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| Australia's climate change denying PM,Tony Abbott. |
The recent ”downing”
of flight MA17 in the Ukraine is a distraction of consequence beyond imagination.
Australians, governed by a climate change denying
government, have been subjected to a media-led deluge about the downing (the
convenient and non-committal description given to the shooting down of the
Malaysian airliner), which has been such that the vastly more important,
certainly in the medium to long-term, scrapping of the carbon charging
mechanism has been publicly almost forgotten.
Tony Abbott and his coalition cohort have rushed to become
identified as the international white nights of the MA17 drama.
The Australian Government’s initiative is to be applauded,
but never must we forget that governments around the world, including our own,
have a bigger responsibility than becoming party to something compared to
potentialities of climate change is a minor event.
True, flight MA17 came to a rather grimy conclusion that was
the product of uninvited, unannounced and unmitigated violence; violence to which
the victims made absolutely no contribution and so certainly on the face of it
where innocent in every way.
As other international flights were just 90 seconds both
ahead and behind, it must be pointed out that they (the passengers, crew and
plane) were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The untimely termination of flight MA17 is a powerful
emotive issue and conscious of that, the Australian news media, not to mention,
almost every form of social media, had been alive with the latest developments
of what is, and isn’t happening in the Ukraine and now Holland that has become
the immediate destination of bodies recovered from the plane’s wreckage and the
wide crash area.
The Abbott-led coalition has soaked up this tragic event,
actively feeding the media with every detail of its commitment to resolving the
dilemma as that has fed the public “mania” for the latest news about what is
happening with regard the downing of flight MA17.
The government understands and knows quite well that the
public mind will always switch onto something that is immediate, can be
resolved quite quickly and easily (it hopes) and brings with it asking nothing
in the way of a personal demand, other than a little sympathy or empathy.
Climate change is hugely different.
Locked into our procrastination and denial we are quickly
leaving the moment in which we could something about resolving climate change and
now were standing on the brink of a time in which we will seriously need to
consider adaptation rather mitigation.
We are quickly passing the time when mitigation would have
been possible and now we have entered an era when we will have consider how we
adapt to climate change and within that what are the ethics of that adaptation.
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| Just a section of the remains of flight MA17 in a Ukrainian field. |
The downing of flight MA17 was in the eyes of most bereft of
ethics, but ethics are value and content laden and if you were to talk with those
who pulled the trigger, or pushed the button, you would find they were, in
their view, quite within their ethical rights to do what they did.
The market-driven society that created climate change, was,
despite the protestations of many who successfully exploited and
successfully profited from it, devoid of ethics and so to emerge from this
never-seen-before era as unscathed as possible, we need to reignite our
interest in and concern for ethics.
Climate change and its consequences is going to have a far
greater impact on far greater number of people than the untimely demise of flight
MA17 and so in whatever way we can, we need to have our responsible men (that’s
men and women) again thinking about, deciding and acting on changing our lives
with the aim of slowing the damage to or climate and there reducing, wherever
and however possible our need to adapt to what is evolving.
