Climate Culture: September 2024

On Lucinda Williams, Father John Misty, Elvis Presley, and climate disinformation.

Climate Culture: September 2024
Father John Misty. Credit: Alexander Kellner. CC BY-SA 4.0.

I've been writing this monthly(ish) column for a while now to share what I've been reading, listening to, or watching that's had me thinking (sometimes quite tangentially) about the climate crisis. Thanks for reading along.

I'm going to start beginning these emails by giving a bit of an update on my other work and things I've been up to.

Over at The Last Place on Earth, I've been writing about power and politics in Western Australia. Last month, I reported from the coroner's inquest into the death in custody of Aboriginal teenager Cleveland Dodd. That was before the tragic news broke that another young person had died in one of Western Australia's youth prisons. This development was more proof (as if it were needed) of what witnesses inside and protesters outside the inquest were saying: youth detention in Western Australia is in crisis.

Notes from an inquest
A coroner’s inquest into the death in custody of an Aboriginal teenager has sparked calls for justice.

Last week, I wrote about a visit to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, where I saw Brett Whiteley's incredible American Dream installation and the latest work from Perth activist art group pvi collective. The trip got me thinking about the risks and opportunities of trying to do art and politics at the same time.

Can art furries solve climate change?
Protest art has to work as art to work as protest.

I also managed to have a brief encounter with the Prime Minister when he was in Perth last week, to ask him a few questions that had been on my mind:

@hotair_wa

Albo HECKLED in Perth. Where’s the money for the gas, Prime Minister? Teachers pay more in tax than the oil and gas industry. Gas barely creates any jobs: In WA, just 0.7% of the workforce is employed in the industry.

♬ original sound - Hot Air

If you've succumbed to TikTok, follow Hot Air for more in that vein coming soon.

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And now, 'Climate Culture':

'Are You Alright?' by Lucinda Williams, West, 2007

I love a good platonic love song. In this one, the central friendship seems like it isn't even a particularly close one, or has faded over the course of years: "I haven't seen you in a real long time," the song goes, before the singer asks, "Do you have someone to hold you tight?" – the kind of question a friend in regular contact would likely already know the answer to. This is a song that easily encourages empathy, and there are two pairs of shoes a listener can imagine themself in. They can imagine themself as the singer, reaching out with genuine concern, noticing the signs that something is off. It feels good to be a good friend. Or, they can imagine themself as the subject. It feels good to be cared for, especially in times of pain, when it's easy to feel like a burden to those around us.

'Obsessing Over Climate Disinformation Is a Wrong Turn' by Holly Buck, Jacobin, 24 August 2024

This is an important article. I heard it made a bit of a stir on Twitter/X – where I no longer have an account. That means I feel disconnected from a lot of the 'climate movement discourse' – but I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Buck argues the climate movement puts disproportionate effort into debunking disinformation, instead of also working through values conflicts and people's distrust of elites. "Fighting disinformation becomes a cheap hack for the hard work of listening to people and learning from them," she writes. "We have to put resources into a different sort of public engagement with climate change, one that sees publics as competent and nuanced rather than as susceptible marks for memes." I reached similar conclusions when I investigated opposition to offshore wind farms in Western Australia's South West. Wind farm opponents weren't just right wing cookers adrift in a sea of conspiracy theories, though they were often that too. They held genuine concerns for ecosystems and a distrust of foreign corporations swooping in to profit big from the energy transition. I still hear it said all the time that if only people heard the right information, expressed in the right way, we'd all pull together and solve the climate crisis. But the awareness is raised; there's no one left who hasn't heard that climate change is an existential risk. It's time to speak openly and honestly about complexities and trade-offs, and as Buck stresses, to get on with the work. Increasingly, I believe an effective climate politics must be populist.

'I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All' by Father John Misty, 2024

This song has the sprawl of some of my favourite Bob Dylan songs ('Jokerman', 'Brownsville Girl', 'Too Late'), plus funky saxophone and Josh Tillman's usual wit. On the topic of climate, as ever, he is wry, cutting, and cosmic:

After a millennia of good times
God said hey now, let's have a dream
Where we raise the stakes a little
Come on, let's make things interesting
Parachute into the Anthropocene
An amnesiac, a himbo Ken doll
I guess time does makes fools of us all

'Somebody Bigger Than You and I', written by Johnny Lange, Hy Heath and Sonny Burke, sung by Elvis Presley, How Great Thou Art, 1967

Some questions are fundamental. We can answer them, but only ever partially.