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Narrow window of opportunity

Tim Flannery’s road map to save the planet
by
March 2021, no. 429

The Climate Cure: Solving the climate emergency in the era of Covid-19 by Tim Flannery

Text Publishing, $24.99 pb, 205 pp

Narrow window of opportunity

Tim Flannery’s road map to save the planet
by
March 2021, no. 429

The Climate Cure should have been on every Australian federal politician’s Christmas list. As Tim Flannery explains, our federal politicians, stymied by Coalition climate change denialists and the fossil fuel lobby, have failed the climate challenge of the past two decades, so that we have ‘sleepwalked deep into the world that exists just seconds before the climate clock strikes a catastrophic midnight’. But ‘at the last moment, between megafires and Covid-19, governments are at last getting serious about the business of governance’.

Perhaps no other Australian is better equipped than Tim Flannery to define the immense challenges of the climate crisis or to propose a cure that might work. Flannery combines scientific understanding with political nous forged over many years of engagement in national and international climate politics. Just as important, his prose is crystal clear about the nature and extent of both catastrophe and cure. I have not read a better explanation of the difference between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ hydrogen energy (dirty hydrogen is generated using fossil fuels and thus contributes to the problem it is meant to solve) or of the different options for ‘drawdown’ (atmospheric CO2 removal).

Alistair Thomson reviews 'The Climate Cure: Solving the climate emergency in the era of Covid-19' by Tim Flannery

The Climate Cure: Solving the climate emergency in the era of Covid-19

by Tim Flannery

Text Publishing, $24.99 pb, 205 pp

From the New Issue

Comment (1)

  • Just to be clear, "the main enemy is [not] the fossil fuel lobby". It's the indifference of the masses. Some sort of (wilful) cognitive dissonance is in place so that rational people who long ago accepted there was a problem have continued to neither get involved in the campaign for action nor to do anything about the extravagance of their own lifestyle. The outrageous rise in overseas travel prior to Covid-19 is a case in point. How could this possibly be okay when we can blithely refer to "tipping points for irreversible climate change" and all the chaos and death that would entail? As in so many areas of public life, laying blame is easy; owning the problem is much harder.
    Posted by Patrick Hockey
    05 March 2021

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