Venice floods make climate change denial indefensible

Zanoni took particular aim at Luca Zaia, the Veneto president and League politician, for presenting a budget that contained ‘no concrete plan to tackle climate change’.
Arguing against implementing fairly straightforward carbon emission cutting emissions whilst sitting under 1.54 meters of water undermines any claim towards climate ignorance these politicians might have hoped to make, and essentially forces them into a position where they must admit their self-interest.

‘We thought it would be more harmful to cut employment rates’ is not only a sham designed to avoid restructuring employment in line with the Paris Agreement, but now directly contends with evidence that Venice will be underwater within a century according to a 2017 report by the Italian National Agency for New Technologies.

At the same time Venice fills with water, the NSW coast in Australia is being ravaged by its earliest and most severe fire season since records began. Even for modern Australian political discourse, which has always veered towards the alarmingly ignorant (I say this as an Australian), the responses from Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Deputy PM Michael McCormack have been jarring.

‘We’ve had fires in Australia since time began!’ McCormack told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) through his gas mask as the smoke billowed around his temples.

The comments were made last Monday as Australia woke to the news that the catastrophic fire emergency it was facing, threatening home on much of the east coast, had already taken three lives. And all this before summer has even begun.

Queensland has been battling its fire season since September – a mere month since winter ended.

McCormack’s reaction to people having the audacity to link bushfire season gradually getting earlier every year to climate change was to call them ‘pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies’ on breakfast radio.

This is the same government who continues to support the construction of more coal mines, refuses to switch any sectors to renewable energy, and maintains Australia as the third biggest exporter of fossil fuels. But yea, the fires are definitely unrelated.

The more politicians think they can get away with climate change denial whilst the physical effects of the disaster can be seen and felt, the more they reveal the deliberate nature of their harmful policy making. The fact that voters who keep putting these politicians in power might have to evacuate their homes or wade through what used to be their streets to realise the necessity of environmental policy is at best ironic, and at worst, tragic.