizen if there ever was one, Cahill believes it is time to get beyond the argument about whether global warming is man-made and start preparing for a new, more extreme climate. "For the past decade, we suffered from terrible drought," he says. "Suddenly, we get some rain, this creek floods" – he points to what is now a muddy trickle in a narrow concrete culvert – "and we are nearly swept away."

Cahill points out that trying to control nature can actually backfire. Efforts to channel the creeks that flow through town – paving over their natural creek beds and forcing them into concrete culverts – had only served to amplify the flood, rather than preventing it. "We think we understand how to build a city, how to handle whatever nature throws at us, but we really don't," Cahill says. "We can do a lot of fancy engineering – but sometimes, that just makes us more vulnerable."

A week after yasi hit, I drive up the coast from Sydney with Ian Goodwin, a broad-shouldered scientist in flip-flops and shorts. Now in his early fifties, Goodwin has spent most of his life studying how global warming will change the coast of Australia. He grew up surfing on these waters, and still rides the waves every day that he can. More than most scientists, he understands exactly how much Australia has to lose.

"Living on the beach is pretty much the Australian dream," he says as we pass beach town after beach town. At Narrabeen Beach, a broad sweep of sand 15 miles north of Sydney, Goodwin points out where residents have been forced to truck in sand in an expensive and hopeless effort to keep the beach – and the homes along it – from being washed away by increasingly strong storm surges. If the seas rise by at least three feet this century, as the current scientific consensus expects them to, every one of the structures along the beach will vanish. "In fact," Goodwin says, "the way things are going, they could be gone within a decade or two."

"Do the people who live there know that?" I ask.

"Some of them do, but they don't care," he says. "Or they don't think about it. Australians have a hard time imagining the future will be any different than the present."

Australians aren't alone in their denial, of course. But there is a sense of fatalism here that is absent in America, a feeling borne by having lived for long years in a harsh climate, of being able to take whatever nature dishes out. It is why Australians don't leave their houses during raging wildfires, and why they build cites in landscapes where no cities should be built. When it comes to dealing with Mother Nature's nasty moods, Australians have a kind of outback machismo, a justifiable sense of pride for having built a nation in one of the most extreme climates on the planet. But as the catastrophes multiply, so too do the psychic costs of living with it. As a recent report by Australia's Climate Institute concluded, "Higher rates of drug and alcohol misuse, violence, family dissolution and suicide are more likely to follow more extreme weather events." In 2006, during the prolonged drought in the Murray-Darling Basin, the government estimated that an Australian farmer committed suicide every four days.

It's too soon to say for sure, but it may be that the deadly weather of the past few years will open people's eyes to the risks of living on a superheated planet. In July, Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced her proposal for a carbon tax in Australia. The plan would levy a modest price of $25 a ton on carbon for several years, then morph into a carbon-trading scheme in 2015. It's a complicated proposal, full of loopholes and subsidies for Big Coal, but if it passes, it would be a big step in the right direction. "It's a critical time," Ross Garnaut, the government's key climate adviser, told reporters. "Each year, the growth in emissions makes it less likely that we'll be able to avoid severe damage from climate change. So the requirement to take action is urgent."

It's not just floods and drought and wildfires that are spurring action to cut carbon pollution. It's also the fear of being left out of the economic benefits of clean technology. "With its deserts and sunshine, Australia should be the solar-energy capital of the world," one California entrepreneur tells me. "Instead, they are still passing out subsidies to the coal industry." Or as one Australian blogger put it, "Australia is currently exporting typewriters to a global economy moving quickly toward computers."

But as the demand to take action grows, so too does the corporate and political push-back. The coal industry is a powerful force in Australia, and it is rolling out the usual tired arguments that a tax on carbon would devastate the economy and send jobs scurrying overseas. The country's opposition leader, echoing the language of right-wing deniers in Congress, dismisses climate change as "absolute crap." But as befits the Australian psyche, the scare tactics here are even bigger and nastier than in America. The rhetoric over global warming has grown so heated, in fact, that climate scientists at the Australian National University have been assigned security protection after several weeks of abusive e-mails and phone calls. For their work in understanding what is happening to their country, some scientists have even received death threats.

When I ask Goodwin about this, he rolls his eyes. "It's all politics," he says as we walk along the sea wall at Manly Beach, the birthplace of surfing in Australia. "Would a price on carbon be a step in the right direction? Of course. But Australia is a big economy, hooked on growth and the extraction of natural resources – like coal. That is not going to change anytime soon."

Goodwin points out the swanky hotels and beach houses and restaurants along the water. "With three feet of sea-level rise, this is all gone," he says. "The beach, the hotels, the houses – the sea will cut right through to Sydney Harbor. Manly Beach will vanish. Lots of other beaches will go too, but this one is particularly iconic." The destruction could be slowed by building a massive sea wall, Goodwin says, but it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it wouldn't save the beach in the long run. The same thing goes for most beaches in Australia, as well as for Sydney itself – which is extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels, given the extensive development along the water.

But what about the prime minister's drive to put a price on carbon pollution? Couldn't that save coastal areas like Sydney? Goodwin shakes his head. "We could transform Australia's energy system to 100 percent solar tomorrow, and if we keep exporting coal to China, it won't really matter much in the big picture," he says. "But if we stop exporting coal, our economy will fall apart. So it's a stalemate."

We walk for a while, watching all the happy people strolling along the boardwalk and drinking wine in cafes and surfing the waves. The sun is shining, and everything is lovely. Too bad that it all has to go.