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When Prime Minister Scott Morrison took Australia\u2019s top office, in August, 2018, the leadership of his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, had been in question for months, if not years, by his coalition of right-leaning National and Liberal parties. But the final blow came after Turnbull supported a national energy plan that would have moderately reduced the power sector\u2019s reliance on fossil fuels, thereby cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and mitigating global climate change<\/a>. In an attempt to save himself, at the eleventh hour, Turnbull backed off enshrining any emissions reductions into law, but it was too late. Morrison was elected by Liberal lawmakers in a backroom coup<\/a>, and quickly declared that Turnbull\u2019s energy plan was dead. His commitment to fossil fuels was already well known. As recently as 2017, when he was Australia\u2019s treasurer\u2014and when, according to the International Energy Agency<\/a>, Australia exported more coal than any other country in the world\u2014he brought a lump of coal to Parliament and presented it to his fellow-members as if they were primary-school students. \u201cThis is coal. Don\u2019t be afraid! Don\u2019t be scared! Won\u2019t hurt you,\u201d he said. He did not mention that the coal had been shellacked<\/a> to prevent his hands from getting dirty.<\/p>\n Morrison\u2019s tenure as Prime Minister has since been marked by his refusal to acknowledge the scientifically confirmed link between the fossil-fuel industry and climate change. Through the remainder of 2018, a severe drought and record-setting heat waves led hundreds of thousands of flying foxes to fall dead from the sky. That year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found, among many other terrifying climate impacts, that the Great Barrier Reef will die entirely if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Already it has seen extensive coral bleaching and death.) The spring of 2019 was Australia\u2019s driest on record. But, instead of changing his stance, Morrison championed a pro-fossil-fuel policy that included plans for a new<\/a> coal-fired power plant, and the allocation of ten million dollars toward a study assessing whether to revive a decommissioned coal plant in Queensland. The Labor party, meanwhile, campaigned against him on a platform of greater climate action, including more aggressive emissions-reductions targets. No one expected Morrison to win re\u00eblection; polls suggested that a majority of voters were concerned about climate change. But low turnout and apathy due, in part, to the generally unstable nature of Australian politics\u2014no Prime Minister has lasted a full term in more than a decade\u2014contributed to a surprise victory for Morrison, in May of 2019. On Election Night, he told a crowd, \u201cI have always believed in miracles.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps that is why Morrison insisted that coal \u201cwon\u2019t hurt you,\u201d when, of course, it will. Coal is the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Shutting down all coal-power plants is imperative to limiting increases in global temperature, and eliminating coal, especially in O.E.C.D. countries like Australia, is the lowest-hanging fruit in the transition to renewable energy. (According to one report<\/a>, O.E.C.D. countries could conceivably end coal use entirely by 2030.) There is widespread scientific consensus that the increase in temperatures that we have already seen\u2014a global average of 1.1 degrees Celsius\u2014has contributed to Australia\u2019s terrifying, devastating fire season<\/a>, by creating ever drier and hotter conditions. But, as recently as November, Morrison threatened to outlaw climate activism, a day after protests at a mining conference in Melbourne led to skirmishes with police. \u201cWe are working to identify serious mechanisms,\u201d Morrison said, \u201cthat can successfully outlaw these indulgent and selfish practices that threaten the livelihoods of fellow-Australians.\u201d<\/p>\n In December, the country reached its highest national average temperature ever, with some places hovering around a hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. These conditions quickly created a hellscape of devastating bushfires that continue with no end in sight. Thousands of homes have been turned to ash, several towns have been obliterated, and twenty-eight people have died. Smoke from the fire has blanketed cities. In December, the air quality in Sydney was eleven times the hazardous level; on New Year\u2019s Day<\/a>, in Australia\u2019s capital, Canberra, where Morrison lives in the official Prime Minister\u2019s residence, known as the Lodge, the air quality was more than twenty-five times<\/a> the hazardous level. Residents were advised to stay indoors. The fires have killed as many as a billion animals, too, wiping out a third of the koalas in New South Wales, and possibly putting some species dangerously close to extinction, including the eastern bristlebird, the southern corroboree frog, and the mountain pygmy possum. The fires have been so hot, and so widespread (megafires were created when two fires joined), that they have generated their own weather, including uncontrollable fire tornadoes<\/a>, formed when spinning winds build massive columns of fires, ash, vapor, and debris. Areas that almost never burn, including rain forests home to rare, endemic species, have alighted. Even Australian climate scientists, who have known for years that global heating would increase the severity of the bushfire season, have been horrified by the fires\u2019 scale. Virginia Young, an Australian forest expert, told<\/a> the Washington Post<\/em> that she believes the country is on the verge of a \u201cmajor ecological shift.\u201d<\/p>\n The Australian government, with Morrison at the helm, has not handled the crisis well. Morrison ignored requests<\/a> from a group of former firefighters for a meeting last spring, in which they planned to warn him of the need for more water bombers. In December, despite the increasing intensity and speed at which many bushfires were spreading, he took a holiday to Hawaii, only prompted to return early after the death of two volunteer firemen. During his first day back in the office, he told<\/a> a Sydney radio station that he was still considering new coal-fired power plants. \u201cYou need the whole mix,\u201d he said. \u201cI am quite agnostic, just as long as it is reliable and cheaper.\u201d He added, \u201cThere\u2019ll be lots of shouting noises elsewhere, but I tend to listen to those quiet, still voices.\u201d He has been heckled on visits to towns that were destroyed, with residents and firefighters refusing to shake his hand. While touring the town of Cobargo, a town that was scorched, a protester told Morrision that he should be \u201cashamed of himself,\u201d that he had \u201cleft the country to burn.\u201d On Friday, hundreds of thousands of Australian citizens marched in the streets to protest his leadership, to oppose new coal mines\u2014including the huge Carmichael coal mine, owned by India\u2019s Adani Enterprises, which the federal government approved<\/a> in June\u2014and to demand policies that would reduce the nation\u2019s fossil-fuel emissions. They chanted \u201cScomo has got to go,\u201d while online the mocking hashtag #scottyfrommarketing was trending, a reference to his background working in marketing, including a stint as the managing director of Tourism Australia.<\/p>\n Morrison was unmoved. On Sunday, after another volunteer firefighter had died overnight, Morrison, in an in-depth interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, called this bushfire season, and the changing climate, \u201cthe new normal\u201d but gave no indication that he would change his policy stance and transition away from fossil fuels. Instead, he called for a high-level inquiry into the government\u2019s response to the fires, what some observers said is an easy way to make it seem like he cares without actually doing anything. He also emphasized prevention and adaptation measures to deal with the impacts. \u201cIt isn\u2019t just restricted to bushfires,\u201d he said. \u201cIt deals with floods. It deals with cyclones. It deals with the drought, which is affected by these broader issues. Adaptation and resilience is key to that. Building dams is key to that. Native-vegetation management is key to that. Land clearing is key to that. Where you can build homes is key to that.\u201d He added, \u201cThat is as much a climate-change response as emissions reduction.\u201d Although it\u2019s true that adaptation is necessary and urgent, it absolutely cannot be all that any government does to prevent the worst effects of climate change.<\/p>\n For now, it seems, Australia will remain reliant on coal. On Wednesday, Morrison told reporters<\/a> in Canberra, \u201cOur resources industry is incredibly important to Australia.\u201d The country remains the world\u2019s second-largest exporter of thermal coal (the kind used to make electricity), after Indonesia. In 2018, the country sent<\/a> two hundred million metric tons, worth twenty-six billion dollars, to China, Japan, and other countries in Southeast Asia. That number is declining slowly, as China increasingly relies on its own domestic production, and both China and Japan move away from dirty coal. But Australia still also gets a third of its own electricity from coal-power plants, making it one of the world\u2019s largest carbon emitters per capita, and Morrison\u2019s government was partly responsible, at the United Nations climate talks in December, for blocking negotiations<\/a> on policies designed to advance global climate goals. If countries like Australia continue to act like a dead weight on the energy transition, then all the adaptations Morrison mentioned\u2014the entirety of his \u201cclimate-change response\u201d\u2014will be virtually inconsequential. Warming will continue unabated, and great swaths of that continent, and the rest of the planet, will become uninhabitable. Tragedies like these bushfires can no longer be considered natural disasters. On January 2nd, Morrison attended the funeral for Geoffrey Keaton, one of the firefighters who had died on the job. At a press conference afterward, he was asked about his climate policies. \u201cThis is a natural disaster,\u201d he said. \u201cWe cannot control the natural disaster, but what we can<\/em> do is control our response.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n