The Reckoning

That imagery of the Himalayan tsunami smashing into the multi-story building in Nepal was horrifying, but then murder always is, isn’t it? That’s what happened at that border crossing: mass murder. The perpetrators were the boards and CEOs of fossil fuel companies who have known for decades what they were doing, have known the consequences of it, and carried on with reckless indifference to those consequences. They murdered the hundreds, maybe a thousand or more, who were swept away in Nepal, as surely as they murdered thousands in Europe this summer and will take the lives of tens of millions more in the coming decades.

Too strong, too much, too soon, or is it all too late?

When reading reports of the catastrophe in Nepal, I was counting off the moments until whatever media outlet I was reading quoted some scientists to assure me that, although it may have been related to climate change, it was not possible to say without a doubt that this particular incident was the fault of climate change. But that’s not really true, is it, because I just said it.

This was not the act of some vengeful god. Look into the truth of this, and you will find names, org charts and KPIs. There are quarterly reports and executives who read them. What fell in Nepal was not just gigatonnes of fast-moving rock and roaring ice. It was a reckoning.

The catastrophe in Nepal was a climate change disaster, the same way that the five heat waves in Europe this year, which killed tens of thousands of people, were climate change disasters. And because climate change is the fault of decisions taken by a relatively small number of human beings, mostly men, who knew exactly what they were doing, it was mass murder. You’re allowed to say it, at least for now. You don’t need to make up woke-words like eco-cide to describe the process.

It’s just murder, honestly.

That’s not a word we were originally given for the weather. We are given other words, like natural disaster. We are given tragedy and misfortune. Our language offers words that ask nothing of us but our pity for those who were simply standing in the wrong place when a frozen mountain thawed and fell on them.

Thankfully, not everyone is afraid of the words we actually need in this moment.

Ruth Gamble, a climate historian and director of La Trobe Asia, who has studied Tibet and Himalayan rivers for more than a decade, made it into the ABC’s reporting this morning. She’s in Kathmandu right now and was set to go through the border pass that was just destroyed. Gamble can cite instances of titanic floods and massive landslides going back millennia, but says they are more common now.

“Everyone can see, even non-scientists can see, that there’s melting glaciers and melting ice and there’s less snow and more rain and the rain’s coming down faster all across the mountains. The conditions and the type of precipitation that’s falling in the mountains are all changing so fast that denying that it’s climate change takes a willful act to ignore all of the evidence.”

So, she got the memo, but by close of business another memo will have arrived on desks in Houston and London and on the highest floors of those towers in Sydney and Melbourne, where Australia’s own multibillion-dollar fossil fuel companies plot their infernal schemes. That memo does not change. It orders that doubt be manufactured, that The Method be deployed again, a bastard cousin of the scientific method that the tobacco industry deployed for decades to deny, to evade, to create uncertainty in order to keep selling a product the industry already knew killed people.

Of course, they’ll be cursing it in private, the damnable bad luck of having so many wealthy white tourists die screaming in such shareable video. That sucks for them because we would have all forgotten this by Monday if the thousand killed had been poor, and brown, and local to the mountain that killed them. We think of death as the great leveller, but the dead have never been equal. Grief and remembrance enjoy much better production values when the deceased look like the commissioning editor.

One last thing. I’ll put good folding money on the table right now and tell you that someone will put a microphone in front of Albanese or someone like him, in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, to ask “Was this a result of climate change?”

And whoever is asked will respond, with a peevish frown and censorial tone, “Now is not the time to talk about that sort of thing.” Quite right too. Twenty years ago was the time to talk about this shit, and people did. We’ve known this was coming for decades. We know what the companies and their captive governments knew, and we understand that they pressed on, regardless. That mountain did not thaw and fall because these things just happen sometimes. It fell because projections were filed, understood, and set aside in favour of quarterly returns.

It fell because the reckoning is here.

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Friday puzzler. Hope it improves your mood.

Dice Dice Baby. The Friday Brain Buster.