Fourteen years ago, on this day, October 3rd, 2011, Rolling Stone published the following by Jeff Goodell.
Climate Change and the end of Australia by Jeff Goodell
It’s near midnight, and I’m holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the northeast coast of Australia. Yasi, a Category 5 hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds that’s already been dubbed “The Mother of All Catastrophes” by excitable Aussie tabloids, is just a few hundred miles offshore. When the eye of the storm hits, forecasters predict, it will be the worst ever to batter the east coast of Australia.
I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. “In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions,” Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. “Australia is the canary in the coal mine,” says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. “What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future.” (continues)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 391ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 425ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that Australia’s population was well-informed about climate change “then called “the greenhouse effect” in 1987-1990. But that awareness and concern did not translate into strong action.
The specific context was that Goodell had written a very good book called Big Coal – climate change is his beat. Meanwhile, the Australian policy elite had been tearing itself to pieces over a simple small measure – a price on carbon. Gillard’s minority government had just gotten it through when this issue of Rolling Stone hit the newsstands (are their newsstands anymore?)
What I think we can learn from this – we fucking knew.
What happened next. Gillard’s brave but utterly inadequate carbon pricing scheme was repealed in 2014. The emissions keep climbing, as does the kayfabe.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
References
Goodell, J. 2011. The End of Australia. Rolling Stone, October 3.
Also on this day:
October 3, 1970 & 2008: Nixon creates EPA, Brown creates DECC
October 3, 1975 – Three members of Congress introduce first bill for a national #climate program.
October 3, 1997 – CNN pretends to grow a spine (Spoiler, stays jellyfish) – All Our Yesterdays