"Yee-ha!" Prime Minister Tony Abbott was presented with a Stetson and made an honorary guest of Texas when he spoke at the Asia Society in Houston last Friday.
"Yee-ha!" Prime Minister Tony Abbott was presented
with a Stetson and made an honorary guest of Texas when he spoke at the
Asia Society in Houston last Friday. Photo: Andrew Meares









Americans who travelled abroad during the George W. Bush
years have some sympathy for Australians and Canadians right now – it’s
not easy being citizens of countries run by international laughing
stocks. People laugh at you, then get angry: just remember Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo or referring to Australia as Austria.




Americans have a slightly easier time of it at the moment.
Barack Obama is no Winston Churchill, and there’s still plenty of reason
for the rest of the world to look askance (drone attacks, the NSA
collecting your Gmail). But at least he’s a serious human being with a
wide-ranging intellect.



Less so Tony Abbott, who is Bushian to the max. Last week he
journeyed to Texas, where he gave a talk to some oilmen who awarded him a
ten-gallon Stetson hat. Upon donning it he said 'yee ha'. Really.




Abbott’s only real concern is protecting Australia’s
world-topping coal industry, whose expansion plans would make it utterly
impossible to bring climate change under control. You would think
Abbott might have noticed this – his continent is located closer than
almost anyone else’s to the Antarctic, where scientists last month
offered definitive proof that melting glaciers have committed the planet
to an extra three metres of sea level rise. But instead Abbott’s
travelling the world to try to stop international efforts to combat
global warming. In Texas, he told his audience we must prevent the
"ostracizing of any particular fuel", as if he were the global
ambassador of coal, determined to prevent his favourite hydrocarbon from
having to take a back seat to what his Treasurer recently referred to
as "utterly offensive" wind turbines.



Stephen Harper, Abbott’s Canadian counterpart, is just as
dangerously single-minded. Harper’s particular joy is not coal but
tar-sands oil, perhaps the only fuel source that’s just as foul. A
former oil company executive, he’s turned the country’s diplomatic corps
into salesmen of the dirtiest petroleum on earth, and in general
treated the rest of his great nation as if it were a grubby convenience
store tacked on to his Alberta gas station. It’s gotten so bad that
hundreds of scientists in white lab coats marched on Ottawa recently to
protest his attacks on environmental regulations and scientific
monitoring.



Because Canada and Australia have mostly benign and
productive histories on the international scene, it will take a while
for most world citizens to catch up with their new status. But those who
are paying attention know already. Last year, for instance, the staid
and venerable journal Foreign Policy began its cover story on Canada noting that it was now a "reckless, rogue petrostate". Those radicals at The Economist
called Harper a bully "intolerant of criticism and dissent". Australia
and it’s obsessive effort to keep King Coal alive despite its key
contribution to climate change is getting similar international
attention with the likes of Deutsche Bank and HSBC announcing they would
not invest in projects that would bring coal through the Great Barrier
Reef as planned.



All of this matters mightily. These men are decades behind
the science – Abbott plans to combat climate change by planting trees,
which would work better if his country was not by now battling constant
drought and record heat – and they’re trying to blow up international
negotiations in Paris next year. Canada has already renounced its treaty
commitments and Abbott promises no new commitments. That could be
enough to derail any agreement. Both Canada’s tar sands and Australia’s
coal would then fill the atmosphere with enough carbon that it wouldn’t
matter what their successors did. This new Axis of Carbon is a great
threat to all of us.



The good news is that their extremism has spawned widespread
resistance in both countries. Indigenous Canadians (First Nation) and
coastal residents of British Columbia have so far blocked plans for
tar-sands pipelines to the Pacific. Last week a mass walk-on at the site
of the largest Australian coalmine under construction at Maules Creek
helped force a serious delay in the project. Financiers are starting to
question their visions for the future: one multinational last month
shelved plans for a $10 billion tar-sands expansion plan, and at least
half the new coalmines set for Australia are currently blocked. Instead,
investors are looking at countries like Germany, where one day earlier
this spring the country generated 74 per cent of its power from
renewable sources.



Germany is what the future looks like. The leaders of Canada
and Australia – highly educated, sophisticated, and wealthy nations, not
to mention some of the most spectacularly beautiful places on
earth – are clinging to the past, on behalf of the fossil fuel
industries that dominate their governments. Eventually (and hopefully
before the planet’s physics are completely out of control) voters in
these countries will realise they’re being driven off a cliff. In the
meantime, perhaps they might want to pretend they’re Americans when
traveling abroad.      



Author and journalist Bill McKibben is co-founder of climate change movement, 350.org.