Quarterly Essay 66 The Long Goodbye : Coal, Coral and Australia's Climate Deadlock

The Great Barrier Reef is dying. Extreme weather is becoming all too familiar. Yet when it comes to action on climate change, division and paralysis rule the land. In this vivid, urgent essay, Anna Krien explores the psychology and politics of a warming world. She visits the frontlines of Australia's climate wars – the Reef, the Galilee and Bowen basins, South Australia. She investigates the Adani mine, with its toxic politics and controversial economics. Talking to power workers and scientists, lobbyists and activists, she considers where climate change is taking us, and where effective action is to be found. “This was Turnbull's moment, and the Liberal Party's too. Not just the Snowy 2.0, but the whole thing – an ailing and dysfunctional grid, a complex issue, something for the ‘adults'to take responsibility for. But instead of leadership, Australians got politics as usual. Cheap shots, culture-war baiting, bad and good ideas lobbed like hot potatoes and lost in the trash talk of low-grade politics. After the ten-day policy spree, Turnbull resumed his poker face, continuing with his grim role of negotiating with the vipers in his nest.” Anna Krien, The Long Goodbye Anna Krien is the author of Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests and Quarterly Essay 45 Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals. Her work has been published in the Monthly, the Age, the Big Issue, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review and frankie. In 2014 she won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in the UK.