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Australia - like many English-speaking countries - is full of lovely people who somehow manage to keep electing far-right, genocidal, climate-denying governments of surpassing administrative incompetence.
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The most likely explanation: there are people who - while they care in the abstract about discrimination, the environment, human rights, etc - would vote for a dead gopher^H^H^H^H^H^H^H wallaby ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Adolf Hitler if he would promise to lower their taxes by $0.25.
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Which is how Australia, a country that is frequently literally on fire, manages to mine coal, engage in Great Barrier Reef-destroying harbor dredging, and maintain an official policy of climate denial.
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Doubtless there're countless poor and working-class Australians who voted for those policies, but the bulk of the blame rests on the country's vile plute class, the oligarchs whose lavish spending elects one performatively cruel far-right sociopath after another.
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The kind of people who are presently furious with their local governments for failing to build seawalls in time to prevent the coastal erosion that has undermined the cliff houses their mansions were built upon.
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Mansions that are now about to chunder into the sea below, triggering mass evacuations of some of New South Wales's most expensive mega-homes.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/21/australia/australia-coastal-erosion-homes-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
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https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/21/australia/australia-coastal-erosion-homes-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
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While there's some talk of relaxing planning rules to enable the rapid deployment of seawalls, this is - as the local residents say - "too little, too late."
But when they say "too little, too late," they mean, "We should have built a seawall long ago."
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But when they say "too little, too late," they mean, "We should have built a seawall long ago."
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When I say it, I mean, "You should have lived up to your Kyoto obligations, not denied climate change, and pulled out of the Five Eyes spying alliance, whose priorities include neutralizing climate activists."
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The mansions falling into the sea are notable because it's a rare instance in which the first casualties of the climate emergency are the ultra-rich.
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When it comes to faster-moving, more dramatic crises, poor and working people bear the brunt: fires, pandemics, etc all climb the privilege gradient from the bottom up.
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And to be clear, Australia is neither the worst offender nor the only country whose plutes are about to lose their cliff houses.
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Here in my adopted hometown of LA, our coasts are lined with plute-dwelling mansions whose owners have spent decades illegally walling off access to the public beaches. Their homes will also flood and wash away and tumble off of cliffsides.
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And they, too, have supported idiotic, terracidal politicians who slow-walked climate action or denied the crisis altogether. I will have schadenflooding when their homes wash away, too.
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It's too late for those homes. It's too late for our coasts and most of our coastal cities. But it's not too late for us. We can - we MUST - turn this around, by pivoting our entire species' productive capacity to climate remediation.
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I mean, fuck the panic over automation-driven unemployment. Relocating every coastal city inland, dealing with hundreds of millions of traumatized refugees, fighting continent-spanning fires...
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...and dealing with wave after wave of zoonitic and insect-borne pandemics will give us full employment for centuries to come.
https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
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https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
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