By Kurt Johnson
THE ENVIRONMENT
Living Hot
Clive Hamilton & George Wilkenfeld
Hardie Grant, $27.99
Clive Hamilton is a peddler of unvarnished truths; politically unpopular in the moment, they are often accepted in the fullness of time. His 2018 Silent Invasion – about Chinese influence in Australian politics – was dumped at the last moment by a jittery publisher. Today, its findings are broadly accepted with the political wind blowing in the opposite direction.
In Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet, Hamilton has teamed up with energy policy heavyweight George Wilkenfeld. The pair establish themselves as straight-talking when briefly confronting climate’s “third rail” – population size – a taboo for the right as it constrains growth, as well as for the left because it is tainted by vague associations with racism. Yes, population size in affluent societies does impact emissions.
The aftermath of the 2011 flash flood in Grantham. Almost the entire town has relocated to higher ground.Credit: Paul Harris
Hard truths established, Living Hot explains that having squandered the opportunity for climate leadership, any material contribution to emissions reduction by Australia is proportionally insubstantial. Mitigation is now a domestic decision for the big polluters: China, the United States, India and Europe. While Australia still has a moral obligation to continue to meet targets, the priority, according to Hamilton and Wilkenfeld, must be adapting the country for floods, fires, droughts and heatwaves already locked in.
Like population size, accepting the inevitable ravages of climate change is an uncomfortable subject. It concedes some degree of defeat, conceding that the world will irrevocably change, when it seems only yesterday that Australia agreed there was a problem.
While the case for adaptation is slowly gaining traction, activists fear that any refocus will soften commitment to targets if consequences can simply be managed away. But, of course, they cannot. Adaptation assumes substantial loss, but the fossil-fuel lobby has proven it will exploit any opportunity to delay. Still, adaptation is a necessary conversation. It is no longer a question of if the world will change, but by how much.
The authors spend nearly a third of Living Hot critiquing Saul Griffith, Alan Finkel and Ross Garnaut as “false prophets” of climate change. All three have written bestselling books that promise vast opportunity for Australia on a planet pursuing energy transition. Hamilton and Wilkenfeld’s critiques of Griffith and Finkel are fair. Griffith’s “electrifying everything” approach glosses over the necessary infrastructural changes, while Finkel’s reliance on gas and laxness on mining betray his proximity to the Coalition’s dark decade of inaction.
The authors’ rejection of Garnaut’s ideas might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Garnaut’s championing of green exports is highly ambitious but well-grounded in the fact that Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels. Transforming not only our domestic energy generation but becoming a global leader in transitioning trading partnerships could impact global emissions well beyond our domestic share. That Japan is so preoccupied with Australian gas production shows we have more leverage than we realise.
While mitigation and adaptation are not mutually exclusive, they do vie for Australia’s rarest resource – our capacity to act. The most climate-exposed developed economy has again been caught sleepwalking. Organisations such as the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility have been routinely ignored by the government that founded them. Often adaptation, when achieved, is short-sighted and favours protecting assets of the rich and powerful.
Living Hot does not go into detail but the ideas it relays are fascinating. Adapting cities, mapping climate risk and neo-nature – assisting plants and animals to survive in a changing climate – are all worth further investigation.
Where adaptation has been successful, it’s local. Almost the entire town of Grantham in Queensland’s Lockyer Valley has relocated to higher ground after it became apparent that floods were more the rule than the exception. Local action such as this is Living Hot’s central mechanism to enable adaptation. After all, it is the locals who best understand their local changes.
Living Hot is a difficult read. I felt like a weary mountain climber the moment he realises that the summit he has scaled is a false one, with the actual one looming upward at the end of another exhausting climb. But that’s not to understate the importance of Living Hot.
Like Hamilton’s other works, it will no doubt quietly slip into accepted wisdom. Whether Australia miraculously changes character and acts is another matter altogether.
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