2020-01-20 Australia: bush fires and how civilizations collapse

What is going on right now in Australia is horrible. It will, no doubt, make far future history books (if there is a civilization left) as an example of how we were staring obvious Collapse in the face, and said, “Whatever! I’d like more of that.”

This inspired Jay to mix his love of boardgaming and his bleeding heart to make this video on the game Hotshots and raise money for the bush fire release.

I found this article from last August interesting. Basically it was how Australia was the lone holdout in the Pacific against any action on climate change. This is terrible because whole countries in the the region will be wiped off the globe in the coming years. The reason for this resistance against self-preservation is that Australia has a famously “conservative,” Trumpian government in power.

But the reason for that is Australia’s main export and a lot of that growth in the 21st century is attributable coal which it sells to the nearby asian countries and powers their explosive industries. That coal-growth is the cause of both their conservative politics and global warming. So the country has experienced a little short term growth and head-in-the sand backwards political thinking at the cost irreversible damage to their ecosystem today on land and later in sea — a small price to pay: everything.

It is the nature of externalities that because what is being produced (pollution from coal burning) are not captured and priced correctly that we see some of the most ecologically-sensitive people in the world voting for a government that has caused the most ecological damage to itself and their own (and our) destruction.

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