In the middle of the last parliamentary brawl over pricing carbon emissions in Australia, a Liberal-voting friend pointed out to me that we should be paying more attention to adaptation. He was referring to strategies that address vulnerability to climate change, such as poverty reduction, education and building institutional capacity. Adaptation includes infrastructure such as sea-walls, drainage systems and early warning protocols.
At the time, I took it as an irresponsible deflection. It didn't make sense to talk about adapting when we had not even taken steps to circumvent the things to which we would adapt. It felt like a defeatist position to take when a legislative window had opened to mitigate climate change.
But with Prime Minister Tony Abbott prioritising the repeal of the carbon price legislation, it is starting to feel like we are dancing over the watery graves of our Pacific neighbours.
The debate over climate change, like most international debates, is a thoroughly Western, developed world privilege. We need only consider the prospects facing the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati to realise this. People living on such island-states do not have the luxury of wondering whether climate change is 'natural' or induced by human activity. They do not get to have protracted internal brawls over which mechanism would effectively restrain the speed and impact of climate change.
'The Pacific is fighting for its survival,' said Marshall Islands president Christopher Loeak in the lead-up to the annual Pacific islands summit last September. 'Climate change has already arrived.' He and other island-state leaders have been saying so for years — while we have tinkered with questions around scientific consensus, and pointed at China and the United States to justify our inertia.
Part of this inertia of course relates to the problem of persuasion. We have not been able to substantively persuade people about basic aspects of climate change, much less frame it as a problem to care enough about that it constitutes political suicide for our leaders to do nothing.
Moralistic harangues about debts to our grandchildren have not worked, nor have emotive appeals about disappearing polar bears. There is no room for persuasion anyway when arguments are pre-empted by the view that someone who disagrees with you is a bad person or just doesn't 'get' it.
As it turns out, facts are not persuasive, either. As former political adviser Marcus Priest recently pointed out, it is not the solidity or volume of climate science that is the problem, it is political ideology. This is not to say that characterising people based on their ideology helps, either, especially when there is a cross-political spectrum of opinion on climate change policy.
Perhaps the key problem with persuasion is that, in a postmodern world characterised by individualist hyper-scepticism, including (sometimes well-founded) distrust of government, everyone is an expert. This lends any claim some patina of fact. Let's face it, the overabundance of content on the internet — including the glorious rabbit hole that is Wikipedia — helps legitimise any position under the sun.
So where does that leave us? The bases of our arguments over climate change have been trodden so much that a moat has formed around us, leaving us stuck in our little island fortresses. We know thoroughly by now the content of our disagreement. But what are the things that do not require persuasion? Is it possible that we have values and interests that intersect?
Adaptation may be that intersection. It will depend on the extent to which the nature of bushfires in recent years is perceived as 'normal'. It will depend on whether, without resolving climate change links, citizens expect their government to be well-versed in risk assessment, the way the insurance industry already is on climate change. These are only a few possible points of convergence.
Of course it goes without saying that the effectiveness of adaptation hinges on genuine acceptance of climate change impacts. But those on the frontline underline the point that our disagreement over causes and mitigation cannot be at the expense of adaptation.
For the Maldives, which established a sovereign fund to assist the relocation of its people, and Kiribati, which has purchased agricultural land in Fiji to compensate for its saline-contaminated soil, there is no such thing as prolonging the inevitable.
Fatima Measham is a Melbourne-based social commentator who contributes regularly to Eureka Street. Her work has also appeared in The Drum, ABC Religion & Ethics, and National Times. She is a recipient of the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2013. She tweets as @foomeister.
Original artwork by Chris Johnston