Marina Hyde - Don’t panic, humanity: selfless billionaires will save us all
Out an Airline. Even as David Attenborough warned of Earth’s “crisis moment”, the UK government rescued ailing airline Flybe on the basis that some people can’t get to work between Wales and Scotland or wherever any other way. Eventually, surviving businessmen will be able to row between mountain peaks, but for now corporate efficiency trumped the climate emergency. Or the “climate debate”, as some still have it, even though it’s the sort of debate that should ideally ensue when I tell my children not to run in the road – ie, none.
And so to the global backdrop. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, must be religious, on the basis he’s offered “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of Australia’s raging bushfires. In any reasonable theology, however, Morrison’s decision to serve in a cabinet that abolished the country’s climate commission, to slash fire and rescue budgets, and to ignore repeated concerns of fire chiefs would suggest he’s going to burn in hell. Or in Australia, which will probably be quicker.
Watching the unprecedented fires provokes a strong sense that the Earth is bored with the series, and is fast-forwarding to the end. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says we should stop having the climate emergency discussion in terms of us killing the planet, and reframe it to acknowledge that it will be the planet killing us. Instead of seeing Mother Nature as a sort of ethereally benign matriarch, it would probably get more people in the right headspace if we thought of her as Medea, or Karen Matthews.
Morrison has a spiritual twin in Richard Branson, who – as part-owner of Flybe – was one of the rescue plan’s impoverished beneficiaries. Branson’s private Necker Island has twice been ravaged by the effects of extreme weather events in the past few years, an eventuality that always sees him pose for angry but determined photos among the wreckage, presumably in a bid to garner sympathy. You own three fucking airlines, Richard. It’s like watching Dennis Nilsen whinge about his drains...read more
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/17/selfless-billionaires-earth-burning-elon-musk-mars
And so to the global backdrop. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, must be religious, on the basis he’s offered “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of Australia’s raging bushfires. In any reasonable theology, however, Morrison’s decision to serve in a cabinet that abolished the country’s climate commission, to slash fire and rescue budgets, and to ignore repeated concerns of fire chiefs would suggest he’s going to burn in hell. Or in Australia, which will probably be quicker.
Watching the unprecedented fires provokes a strong sense that the Earth is bored with the series, and is fast-forwarding to the end. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says we should stop having the climate emergency discussion in terms of us killing the planet, and reframe it to acknowledge that it will be the planet killing us. Instead of seeing Mother Nature as a sort of ethereally benign matriarch, it would probably get more people in the right headspace if we thought of her as Medea, or Karen Matthews.
Morrison has a spiritual twin in Richard Branson, who – as part-owner of Flybe – was one of the rescue plan’s impoverished beneficiaries. Branson’s private Necker Island has twice been ravaged by the effects of extreme weather events in the past few years, an eventuality that always sees him pose for angry but determined photos among the wreckage, presumably in a bid to garner sympathy. You own three fucking airlines, Richard. It’s like watching Dennis Nilsen whinge about his drains...read more
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/17/selfless-billionaires-earth-burning-elon-musk-mars
