The planet won't wait

The people fall for it for a time because the lying has this viscous oozing quality and it is buried deep in 600- or 800-page reports. But the planet does not read either and is summary in its judgments. Cross the threshold, and it will not hesitate, not for a nano-second, to do its thing. A sizeable portion (perhaps most, perhaps all) of the 9 billion we will become at mid-century will be homeless and the adjustment is likely to be protracted, painful and violent as we scrap over shrinking licences to live.

What should we do? Sack Garnaut and Treasury and start again. This time, put fixing the planet and an alternative politics of the general human interest first … put those ahead of trade advantage and the old murderous politics of the national interest. Hanging on to the last two will be the death of us.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be forever. Just for the half century or so the planet needs to recover and restabilise. That might be enough. Anyway, that’s all, that’s the guts of it, the heart of the moral and political effort called for by climate change. Yes, just two things: a sense of the planet’s vulnerability and of the common interest humans have in its wellbeing. It’s that simple. The rest is engineering.

For now the planet needs a break. And what’s half a century between homo sapiens friends? We have been going at it no-holds-barred, laissez faire, just the way we want, for a couple of hundred thousand years, haven’t we? Fair’s fair. We know what’s fair even if the planet doesn’t. That’s what makes us its “highest” form of life. Let’s live up to that name and do what we are supposed to on a decisive scale for a change. Forget grand bargains, we need a grand show of who we are or claim to be: humanity and human wisdom. Intelligent earth (from homo, humus and soil).