I have flashes of climate grief, recognition in photographic bursts: Pakistani cotton farmers walking through knee-deep water trying to salvage a few white puffs of income off blackened plants; precious graves of ancestors being inundated by the sea in Fiji, the Torres Strait Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Samoa, the Marshall Islands; the view of fire-ravaged forests, white smoke sky and black trunks in Yosemite National Park, Namadgi National Park, so many places that should be verdant.

I continue to order a new washing machine, feed the cat, work with others across the globe on how to reduce our dependence on coal, oil and gas, read novels, go to yoga classes, as is conventional. I’ve been working on trying to prevent catastrophic climate change for three decades.

I’ve repeated, whenever anyone was willing to listen, ‘never underestimate the human capacity for denial’.

Our ability to believe the impossible prepares us for art, stories, religion … propaganda, deception.

In discussing the psychological manipulation of abusive relationships, American researcher and therapist Dr Bessel van der Kolk told a trauma course I attended, ‘I’ve never met a woman who gave up on a [coercively controlling] relationship’.

In my case, it took an act of courage by a stranger in a supermarket carpark. In the aftermath, as I hit the red ‘end call’ button, reality’s freight train knocked my neurons sideways and I realised ‘I am in one of those situations’.

The fossil fuel companies and their enablers entice addiction to their products. They sell cars and oil as sex and freedom; plastics as modernity and convenience; methane, which increases the risk of asthma in children on par with passive smoking, as ‘natural’ gas. We could have had electric vehicles decades ago if the automobile and oil industries hadn’t conspired against them. Exxon employed first class climate scientists in the 1980s. They knew, they lied.

Oil, gas and coal and their authoritarian regimes sports wash. They sponsor children’s teams, buy the game of golf for legitimacy, pretend to be human.

Coercive........

© Pearls and Irritations