Bob Brown says Australia cannot keep expanding fossil fuel production while denying its share of responsibility for the mounting human toll of climate change.

Nepal estimates the monetary cost of its avalanche disaster at A$7 billion. Australia, which emits nearly 5 per cent of global greenhouse gases, should be booked $350 million. So far we’ve made a gift of $8 million. We can do nothing to reverse the death toll.

Denial is an evolutionary precaution against our minds being overwhelmed by the chaos in the universe and the awesome powers in which each of us lives as a near-irrelevance.

It also saves us from being crushed by the thought of personal death and eternal nothingness.

Denial is designed to keep our tails up, but has damning downsides. A case in point is human-induced global warming.

Besides the Australian government and opposition fostering fossil fuels, popular right-wing politicians like Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce are wanting to stoke the flames higher. They depend on the denialism rife in Australia’s right-wing media.

The stakes are high. Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son, James, was dropped from his father’s favour by making public his frustration with News Corp’s “ongoing denial” of climate change during the 2019 Australian bushfire emergency.

Three decades earlier, in 1992, the ‘Warning to Humanity’ was signed by 1,700 top scientists including most Nobel Prize winners for science. They warned that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course” and appealed that we “must move away from fossil fuels to more benign, inexhaustible energy sources to cut greenhouse gas emissions”.

Scientists have warned for years that the glaciers melting in the Himalayas threaten people........

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