Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this.

In the Pacific, we know that climate change is exacerbating a human rights crisis. Our survival relies on the world following international law to limit the warming that threatens our people and shores. Yet the recent trajectory of Pacific governments picking and choosing which rights to defend and which to ignore is deeply troubling.

A Difficult Year misses the solution evident in its own story. Were it to look more closely, the film might challenge the weak political clichés it skewers with powerful truths: that those worried about the climate and their money have more in common than what divides them; that only a movement focused on ending both environmental and economic exploitation can defeat a politics with no interest in stopping either.

If the world is to meet its climate targets, international organisations and wealthy countries need to provide accessible and fair funding to developing nations. Otherwise, the cheapest and least efficient paths towards cooling will be pursued out of necessity.

I ask my mother if the Iron Dome is carbon-neutral. She replies that “the resulting explosion is tiny and probably negligible,” and asks me in return if I’m aware the Dead Sea is dying, the water receding.

Let this be a line in the sand. Let us learn our history. Let us listen to liberation movements around the world. Conflicts for land and water will shape the decades to come. Showing up for each other and building power to demand justice is our only hope for a humane future.

In October 2023, the Bass Strait and Otway Basin will become the next frontier for offshore oil and gas exploration. Spanning from the coast of Warrnambool to Currie, the licenses cover over 7.7 million hectares of ocean. The irony is strong: the oilfields are named after the Thylacine, the famously extinct Tasmanian tiger, and Yolla, the Palawa kani word for short-tailed shearwaters—birds which have of late been washing up on the beaches of King Island with plastic in their guts.

The big fossil fuel companies, from Santos to Woodside, are not necessary to the healthy functioning of our society. In fact, it’s the very opposite—they are the ones that got us into this mess and are holding us back from taking real action. Ending their social license is the first step in being able to see and think clearly about the intense and disruptive challenges ahead.

It’s not difficult to grasp the horrific conclusions that might be—and repeatedly have been drawn—from the populationist argument. If the masses truly threaten the well-being of the planet by their existence, would, say, the emergence of a new and deadly pandemic be such a problem? The more morally squeamish of the populationist crowd might not like to follow that train of thought to its ultimate destination but plenty of others will.

As we process the magnitude of these floods, while still trying to make sense of the black summer fires, it is clear that we are going to need significant resources to manage the ongoing, rolling crises that will define our lives in the decades to come. As these impacts become more and more frequent, we need to organise around the idea that those responsible for the climate crisis must pay for the mess they have made.

Dan Ilic from the podcast A Rational Fear made headlines over the past weeks for placing billboards attacking the Coalition’s climate policies. His ‘JokeKeeper’ campaign has received gushing praise from many commentators, with Jane Caro suggesting that Ilic be made Australian of the Year and comparing him to child sexual assault survivor Grace Tame. While […]

It’s often the very same forces that are making our wages stagnate and our work become increasingly insecure that are working to prevent us from taking serious action on climate change. It’s clear now this is a fight that will have to be waged by unions and their members.

It is one hundred seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock and Australia is waking up to a charred and flooded landscape. After our burning summer, how will things be different? As communities recover and rebuild, let there also be this reckoning: it is not just climate action this country needs, it is climate justice.

As I made the trip on that half-empty plane, I thought about how my interstate mobility – moving east for study, west for family, east for work – and that of many others like me, has always been underpinned by the knowledge that it’s possible to go home. Unlike the climate migrants of Kiribati or Honduras, I haven’t had to face the possibility that home might become unreachable or might cease to exist as I know it.

In the wake of Australia’s most devastating bushfire season and the governments continued inaction, the pressure is mounting for Australian universities to take initiative in the fight against climate change.

A just education system must serve the joint purposes of providing the skills needed for a radically different economy, and the knowledges needed to make possible, and to build, another world for us all.