Bleached coral in the Great Barrier Reef. Credit Agence France-Presse/XL Catlin Seaview Survey

Today’s editorial, from his current perch in Australia, is typical of the most reasoned editorialist currently writing for an English language major daily that we know of; so, worth a read:

Coral vs. Coal

Roger Cohen

MELBOURNE, Australia — Tim Flannery, a scientist and environmentalist who was named Australian of the Year in 2007, lost his job in 2013. The right-wing government of then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott shut down the Climate Commission that Flannery headed in a peremptory move designed to demonstrate its contempt for climate change. The commission had been established two years earlier to provide “authoritative information” to the Australian public.

Abbott, of the conservative Liberal Party, had no time for such information. Climate change, he argued in his autobiography, was bunk. It had been “happening since the earth’s beginning.” Therefore it made no sense to “impose certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future.”

“To Abbott, I was the devil incarnate,” Flannery told me. Throughout the developed world — from the “Drill, baby, drill!” crowd in the United States to Abbott’s “ax-the-tax” attack on clean-energy legislation in Australia — denial of climate change has become a tribal, almost masonic badge of the coal and fossil-fuel loving right. In today’s culture wars it’s as much of a wedge issue as any.

Through crowdfunding, Flannery raised enough money in short order to turn the state-funded commission into the Climate Council, an independent nonprofit organization with the same role. Earlier this month, he headed for the Great Barrier Reef to see what “benign changes,” as Abbott would have it, global warming has produced in the world’s largest coral reef. He found what he saw northeast of Port Douglas on the outer rim of the reef devastating.

The reef, one of the largest living things on earth, has started to fail. Whether it can recover is unclear. An organism roughly the size of Germany is bleaching to death. More than 90 percent of the reef that Flannery saw had suffered. Bleaching occurs when excessive heat and sunlight cause the algae that give coral reefs their shimmering colors to create toxins.

The toxins repel the tiny animals called polyps essential to the ecosystem of the corals. As my colleague Michelle Innis put it, “When heat stress continues, they starve to death.” Because the coral reefs support vast fish stocks, the livelihoods — sometimes the very survival — of countless people depend on them…

Read the whole editorial here.