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-Thank you.
We are in the grips
of a massive global crisis,
and you are leaving it to children to clean up your mess!
Schoolchildren have today ditched the classroom
to take to the streets over climate change.
They’re calling for the prime minister to be sacked
and for an immediate departure from fossil fuels.
Ho, ho!
ScoMo has got to go!
Hey, hey, ho, ho!
More than 11,000 scientists
from around the world
have issued a warning today declaring a climate emergency.
Australia’s seen both the warmest
and the driest year on record.
There are also warnings out this morning
for the impending bushfire season,
which authorities fear could be the worst on record.
Extreme conditions are on the way,
and it’s all down to climate change.
Australia is a distillation
of the world’s dilemma when it comes to climate change.
But the story doesn’t make any sense
unless you understand what Australia is actually like.
From its very inception,
it’s a country that’s been reliant on fossil fuels.
We are now the world’s largest exporter of coal,
the world’s largest exporter of gas,
and you hear the same thing over and over:
If we haven’t got fossil fuels, we’ve got nothing.
We are also a very flat, dry continent
that’s exquisitely vulnerable to climate change.
We knew that we would start feeling the impacts before anyone else.
And we’ve ignored that bigger picture to our great cost.
Now to the catastrophic wildfires in Australia.
More than 200 fires rage
in two of Australia’s most populated states.
Climate scientists are saying
the bushfires in Australia are a warning of what may be to come around the world.
This could be the new normal.
The greatest tragedy of this terrible
Black Summer bushfire season
was that we saw it coming.
My first big fire was in 1971.
I was only 12 years old.
Some friends rang up and said the fire’s coming
up the hill towards us, and off we went with axes
and rakes and hessian sacks.
There was no ifs or buts. That was just what you did.
In Australia, fires are a constant.
Small fires in the Blue Mountains Area,
fanned by hot north winds,
struck towns and villages with bewildering speed.
Every year, there are bushfires.
Some years are very, very bad.
Other years, not so much.
But every year, there’s fires.
It was very rudimentary in the early days.
Grab branches off trees,
beating out the flames.
Wet sacks, rakes.
That was my first big fire,
and that’s when I knew that’s what I wanted to do as a career.
I was hooked.
And I didn’t purposely set out to be the chief,
but in hindsight, it was a thirst for knowledge.
The government decided I was the best person for the job at the time,
and it was an incredible privilege and honor.
I was accustomed to a long buildup to a bad fire season.
My father would say,
"Look, that wattle tree is flowering a month early.
"That means it’s really dry.
"Look at the color of the leaves on that banksia tree.
"That means it’s having to go deeper for water.
"It’s dropping its leaves.
"Watch the ants. What sort of beetles came out
at what time of year?"
And in 1994, it just suddenly got hot and windy and dry.
The rain forest in Queensland is drying up
and animals starving after the driest three months
for more than 80 years.
I realized something’s haywire.
New South Wales was hit by massive simultaneous fires.
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, boy.
Fire.
It’s fire!
This is the one that bushfire fighters
have had nightmares about for years.
Every hectare of this bush has tons of tinder dry fuel ready to explode.
There are grave fears about how far its devastation will reach.
Residents battle to protect their homes,
but for some, the struggle became too much.
It is the most terrifying experience
you can imagine.
In 1994, I lost my home to a bushfire that took everything.
I walked away in the shorts I was wearing,
uh, just, you know, trying to fight that fire.
Thankfully, my family all survived, but we lost neighbors.
We lost four people in that fire.
I’ve watched the climate science develop
over the last 30 years.
He is known around the world
as one of the leading scientists studying climate change.
His name: Tim Flannery.
We are approaching a threshold
to dangerous climate change, and the time to act is very limited.
The scientists have been very, very clear about what’s happening.
Look at the picture of the Earth at night,
and look at all the lights that are on, right?
Imagine the fossil fuels that are being burned to support that.
Those greenhouse gases trap heat energy close to the surface of the planet.
They act a bit like a blanket on a bed.
And so the temperature just keeps going up and up and up.
A new study of climatic changes
in eastern Australia has produced
the strongest evidence yet that the greenhouse effect is underway.
The increase reflects the rise
in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over that time.
Something is really happening.
I started to read and study and ask questions
and discovered some early papers on climate change and thought,
"They might have something here."
And in the years to follow, I realized, yes, they certainly did.
You’d assume that about once a decade
there would be a very damaging fire in New South Wales.
But after 1994,
we were having more and more of these bad fires.
We were losing homes in 1997, three years later.
Christmas Day, 2001, massive fires.
2002, more fires.
2003, the city of Canberra,
firefighters narrowly escaped with their lives.
Go!
2009, Victoria.
We were regularly getting off-the-scale fire danger,
and it was all down to climate change.
The fires were getting worse and worse,
and I knew that this is exactly
what climate scientists had predicted for Australia--
longer fire seasons, more intense fire seasons--
and that, sadly, was what I was seeing.
The community is somewhat concerned
that, uh, global warming could lead to droughts of greater duration.
Now, whether that...
whether that is a legitimate concern is...
is a matter that’s, frankly, very much debated.
I’ve watched the climate wars in Australia
for the last 14 years.
The plans to expand the coal industry
are on a staggering scale.
There has been a concerted effort to undermine
the science of climate change.
Carbon dioxide does not drive temperature.
A complete reversal of what these people are spreading:
their lies and their deception.
Then you said climate change was crap.
Well, I think what I actually said
was the idea of the settled science
of climate change is, uh, a bit aromatic.
I was Australia’s first--
and to date, only-- climate commissioner.
And served for three years under the government,
getting the word out about climate change,
taking complex science and making it comprehensible to people.
Extreme weather events are going to get more common and more severe,
according to the latest report from the Climate Commission.
But the media just went totally crazy.
Critics have labeled the Climate Commission alarmist nonsense.
These people are desperate.
Climate change, the whole thing is a hoax.
Out, out, out! Lies, lies, lies!
Then the conservative government
was elected, and their very first act was to sack us.
It wasn’t to do anything important economically.
It was to get rid of the Climate Commission, which they did.
He has to be exposed.
It was really comic book stuff.
People tried to act earlier,
but there’s a lot of vested interests involved.
I mean, Scott Morrison--
of course, now he’s our prime minister--
stood up in the parliament and held aloft a lump of coal.
Mr. Speaker, this is coal.
Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.
-SPEAKER: The treasurer... -It won’t hurt you.
The treasurer knows the rule on props.
It’s coal.
Of course, this lump of coal wasn’t a dirty lump of coal
with dust all over it.
This lump of coal had come from the Minerals Council,
so it was very nicely cleaned up for what was
essentially a marketing presentation.
Mr. Speaker, those opposite have an ideological,
pathological fear of coal.
There’s no word for coal-ophobia, officially, Mr. Speaker,
but that’s the malady that afflicts those opposite.
Switching off jobs and switching off lights
and switching off air conditioners
and forcing Australian families to boil in the dark
as a result of their Dark Ages policies, Mr. Speaker.
Jobs will be lost.
Babies will die in hospitals when the power goes out.
This is the constant refrain.
We cannot have kids coming home from school
and not having so much as a toaster in the house
because they don’t have power.
They don’t have a fridge, mate.
But I think one of the real low points
was the debate over electric cars.
The response to it from Scott Morrison was this
barrage of talking points that said, amongst other things...
It’s not gonna... it’s not gonna tow your trailer.
It’s not gonna tow your boat.
It’s not gonna get you out to your favorite camping spot with your family.
To have that kind of infantile debate
in a political campaign, it just said to me,
in 2019, we had not moved on.
Thousands of school students across the country
want our politicians to know they’ve had enough.
They’re demanding something
be done about climate change, and tomorrow,
they’ll be walking out of school.
So, I was 16 when I first started.
I think, like, ’cause people hear that, and they go, "That’s, like, really young."
You know, and a lot of adults still would, you know, be like,
"Oh, you’re so young. You’ve done so much.
I’m so proud of you." You know, that’s, um...
"You give me hope," which...
Don’t get me started on that.
I found out that Sydney was gonna have a climate strike protest,
and I thought, "I have to be involved with this.
I have to get my friends involved."
Like, "We have to take as many people as possible from school."
And I remember, as we walked up towards the square
where it was gonna be held, we turn the corner...
...and it was... I mean, it was just a sea of, like, sweaty,
you know, teenage kids.
Sydney has been brought to a standstill
by people fired up over climate change, joining millions of people
all around the world in the biggest protest yet
over the state of our planet.
We are on the outskirts of the biggest catastrophe
humanity has ever faced, and our government is doing nothing!
It’s almost like you’re conducting an orchestra.
We want a safe future! Who’s with me?
That crowd becomes the music and becomes the energy
in that drive, that wave of hope.
That wave just kept crashing over the crowd.
Like, people were really excited.
Like, the rally hadn’t even started.
Our job was done.
A lot of the publicity was driven by our prime minister reacting to it.
We don’t support the idea of kids not going to school
to participate in things that can be dealt with outside of school.
And so, what we want is more learning in schools
-and less activism in schools.
Which, you know, we sort of thought,
you know, "Piss off."
And to these adults, we say, laugh at us,
attack us, do what you want to us,
because you are on the wrong side of history!
We had over 300,000 people take to the streets,
which, if you are an Australian, you will understand--
Australians don’t do protests.
Best day of my life. Best day.
I’m not, like... Nothing can beat this.
I remember coming home and just thinking, "Shit."
We want climate action,
and we want it now.
Hey, ho! It’s hot in here!
There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere!
Then there was just radio silence from parliament.
But the Murdoch media suddenly were not quiet.
The so-called activists-- more like anarchists--
protesting in our streets these days.
Lies, disinformation.
Children completely brainwashed, just saying what is
the exact opposite of the truth.
It was the first time that I really experienced
any, like, climate anxiety,
because the people who’ve been in power for the last 30 years
have known about this crisis and have deliberately decided
to not only not do anything about it
but to fight against people who want to do something about it.
You know, I want children growing up
in Australia to feel positive about their future.
But I don’t want our children, um, having anxieties about these issues.
Whatever challenges come our way, we’ll deal with them like we always have.
I feel as if we have been
just sleepwalking into a catastrophe.
All of the warning signs have been there.
Greg Mullins, our most experienced fire commissioner,
came to us in April and said, "We are facing an unprecedented disaster."
Two years in a row,
the driest year on record for much of... of eastern Australia.
And this year’s looking like the hottest year on record.
How are we going to manage the fire situation?
So we were trying to help Greg
to get an audience with our prime minister,
because this is a matter of a national catastrophe.
We wrote to the prime minister
in April 2019 and said, "Prime Minister,
"we fear that a bushfire catastrophe is coming our way.
"We’d love to meet with you.
"’Cause this is going to be a shocker.
This year, we’re gonna need everything we can get."
"We need better use of the military to support the fire services,
"more funding for firefighting aircraft.
But you need to know about this, Prime Minister."
He just wasn’t interested.
2019...
it’s a snowball rolling down the hill.
It’s getting bigger and bigger.
There was just no moisture left.
And we just watched the forests dying.
It was like, yeah, you just had a terrible feeling
it was all really catching up with us.
But I have to say,
I did not predict how brutal the fires were going to be
as the summer went on.
It rocked Australia to the core what happened in the Black Summer.
You know when you watch a movie
and there’s that sort of, like, low drone noise?
It just increases in volume.
And you just know that something’s coming and it’s going wrong.
It was like that-- it was a very slow burn.
And then all of a sudden, it just was massive.
The lead-up to it was frightening.
The whole of Victoria and New South Wales got very, very dry.
And it was just, like, a... a brooding presence.
I went into the bush
because I wanted to record what I could see.
I was really concerned because the trees grow so close together.
300 to 500 trees per the acre.
It’s a very volatile forest.
And any fire there, it just goes off like a bomb.
Just 13 days out of winter,
and there are at least 40 bushfires
burning across the state.
Today the message from authorities was clear:
Get ready.
I was working at the newspapers up the coast.
We’d already started reporting on fires,
I think, uh, as early as September.
Everyone was off photographing fires.
They were just going off everywhere.
Like, the-the phone just keep going, "Beep-beep-beep."
And then, uh, look, there’s another fire.
There’s another fire.
And so there was a sense in the air that something could happen.
And around here, it was really, really dry.
Some of the walks that I do every day,
I’d noticed that the plants had started dying and wilting.
By the time it was November,
the ground was, um, like concrete, seriously.
Everyone’s lawn was dead.
Mallacoota’s very remote.
And quite a number of longtime locals were very, very concerned
that this was going to be the year.
But the biggest red flag went up
when the rain forest was burning.
Those forests have never burnt.
We’re bearing direct witness
to so many processes of change playing out around us.
We’re essentially right in the middle of this stretch
of some of the oldest forests on the planet.
Unchanged through tens of millions of years.
Through continents splitting apart,
asteroids hitting the world.
Those trees have been like an arc through time and space.
But as a consequence of these climatic shifts,
they’ve been drying out.
It’s a process of unwinding deep time,
of ripping the rug out from under these species
that have always had the conditions that they need,
going back to the time of the dinosaurs.
The fires of Black Summer burnt into these ancient refuges.
There are currently 51 active fire zones
across the state, 23 of them uncontained.
The ongoing bushfire threat is coinciding
with a dangerous heat wave,
forcing the Rural Fire Service to declare an unprecedented emergency situation.
I’ve been with the Rural Fire Service...
...for 60... 65 years.
-60-odd years. -Mm-hmm. 65.
Fought fires all over New South Wales and Victoria,
and I’d never seen anything like it.
That fire started, and it never let up.
They attacked it with bombers.
Large air tankers.
It didn’t matter what they did.
It worked its way down the coast.
Major blazes are going to combine
to form one massive fire,
and everyone is on very high alert.
We knew sooner or later
it was going to be our turn.
I can remember saying to people, "This is serious.
This fire is going to impact on Cobargo."
I had no idea that it was going to be within hours.
At about 4:00 in the morning...
-3:00. It was 3:00. -Or, um...
-It was 3:00 in the morning... -Mm-hmm.
woke up, went out, and-and I...
it just felt unreal.
All of the western skyline just had this eerie red glow.
Red.
I came in, and I woke Mary, and I said,
"Listen, get up, love.
"Have breakfast.
This fire is going to hit."
-BOY: Oh, it’s way darker! -GIRL: Mum!
-Mum. Mum. -It’s way darker.
30th of December,
the CFA called an emergency community meeting.
We still had probably around 7,000 tourists in the town.
There was an announcement for people to leave.
A lot of people didn’t leave.
I went around the caravan park and asked people
how they were feeling about this looming sky.
And I really think that there was a sense of, like,
"Oh, well, I’ve come here on my holiday, and I’ll be all right."
I think, at that stage,
everyone was still thinking it’s not going to happen.
You know, you don’t think it’s going to happen really.
At one point, I was wetting down my car,
and this stupid woman came up to me and said,
"What are you doing wasting water?
"You don’t need to have your car...
What are you doing washing your car?"
I said, "I’m wetting it down so the embers can’t catch."
I said, "Do you live here?" She said, "No, I’m visiting."
I said, "Well, go home."
Holidaying while home burns.
Scott Morrison relaxing in Hawaii
as the nation confronts an unprecedented bushfire catastrophe.
When I saw Scott Morrison
going off on a holiday to Hawaii in the middle of this emerging disaster
that we could have done a huge amount
to actually make it much less severe than it was,
um, I almost cried.
He’s cutting short his family vacation,
which his office has refused to confirm or deny for days.
I think it was really clear from the outset,
uh, when the fires started to get serious
that Scott Morrison did not understand
the gravity of the situation.
I get it that people would have been upset
to know that I was holidaying with my family,
uh, while their families were under great stress.
They know that I’m not gonna stand there and hold a hose.
I’m not a trained firefighter.
He saw it through a purely political lens, I think.
He did not want the fires to be an issue,
a big national issue,
because he was worried it would open up
the climate change issue.
Australia has been battling ferocious fires
for as long as, uh, Australia has been a nation
and-and well before.
He was overly influenced
by the power of the Murdoch media.
Fire is part and parcel of our landscape.
It always has been.
People in politics
took these guys, they took these women
really seriously.
Does climate change cause these fires? No.
The lies.
We know what causes bushfire. Someone has to light it.
You know, arson.
They said, "These fires have been started by arsonists."
You can’t blame the fires on climate change, especially
when so many are... deliberately lit.
The fact of the matter is
Australia has an arson problem you can’t pin on global warming,
climate change or whatever title you’re giving
your environmental bogeyman these days.
What a load of crap.
They couldn’t accept
that we’re having the worst fires in history
because it was clearly driven by climate change.
Right through, I think, to the tragedy of New Year’s Eve,
the government didn’t really get it.
People, communities are getting cut off.
They’re getting trapped.
The fire’d approached from every angle here.
You’d go to sleep seeing the fire,
and you’d wake up, and it would still be there,
closer to you than it was,
and it just wore you down.
And so you’ve got to have good luck,
and Mallacoota had terrible luck.
Where’s my keys?
Has anyone seen my keys?
Don’t worry about the keys. We’ll put you in this car here.
-That’s my car, mate. -Don’t worry about the keys.
-I can’t open it without them. -Doesn’t matter.
Go, now, now!
A siren went off.
And our phones went off.
And it was,
you know, "Evacuate now."
And I turned around, and there it was coming at me.
Go! Go!
This red glow.
Move!
It was orange and smoky.
There was lightning up in the sky.
Cars were going on to Bastion Point beach.
Other people were getting ready down at the wharf,
and then other people were going to the hall.
There’s a photograph of a local woman,
and she’s holding her little dog.
She wanted to leave, but she also wanted to stay.
"I want to stay because
this is where I live. This is where I belong."
And here we were.
Now we had to decide whether we go or whether we stay,
like there’s a monster coming down on us.
And the wind. I can’t stand wind anymore.
I can’t be out in it because it just reminds me
of this howling going past my ears.
You could hear it. It was a... like a...
It was like a dragon, you know, like a...
And then everything went pitch-black.
This is Mallacoota at 9:13 in the morning.
Absolutely unbelievable. Pitch black.
There’s embers falling from the sky.
A girlfriend of mine texted me and said, "Are you okay?"
And I started taking some shots just to send to her.
She said to me, "Was this taken last night?"
And I said, "No, it’s right now."
It’s now really scary.
You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
The wind’s picked up,
which is pushing the fire straight towards us.
The reason that the sky goes absolutely pitch-black
is because all of the soot
that is created by the fire actually goes ahead
of the fire front.
So that’s what hits you first.
And then, as the fire front gets closer,
the soot clears, and you just get this intensely red sky.
I was sitting outside the hall.
I wanted to see as much as I could.
But then a CFA volunteer
came and tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You have to move in."
In the hall, it was really claustrophobic,
and they blacked out the windows,
so you couldn’t look out, and all you could see
was the fire through the skylights.
You know, so you could see the red...
the red glow and the flickering through the skylights.
And, you know, like, we were sort of just laying down.
I-I can remember just sort of laying down,
and I just thought, "How are we gonna get out of this?
How are we going to actually get out of this?"
And then I also felt, you know, I put my child in this situation, so...
maybe my imagination is big, but it was really...
...a real thing that you didn’t know
whether you were actually really gonna come out of there alive or not,
because it-it could have gone up.
Yeah.
It was like being on a plane when it’s going down.
And that’s how it felt.
The side of our house was very, very hot,
and the embers just hit me-- little red embers.
And the heat was enormous, so I...
hosed myself down.
I was shocked at the ferocity of it.
It was only a matter of half an hour,
and we lost water.
Need to evacuate!
-Please evacuate!
So we’ve lost water, we’ve got no power,
-and we’ve got no fire trucks. -Right.
All communications are gone.
Our radios are knocked out.
The town was at-at the mercy.
Said to Mary, "There goes the house."
"There goes the shop."
It was almost surreal.
Jesus.
The roar and the noise of it was horrendous.
I just called it a vicious monster.
Wow.
For an individual person facing a bushfire,
the fire almost behaves like a, an animal,
a predator that’ll play with you.
You can see it just gently creeping along harmlessly.
Whoa! Kangaroo!
Okay, coming this way.
But within an hour, it’ll change,
and it might burn a neighbor’s house and leave yours.
Oh!
Or it’ll burn your house and leave everything else around it.
So it’s psychologically very damaging to have to deal with that stress.
And then when the fire comes, of course, it’s a catastrophe.
Normally, the flashbacks happen
more on hazy sort of days when it’s not quite as clear
and you’ll just glance up at a ridge.
I don’t know, it just triggers something,
and I just see flame.
The roar of the fire was...
Yeah, there’s no words, really, to describe it.
It was just screaming.
Like, we couldn’t talk to each other.
It was more hand signals and yelling in each other’s ears.
The trees are about two to three stories tall,
and the flames are about two to three stories above them,
just ripping the whole way around, just tornadoing above us.
It was just picking everything up and just taking it.
Branches landing next to us as thick as your arm.
I was trying to breathe,
and so I tried to rip my mask off, trying to breathe, and I couldn’t.
There was nothing I could do.
I was in full panic mode at that point.
I was seeing birds falling out of the sky.
Yeah, the cockatiels on fire,
burning and dropping out of the sky.
It was something you could not fight.
It was just-- survive.
I knew there was gonna be mass loss.
To the south, there were bushfires.
To the west, there were bushfires.
To the north, there were bushfires.
And in every direction, roads were cut off.
Families are trapped on the beach
as the fires surround them on all sides.
The entire coast is choked with this thick smoke,
making it difficult to breathe.
The fires really came home to me
when the smoke came into Sydney.
You know, you’d be going for your morning walk,
you’d be seeing your friends,
and just this heaviness in your breathing.
And it was really discombobulating for me.
I was writing about climate change,
and there I was in my everyday life experiencing it.
The plume of smoke generated by the inferno
covers five and a half million square kilometers.
That’s the size of Europe.
DR. REBECCA McGOWAN: The psychological impact was stifling.
They say seal up your windows,
seal up your doors.
That doesn’t stop the smoke.
It was just insidious.
DR. ROLY STOKES: You know, and maybe in a bushfire season
in the past, you might have a week of smoke
and that was a really bad fire.
And this was just three months
of, like, the thickest smoke
that you could imagine.
You know, it was just everywhere.
You couldn’t get out of it.
And I was so tired--
really unusually tired.
You know, like, people just keep saying to me,
"Well, you’re pregnant, um, and you have a toddler,
so you’re gonna be tired."
But you get tired from the heat
and you get tired from having to breathe harder.
When a woman is pregnant,
the whole system is on overdrive.
So she breathes faster
and she takes deeper breaths.
She’s inhaling this toxic smoke.
The tiny little smoke particles travel through her body
and get lodged in the placenta.
The filter system, the thing that we all grew from.
My friend who worked in obstetrics,
she said, "It just doesn’t sound right."
So I went to the hospital.
"This baby needs to come in the next 24 hours
because this is really real risk of stillbirth."
That’s-that’s pretty real, confronting news.
The same time that Saga was being born
is when the village of Cobargo was burning just 200 kilometers away.
And the air was full of smoke,
and people are having New Year’s celebrations
we could hear from outside the hospital.
It was a really bizarre time.
And coming in at just under two kilograms,
Saga Snow made an early entrance at 36 weeks,
not wanting to miss any of the festivities.
The baby was small, and the baby was early,
and the baby had respiratory issues.
Nice little temperature-controlled box.
The midwife,
her immediate question straightaway was, "Are you a smoker?"
"Are you a smoker? Have you ever smoked?"
And she said, "No, I’ve never smoked.
You know, why do you keep asking me that?"
And the placenta attached to this baby,
it was a gray, crumbly, disgusting-looking placenta.
We’ve all seen those pictures of what smokers’ lungs look like.
They’re on Australian cigarette packets.
That’s what this placenta looked like.
She was in ICU for 17 days.
You’re not holding your baby.
You’re... you know,
you put your hand in through the incubator and hold her little hand.
And I can still now, um, get her to sleep by holding her hand
because that’s what she learned in those first few weeks.
She was well under first percentile in birth weight,
and she’s taking a long time to catch up.
By the time she’s 18 months, if she’s still behind,
they’ll consider giving growth hormones.
The young women who are coming in
with their babies tell me that it’s-it’s not just them
but in their mothers groups,
their babies have been affected by the smoke
and their babies were born early.
Where the women have to go back after the birth
and have these crumbly, horrible, smoke-affected placentas scraped out.
You can see how little she is there.
The origin of life is actually now
this canary in the coal mine,
and these babies are being exposed
to the effect of the heating of the planet,
the climate change.
Night night, Saga.
Look, in-in Australia, bad fire weather days
have always been difficult,
but what was different this summer was multiple fires
formed their own weather systems.
With massive fires, the heat going up
drives the smoke column ten, 12, 13 kilometers up into the stratosphere.
And the water vapor in the smoke forms a cloud.
The fires create their own thunderstorms.
They’re a very dangerous, scary thing to be under.
Incredible winds from every direction.
Ah, burn and piss off, will you?
The sparks carried in the convection column
going eight to 12 kilometers.
And they spark fires up to 30 kilometers away from the lightning,
but there’s no rain.
-See the wind swirling? -Yeah, it is, isn’t it?
I remember my dad saying,
"I think I saw one in the 1939 heat wave."
And I thought I saw one in 1975.
But that was sort of a legend with firefighters.
Not many people have seen ’em.
I saw about ten last summer.
It’s true that big fires can generate their own weather,
because this looks like a massive thunderhead.
It looks like a nuclear bomb’s gone off.
It’s, um... it’s huge.
Pyro-convective storms...
"Rare." Well, not anymore.
I was fighting fires as a volunteer,
and I was all over the state.
Um, I don’t like this.
No. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, I’d never really felt in the past almost powerless
as I did this last spring and summer.
Hurry up!
-Everyone out!
I was in Batemans Bay.
We were waiting for instructions and catching our breath.
You couldn’t see very far because of the orange smoke.
Everything was dark.
It was probably 2:00 in the afternoon, but it was like night.
Then I saw something moving on the side of the road.
And I walked closer.
It was a mob of kangaroos.
The speed of that fire with its pyro-convective storm
driving it in every direction, they had no way... way to go,
and they came out of the forest on fire
and dropped dead on the road, and I’ve never seen that. I...
Kangaroos know what to do in a fire.
They’re fast animals.
I just, uh...
What do you... I don’t know.
Yeah, the world’s changed.
Every year for the last 25 or 26 years now,
there has been a conference of the parties.
It’s where decisions like the Kyoto Protocol
and the Paris Climate Agreement were reached.
And in 2019, it was the COP 25.
Well, the COP 25 climate conference
is underway in Madrid with a new report showing
the past decade is almost certain to be the hottest on record.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres is calling for urgent action.
I was invited by Greenpeace
to join them at this conference.
And I realized I didn’t have any jeans,
and I was heading into European winter,
and I thought, "Hmm, better get some jeans."
And, um, I remember being in the city with my mum,
and there was ash falling and the sky was, like, orange.
And we just thought,
"Well, something has to come out of this.
We have to create this change."
I hopped on the plane, and when I got to Madrid,
I was staying in this hostel with a bunch
of other kids from around the world.
-SPEAKER: What do we want? -CROWD: Climate justice!
-When do we want it? -Now!
We were there at the conference
from about 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.
Fossil fuel companies were funding the conference,
and their names were plastered everywhere.
Each country had its own pavilion
sort of, like, trying to represent what they were doing in terms of climate.
What did Australia have as its pavilion?
Australia didn’t have a pavilion, I remember.
And our Minister for Energy Angus Taylor
got up in front of the entire world
while his own country was on fire
and said that Australia was doing its part.
We are already on track to meet and beat
the targets we have set for 2030,
just as we are meeting and beating our Kyoto targets.
That was embarrassing. It was...
It was just... like, it was humiliating.
This government is not taking action to address climate even though
our country is burning because of their inaction.
Fossil fuel lobbyists were able to just
sort of weave in and out of government cubicles,
whereas indigenous activists and young people were locked out.
Shame on you! Shame on you!
Shame on you!
And we saw these negotiations break down.
We’re disappointed that we once again failed to find agreement.
This is really becoming very worrisome
for a lot of countries.
Coming back to Australia,
we were really left with not much hope at all.
The fires were everywhere.
It was just horrific, and I was really burnt out.
Like, you know, your heart can sink.
I think my heart had just hit the floor and just kept going.
I cried for three days straight.
I was totally shocked by the scale.
If you’d have asked me before the fires
how big a percentage of the forest area would have burned,
I might have said maximum five percent.
But to see 21% burned,
it’s-it’s like we’ve... we’ve crossed a threshold.
We’ve entered a new era.
Those fires burnt ten times more than had ever burnt before.
And the impact was beyond comprehension.
You-you drive for hundreds of kilometers
in New South Wales,
and all you see is blackened earth.
Three billion animals were killed.
You pick him up, and I’ll...
All right.
We’ll get going in a second.
-MAN: Yeah. -Okay.
We saw places burning that have never burned before.
Forests millions of years old that dinosaurs used to walk through
that had always been too wet and cold to burn...
burn.
Usually in a fire, you get blackness and grayness.
But the trees burned so hot that when that fire had passed
it looked like snow had fallen,
because the ash was snow white.
And that’s what it was like.
It was kind of almost like walking out
into the apocalypse or something.
Like, everyone just was a bit dazed.
The first thing that we saw was just all the houses around town, just gone.
So I just started photographing.
You know, by January,
there were people going about their holidays having to be rescued
by the Australian Army, the Navy.
Unbelievable scenes for a country like this.
You know, I’ve seen people who’ve lost houses.
We’ve all seen them on television being interviewed and stuff like that.
But until it happens, I don’t think you’ve got any idea
what it’s actually like.
And it’s... and it’s layer upon layer upon layer of...
of dealing with it.
It’s-it’s not, you know, there’s the initial shock
and-and, you know, um, despair that you’ve lost everything you own.
I mean, I have no photos.
I have nothing of my mother’s, my father’s, my grandparents’, nothing.
It’s just... it’s like a whole part of my life has just been wiped away.
Former New South Wales Fire and Rescue Commissioner Greg Mullins
is demanding action to prevent future catastrophes.
We have to talk about climate change
because our bushfire situation in Australia has changed forever.
What the ex-fire chief is saying is patently absurd.
They said that I shouldn’t have been talking about climate change
when people were suffering in the fires.
This is what it’s come to.
Hysteria and, uh, completely fact-free ranting
can see you elevated to some heroic status.
I don’t care.
I’m actually in this business,
and I know that when people suffer loss
they want to know why immediately.
They want to know what the hell happened.
I don’t want to look at it right now.
...they’re all from the original businesses in Cobargo.
Brian Ayliffe from just over the road,
lived there for 48 years.
That was a family business. They’re gone.
We heard a rumor that there was
multiple cars getting around town.
Why is there four, like,
SUVs all blacked out getting around town?
It’s gonna be someone of some degree that needs security.
So we all went, "Oh, you know, the prime minister’s here."
It wasn’t a leader saying,
"This has been an emergency. What do we need to do?"
He got out, and he started taking selfies with people.
-Got a smile.
Looking in this direction.
Good on ya. Thank you very much.
-Thank you. -Good on ya.
He just went, "How are you?
"All right, you’re not good. Next person.
"Oh, how are you? Oh, you’re not good. Next person."
That boiled my blood. I’m not going to lie.
I... My house was in rubble,
and here he is taking selfies with people, smiling.
I thought that was extremely inconsiderate.
And he come up to me and asked, "How are you?"
And I-I just saw red.
Hello. How are you?
I’m only shaking your hand if you give more funding to RFS.
So many people here have lost their homes.
Yeah, I understand, all right? I understand.
We need some beds. We don’t have enough beds here.
-We need more help. -Shh, shh, we understand that.
It’s okay. It’s okay.
How come we only had four trucks
to defend our town, Mr. Prime Minister?
Fuck, you’re an idiot, mate. You really are.
You won’t be getting any votes down here, buddy.
-WOMAN: You control the funding. -You’re an idiot.
What about the people around here?
-No, I’m pissed off! -WOMAN: What about the people
who are dead now, Mr. Prime Minister?
You’re not welcome, you fuckwit!
Are you from the media?
Tell the prime minister to go and get from Nelligen.
We really enjoy doing this, head!
Thank you very much.
The bushfire crisis ignites on the streets.
Our country is on fire!
We’ve been telling the politicians
the same message for over ten years,
and they are not listening.
We have a prime minister in denial about climate change.
This is real.
We will rise! We will rise!
Australians started coming out on the street
at such short notice to really demand change.
People were angry, and people were scared for their lives.
And I think it shows how bloody angry everyone is here in Australia.
An estimated 20,000 demand action on climate policy.
It was people taking a stand.
People who hadn’t really listed climate among their priorities.
I’ll set Australia’s policies consistent with what I believe
and my government believes is in Australia’s national interests.
But hasn’t... Sorry to interrupt,
but hasn’t that changed a bit?
Look, I’m-I’m someone who... who was probably on board
with what you took to the... to the polls wh-when you went.
I think now, though, that I’m part of a growing groundswell of support who...
people think that more needs to be done, that now is the time for action.
It’s not a time to sit around and keep-keep chatting
and saying that we’ll discuss this down the track.
When this big realization
started to come through that we couldn’t just put
greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere for nothing,
this was a big shock.
Key National Party figures have hit out at a push
for the Morrison government to promise zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Why not be aspirational?
Why not have a bold target?
But I think just as people thought
that we might finally have a serious debate
about climate change policy in this country, COVID hit.
I watched in sore amazement
as the Morrison government dealt with the COVID crisis.
There they were listening to the chief health officer.
In fact, Australia declared a pandemic
12 days before the World Health Organization did.
Hotel quarantine for all travelers entering Australia
is now well underway,
as the Army enforces the strict mandatory isolation.
We had this very severe lockdown
that had enormous economic impact.
The government became a socialist government overnight,
subsidizing people’s wages and so forth.
The spending in response to coronavirus has been historic.
Now, they were hard yards for any government to do,
but to see a right-leaning government do them amazed me.
And I thought, "Oh, this is great.
We might actually get some action on climate change as well."
Given the bushfires, which scarified everybody.
I mean, we’ve seen government act.
Now we know how it can be done.
We’re getting a snapshot of
our post-coronavirus economy.
And in startling news, the figures rival
the years after World War II.
Australia did a very interesting thing when people were looking
at the economic recovery.
What is the world going to do to come out of the COVID recession?
People started talking about a green COVID recovery.
We can’t go from the COVID frying pan into the climate fire.
We’re facing the biggest economic fight-back of our generation,
and for many, the big question is:
Where do we get our energy from?
And where do we find our new jobs?
76,000 jobs in Australia could have been created
with renewables.
There’s just so much could have been done.
Instead, the prime minister got up
and talked about a gas-led recovery.
-MORRISON: Thanks very much.
There is no credible energy transition plan
for an economy like Australia’s
that does not involve the greater use of gas.
So, yeah, ladies and gentlemen,
moms and dads, boys and girls,
let’s extract more methane.
Got to get the gas.
We must unlock new sources of supply.
We must get additional gas to market
as efficiently as possible.
I sat there watching the speech on television,
and I waited for the prime minister
to use the words "climate change."
I appreciate your patience this morning.
I waited for him to explain
how climate change fitted in
to this gas-led recovery.
His speech went on and on and on right till the end.
He does not use the words
"climate change."
He never mentions the words "climate change."
We’ve got to get the gas.
He was sending a message:
We are gonna double down on our bet on fossil fuels.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, uh,
it’s not good enough, is it?
Um, look, it’s-it’s the standard set of talking points.
I find it... I find it laughable when politicians--
sorry, Darren, no offense-- uh, say that they’re not
into long-term planning, they don’t know how to do that.
That’s-that’s the job.
We’re trying to plan what the nation’s
gonna do in the next ten, 20 and 30 years.
I think we-we need to sort of raise a conversation, right?
We need to have a broader vision for Australia.
I think we could be a renewable energy superpower.
It’s news that came in from the sidelines
of the UN Climate Summit in New York.
The Australian tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes confirming
he’ll be investing in the world’s biggest solar farm.
CANNON-BROOKES: Australia has a DNA of exporting energy.
That’s the way we should tell the story.
Why do we export energy?
We have a lot of resources.
So, instead of digging them out of the ground,
what if we got them out of the sky?
We have a land mass larger than the continental United States.
We’re the sunniest country outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
You could power the entire planet five times over just from Australia.
You’re pretty hooked into global markets.
-CANNON-BROOKES: Yep. -Um, where is coal going,
from your perspective?
Um, oh, it’s going away.
Quite simply, look, I mean...
I don’t care what you think about the climate.
We will need to pivot
from exporting coal and gas to exporting renewable energy,
because the rest of the planet will start figuring this out.
And as it does, we are left exporting things
that no one else needs.
We can see that coming,
but we haven’t gotten that storytelling through
when it comes to the myth that Australia needs fossil fuels.
That is challenging to our national psyche.
In Australia, you cannot talk
about electricity generation
and ignore coal.
Coal will continue to play an important role
in our economy for decades to come.
That means jobs.
We’re sort of seeing these communities
staring down the barrel of a gun.
Politicians on both sides of parliament say that they’re standing up
for these communities, but I would question that,
because I think that they’re lying to these communities.
My grandfather was a coal mining engineer.
He came to Australia in the ’70s with his then wife.
Dramatic divorce.
In the ’80s, he was made redundant,
and so, all of a sudden, he was left without a job.
Something that his, you know, family had been working in
for a couple of generations.
Something that had been an integral part of his identity.
Like, we were really close, and he used to tell these stories
about his time down in the mines
and about his friends, about what it meant to him.
I’ve had the fortune to learn about these experiences,
to learn about having this economic dependence on this industry
and as a town having that dependence on that industry.
I really want to see a pathway
for these communities out of fossil fuels.
CANNON-BROOKES: Being proud of that industry is not a problem.
Mining is not a bad thing.
We need mining in Australia.
If you want to build batteries and panels and wind turbines, guess what you need:
steel, gold, copper, nickel,
rare earths, lithium, obviously silver.
We have a lot of all of those in Australia.
So that’s why we try to tell the story and say,
look, it’s about energy that we’ve been exporting.
We can continue to do that.
But we need to prove that we can export renewable energy
in a massive way in large quantities.
If you think about exporting sun and wind, it’s a little difficult, right?
We’re not gonna put up a giant mirror and send it somewhere else.
We’re not gonna, like, turn the wind
and blow it somehow other ways that they catch it on the other side.
So we need to figure out how to do this.
This is a problem that Australia needs to solve.
The best part about this project--
it’s about 22 billion Australian dollars, roughly--
is it’s possible.
Australian tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes
has announced plans to create the world’s biggest solar farm...
And it’s aiming to generate power
and transmit that over to Singapore.
CANNON-BROOKES: We’re dealing with a vast amount of power here
that needs to move over a vast distance--
3,500 kilometers--
through some pretty hairy waters.
So, in between the world’s largest solar farm and the world’s longest
undersea high-voltage DC cable,
we also need to build the world’s largest battery.
If this works-- which it will--
there will be 50 cables from Australia to Asia
exporting massive amounts of energy.
We’ve got one of the best resources to go to for the future of the planet
without changing our DNA.
It’s the entire planet that is being challenged here.
It is the existential crisis for the human race.
Climate change is affecting the Australian economy.
It’s affecting businesses. It’s affecting individuals.
I think it’s not an issue that business should have its head in the sand on,
and that means they should be speaking out in a government vacuum.
I think there is no doubt that we are at a turning point in Australia
when it comes to climate change.
Some Australian companies are powering forward
with a massive energy transition.
But what people don’t really understand is the absolute urgency of this.
Today, average global temperatures
are about 1.1 degree above what’s called the pre-industrial average.
So, where they were 200 years ago, basically.
Australia, however,
because it’s so sensitive to climate change,
is already at almost 1.5 degrees of warming.
We knew that we would start feeling the impacts before anyone else.
We are facing a new and terrifying future in Australia, in terms of bushfires.
We might expect Black Summer conditions once every 400 years in the past.
From now on, we can expect it once every eight years.
Our climate has changed forever.
I’ll never see it go back to what it was when I was a kid.
We’re getting weather now that no human being
has ever seen on this continent.
In 2019, there was one fire near the Victorian border
where a pyro-convective storm picked up an eight-ton fire truck,
dropped it on its roof and a young firefighter lost...
Yeah, he was killed, so...
Sorry, it’s-it’s tough for firefighters to think of other firefighters, you know,
losing their lives in the line of duty, and nine did in the last fires.
I’ve been around the world.
I’ve studied bushfires and how we deal with things.
We can’t deal with the worst years anymore.
We’re having fires in places like Greenland,
the Arctic Circle,
where they never used to happen before.
And I look at California.
Twice as much area burnt as their worst ever fire season.
Oregon was on fire.
Washington state.
The whole West Coast.
There’s something wrong.
There’s something really wrong.
Climate change scares the shit out of me.
We can’t stop a lot of the global warming
that’s built into the system now.
There’s a certain amount of change that’s inevitable,
and it-it’s extremely important that people understand that
and understand what the impacts of that really mean on their lives.
We are so close now to some of the tipping points
that I wrote about when I wrote The Weather Makers
all those years ago, committing the world
to 1.5 degrees of warming by about 2030.
What does 1.5 degrees Celsius look like?
1.5 degrees is a world where
we will have significant impacts from heat waves,
megafires and all of the other things.
But where the Greenland ice cap is melting relatively slowly
and we’re getting sea level rise happening but at a... at a lower level.
So it’s not a great world.
The world we left behind at one degree of warming
or less than one degree was a lot better.
But two degrees, by comparison, is hell.
So, um, we-we need to make sure we hit that 1.5 degree.
What does a two-degree world look like?
A two-degree world is a world of catastrophe.
It’s a world where the Greenland ice cap’s melting rapidly,
where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is decaying
and therefore sea level is rising rapidly.
It’s a world where the Amazon rain forest is dying
and turning into a savanna or a woodland.
Where the permafrost is melting away so rapidly
that massive amounts of methane are being put into the atmosphere.
And then no matter what we do,
the temperature’s just gonna keep on spiraling.
It’s a world of massive disruption.
Our economy, our food security, our water security,
our peace will be threatened by unprecedented change.
So, what should we do?
Sure, put some solar panels on your roof
and cut your emissions-- that is fantastic--
but never let the fossil fuel industry
or anyone else tell you that that’s enough.
Right? It’s not my problem as an individual.
It’s a collective problem we have, and we need to act collectively
to find a solution.
And we’re not seeing that.
We’ve got states operating separately, companies operating separately,
and we can’t guarantee what the outcome will be.
This is a moment that needs leadership.
It really does.
We can all act and do our part, but without government leadership,
it’s just not going to be done.
The prime minister is feeling the heat on climate change
ahead of a UN summit of world leaders.
The pressure is growing on Scott Morrison
to commit to a target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
Will you commit Australia to achieving
a net-zero emissions target by 2050?
Well, as you know, our policy is to achieve that
in the second half of-of this century.
Well, as-as I outlined,
we’re seeking to get to net-zero.
Um, we’d preferably would like to see that happen
by 2050, as I’ve said.
It could happen sooner with significant technological change.
But I’ll tell you, if there isn’t the technological change,
then it’s just a bit of paper.
It’s like this government just doesn’t care.
I don’t get it, because that’s what motivates me
is thinking of the future.
I worked in public service for many years.
You make a lot of sacrifices, and you don’t get rich.
So it’s a bit of a calling,
and it’s about the greater good.
My career was fixing up other people’s problems.
...could be seen from about 50 kilometers away.
Uh, the-the flames were 15, 20 meters into the air.
When it all turns to shit,
they call the fire brigade,
and we turn up and we make things better.
I remember turning up to a blazing warehouse one night
with an old, experienced station officer.
I was a pretty young firefighter.
I said, "What do we do?" And he said,
"How do you eat an elephant, son?
"You start with the first bite.
Just start. We’ll work it out as we go."
So that’s my mindset, and that’s what we’ve got to do with climate change.
So we just don’t wait for the climate denialists.
If they don’t get it, they don’t get it, and they probably never will.
We’ve got a world to save, and we’re going to do it.
We’ve got 20 to 30 years of warming,
and as long as we reduce emissions
to zero by 2050, the scientists are saying
the warming will stabilize and then gradually start to come down.
I won’t see it, but my grandkids will, and I want to keep them safe.
It is not okay!
These people and companies are literally
burning our futures.
The climate crisis impacts everyone.
The one comment I got more than any other
from adults was: "Oh, you give me hope."
"Your generation is gonna save us."
I thought, "Great. Thanks."
We shouldn’t have to be doing this.
Like, as kids, we’re not equipped to deal with these, you know, scenarios.
We should just be focusing on freaking out about school,
our next assignment, our next identity crisis,
and here we are trying to save the world.
Are you mad at us?
Um...
I’m not angry at the older generations.
I’m angry at people in power who spread deliberate lies,
you know, deliberate misinformation
to deter people from demanding what’s right.
I’m angry at people who have incredible wealth
and decades of knowledge about this brewing crisis
and decided not only to not do anything
but to exploit it for their own self-interests and gain.
I foresee it being
the largest obstacle my generation faces,
in terms of having a safe future
and being able to have our own kids.
Like, that’s something I’m wary of, is having my own kids, um,
because I don’t want to bring them into a world
that’s going to be unsafe, um, and that isn’t gonna provide them
with as good a quality of a future
as I have had the fortune to have.
-Three, two, one. -Go.
’Cause people look at it as an incredible thing--
of young people exercising their power,
exercising their voices.
-SPEAKER: What do we want? -CROWD: Climate action!
-When do we want it? -Now!
-What do we want? -Climate action!
-When do we want it? -Now!
-What do we want? -Climate action!
-When do we want it? -Now!
But I joined out of,
like, a feeling of necessity rather than want.
And I think it is the most tragic thing
I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to be a part of.
My mother taught me about Country.
We identify as Aboriginal because of this, this and that.
This family, that family, that family.
It’s pretty obvious that the vast majority
of my genes are from Cornwall.
Um, but... and I’ve been to Cornwall,
but my heart didn’t flutter.
I came back to Australia, and...
this is what I know in my blood.
And all the time, I was writing.
I’ve written 33 books about the Country.
The Earth is the mother of all Aboriginal people.
And we treat the Earth like our mother.
That’s our law.
And if we all respected the Earth to that degree,
then we wouldn’t be damaging it as greatly as we are at the moment.
I think we’ve been building toward this for 250 years.
Europeans had so little respect for Aboriginal people.
When the first Europeans came here,
they found a sweet and open land.
It was pleasant.
They said it looks like a gentlemen’s park.
And it was a gentlemen’s park,
because the people here were gentle men and women.
But Europeans then stopped the method that had made it like that.
Indigenous Australians managed this land
for 40,000 years at least.
And it was carefully curated.
And then the Europeans came along.
We took the fire stick out of the hand of Aboriginal people,
and we changed the landscape dramatically.
Now we are facing consequences in terms of these huge bushfires
that result from climate change,
and we have to recognize that the land has really changed.
And that the old practices may not be entirely effective in the new regime.
And we need to learn together again
really how to manage this land at that very large scale.
This is the critical moment for humanity.
Right? I’m not going to let my children’s future
be flushed down the toilet for inaction.
And whatever I feel internally,
it’s gonna stay there because, well, I’m-I’m gonna fight to the last.
There’s-there’s no moment where you can say you’ve done enough.
This is a long conversation.
We’re gonna hurt each other, and we’re gonna bruise each other,
and we have to wear it.
There’s gonna be disappointment.
There’s gonna be hope.
All of that’s gonna happen, and we have to stay patient.
This argument is such a big argument.
But I’ve seen really important things done
in circumstances where nobody expected it to be done.
So of course we can do it.