Trump’s legacy: Division, denial and a climate in crisis

As Trumpism spreads and the climate crisis worsens, the cost of denial, greed and inaction grows impossible to ignore, writes Dermot Daley.

IT IS DIFFICULT for most Australians to comprehend how the great nation of the United States of America has been so abused by the indecent, lying, self-obsessed figure of Donald Trump.

The obsession with wealth without having to work for it is the behaviour of a narcissistic brat dominating the sandbox. A further complication is that Trump, like doppelgangers Putin and Netanyahu, wants to remain in power forever to avoid well-documented charges of criminality.

In Australia, there is no one in the Red Team or the Blue Team currently showing similar signs of lust for unearned personal wealth and power, although things can change.

But sadly, across the world, the age of democracy and government by and for the people has been transplanted by naked capitalism that has hijacked democracy and free enterprise, and now allows giant corporations to dictate their own terms to the Government of the day. This is most evident in the ways that capitalism frustrates attempts to address the climate crisis.

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For at least 50 years, scientists have expressed increasing concern over melting polar ice, rising sea levels, rising ocean temperatures, loss of species and extreme weather events.

The term “global warming” became “climate change”, which has now become a full climate crisis.

At first, we were told that global warming was due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, creating a thick blanket that trapped the heat. The solution, we were told, was to decarbonise, which, ironically, still allowed deforestation and the exploitation of coal and gas.

Today, we are being asked to convert our gas appliances to electricity because gas is now “bad for the environment”. No one seems to question that gas production is expanding and that the gas sourced in Australia will be sold overseas, where it will still produce greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, in Australia, older gas appliances may be less efficient, but can anyone recall seeing lab-coated technicians going from suburb to suburb with tools and exhaust hoods to measure the presence of “bad stuff” in the exhaust vents of our homes and businesses?

Physics shows that energy cannot be destroyed. E=mc². The latent energy in coal and oil releases light, heat and sound when converted into kinetic energy. The practice of burning fossil fuels over the past 350 years has steadily released heat into the atmosphere (the area between the Earth’s surface and outer space), incrementally raising the temperature of that zone throughout time, independent of the seasonal constant of solar heat gain by day and solar heat loss by night.

Since the advent of the internal combustion engine at the end of the 19th Century, the number of small mobile hot-spots (place your hand on your engine manifold after driving for half an hour) operating day and night around the world has increased exponentially.

Add to that the thermal emissions of exploding bombs and rockets in times of war, and it is indisputable that generations of human activity have overseen a very significant global warming effect here on this Spaceship Earth. This assessment does not include the sporadic release of energy through volcanic action or the increasing spread and incidence of wildfires.

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Those who deny the climate crisis are speaking with the gleam of gold and silver in their eye.

It is this slow and steady heating of the environment that is causing the ocean surface temperature to rise. It is the warmer water that induces higher transpiration rates of moisture into clouds, resulting in greater deluges of rain onto the land. It is the warmer air that dries out forests and scrub, creating a higher fuel load for bushfires. It is rising ocean levels that can cause catastrophic damage to coastal regions from storm surge arising from heated air over the warmer seas.

And it is this, combined with the steady theft of natural habitat, that is causing a rift in the food chain, resulting in measurable loss of species.

We humans caused all this to occur.

We placed our desire for comfort above the timeless balance of Nature and we allowed others to make decisions that were not theirs to make. We may have already crossed a point of no return.

We now learn that several billionaires, those financial oligarchs, have decided such and are constructing their own fortresses with food caches to be guarded by private armies. These greedy pirates deserted the normal community many years ago.

Those of us who love nature and the arts and sport and music, and enjoy being with loved ones to celebrate life itself, we who are called “woke” because we prefer to find things out for ourselves rather than listen to the loudest voice, we fully understand that our Spaceship Earth will survive.

The Earth will continue to rotate on its axis and it will continue to revolve around the sun on its annual orbit. But we humans, sadly, have made a protracted series of bad choices that will, in all probability, result in our blue-green planet being incapable of supporting human life.

Currently, this is not a matter of “if”, but “when”.

If we had the collective will, we could still make a difference, but that would require a rapid and radical shift in our approach to consumption. Many people will not have the appetite for this because it may entail acknowledgement of the lore of the indigenous peoples of each region.

Unless anyone out there has a better solution.