Safeguard a day late and a dollarydoo short.

But it’s all you’re getting for now.

The future has already happened. It’s happened to Lismore twice in the last five years. It happened to the easter half of the continent in 2019, when mega fires turned enormous swathes of bushland into a scorched, apocalyptic hellscape, a carbon copy of Mordor, if you will. It’s happening right now, as La Niña recedes, and we wait for the first hot breath of its sibling on our necks.

With climate change, the future is here, and to revise William Gibson, it is massively fucking distributed.

It’s a larf then, innit, to hear Chris Mitchell, editor demeritus of The Australian, rage-fapping about the frenzy of ‘left media’ and ‘environment journalists’ (surely the same thing, Christopher) over the latest report from the IPCC.

According to Mitch, the emo eco-kids were totes ignoring the very large elephant-shaped absence in the room, “the failure of a climate catastrophe, or anything like it, to arrive”.

Seriously?

Perhaps it just failed to arrive on the front page of the Oz, mate?

But what did arrive was the IPCC’s latest doom teaser and the government’s Safeguard Mechanism via a deal with the Greens that was either a critical last-minute lifesaver or a worthless microdose of weak-sauce and uttbucking fugly compromise, possibly both, in the very same presser, if you’re Adam Bandt.

For me, it felt like an opportune moment to contemplate our collective doom, having spent most of the weekend thinking about procrastinating and most of Monday writing an essay about it just for you.

Because that’s what we’ve been doing, haven’t we? As a species, I mean.

Procrastinating ourselves to megadeath.

The Twindenberg @jonkudelka

Every damn time.

We know the homework is due and the hour is late, and that the motherfucker is getting later by the second. As Rick Morton wrote about John Steinbeck’s climate change novels (acknowledging that nobody knew, not even Steinbeck, that he was writing climate change novels at the time), we fall ‘into the pit’ each in our own way. Some of us simply despair of humanity, and others lose themselves in option paralysis, worrying about exactly what we can do. Some, of course, are still, even now, straight-up deniers, and “the worst of an unhelpful bunch” are those grifter psychopaths and zero fucks bullshitters who know they’re grifting and bullshitting everyone into a planetary grave, but they’re making bank. So fuck you.

The New Yorker

Into this last bucket of human chum go all of the fossil fuel boyars and their hired goons at NewsCorp. I’m sure Chris will still be This-Is-Fining us as the sea level rise spills over the top of the Cahill Expressway. But he’ll do it from behind razor wire and AI gun pods in Schloss Murdoch’s Southern Highlands fortress.

Knowing this is almost inevitable is admittedly demotivating.

But just because it feels like you’re doomed, it doesn’t mean the psychopaths win.

There’s a great Ketan Joshi bit, which, again, I stole from Rick Morton (sorry Morto):

A problem created by human agency is a problem that can be resolved by human agency. Climate change is a disaster created by decisions. Nothing in the span of time that will exist after you finish this sentence is locked in. If you subscribe to the idea that we, with effort, can change or be made to change – the ability to choose one pathway over another – you believe that the harm of fossil fuel usage can be brought down far, far lower than what will happen if we continue on our current path. There is no ceiling on this philosophy, no end point to willpower and struggle. There is only a spectrum of difficulty, and the ticking clock of atmospheric physics.

Procrastination isn’t so much the opposite of agency as it is a very particular form of rejection.

In its purely personal form, the sort we discussed on Monday, procrastination is a type of self-harm. With climate change, it’s much worse, what Megan Garber calls capitulation at scale – when a whole civilisation, addled and weary, keeps ceding its present to its future, and the future is…

Well, you know.

“We know what’s coming,” writes Garber. “We do very little. We panic and shrug at the same time, awaiting the impending future.”

That suspended yet “catastrophic meantime” feels sickeningly familiar to the champion procrastinator, doesn’t it.

Is the Safeguard Mechanism doing ‘very little’?

It’s doing more than I thought, but Bandt is right that it’s not nearly enough, not for the third biggest fossil fuel exporter on this poor fucking planet.

And yet, we are capable of dealing with long arc crises. The cynics and nihilists denying there is a climate crisis can often be found on the same OpEd pages warning of existential threats from a rising Chinese hegemon and demanding hundreds of billions of dollars be spent yesterday to prepare for the future.

Spoiler: we absolutely will spend hundreds of billions of dollars preparing for that future, even as we can see what it looks like from what is happening in Ukraine.

Or maybe because we can see what it looks like.

I dunno.

Either way, that future has arrived, but in the original phrasing of William Gibson, it’s not yet evenly distributed.

Our other future is here, and it’s everywhere all at once.