Garnaut Report

I don't usually look forward to government reports. If what was needed was a nice hot cup of tea, they are usually more like having a tepid cuppa that you left lying around a bit too long and that you find a moth floating in when you clean out the pot. You just know it's not really going to do the job... and can make you feel a little bit ill afterwards as the moth lay crumpled up in the plug hole.

OK, that might have been a bit melodramatic, but you get the point. The Garnaut report is not, it would seem, the tepid mothy type. Ross Garnuat has just come out and said that we will probably lose the fight against climate change. Hooray for him, and from a mainstream report, commissioned by the federal government, not some radical who can be dismissed as crazy. It's frankly about time we started calling it like it is.

What exactly he means is a bit open to question, and is a fairly one dimensional way of looking at ecological catastrophe. After all, without a few ecological catastrophes in the earth's history, we wouldn't be in the position we're in... err the position of being able to create our very own ecological catastrophe.

I agree entirely with his findings and his premise so far. Check out the Garnaut Review, it's well worth it. And what i particularly like is how public Ross Garnaut is being, he is really going out of his way, it would seem, to make sure the report doesn't get watered down as it filters into the bureaucracy by being very public about his progress and findings.

However, what would be more interesting than saying 'we're probably going to lose the fight..' would be to say that we're most likely beyond the point of being able to stay the way we are: culturally, economically, spiritually, and even, perhaps, biologically. It turns a sense of impending doom into a sense of opportunity and possibility. Dangerous, possibly deadly opportunity, but opportunity nonetheless.

Ironic, really, that our desperate clinging to our identities, our feverish desire to control our environment, our deep desire to replicate the familiar, has in fact hastened our own evolutionary challenge.