Opinion
Donald Trump is America’s first president to chant “drill, baby, drill”. And his Independence Day parade in Washington on the weekend was the first in 250 years to be cancelled due to intense heat.
On the same day, Iran, which has just flexed its oil muscles to coerce the world economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz, installed 6000 overhead sprinklers to cool the crowds at the funeral parade for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
World Cup games are being stopped for mandatory hydration breaks in every match for the first time to protect player health from extreme heat. And, in Paris, health regulations were relaxed to allow people to swim in the Seine, while French shops report a run on chalk because people are smearing their windows white to reflect sunlight.
It wasn’t enough, of course, to protect everyone. French authorities report a preliminary death toll due to heat of 2025 people in the week beginning June 22, the peak of its record heatwave, about 30 per cent more than in the corresponding week last year.
Altogether, the heatwave killed more than 4000 people in Western Europe, based on preliminary national tallies. Belgium’s authorities said they had seen the highest one-day death tolls since the first wave of the COVID pandemic.
The years 2023 to 2025 were the three hottest on record. The world is failing to curb carbon. With collective solutions failing, the people who can afford to buy private protections are doing what they can. There’s a run on air-conditioning. “Aircon stocks become next hot bet as Europe wilts,” headlined London’s Financial Times two weeks ago.
Going a step further, some of the people making the greatest profits from the carbon-pumping economy are protecting themselves with the latest fad in billionaire indulgence – the snow room.
“A snow room is more or less the opposite of a sauna,” as The New York Times describes it. “A cave-like space of ice and snow. In some, white flakes descend gently from the ceiling to create the feeling of being inside a snow globe.” Prices start at $US130,000 ($187,200).
Petrochemical billionaire Mukesh Ambani has installed one in his Mumbai skyscraper home, reports the paper. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has one in his superyacht.
A manufacturer of snow rooms, Tyler Slater of the Spa Butler in Texas, says: “Basically, we can produce any fantasy you want. Think of it as Disneyland with snow.”
But while you can visit Disneyland, you can’t live there. Climate activist George Monbiot calls “billionaire brain” a pathology. One symptom, he says, is the inability to see beyond short-term gain: “They would loot the planet for a few more rocks on a needless mountain of wealth.”
Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London, says: “Climate change is here, it’s already impacting the things we enjoy in our everyday lives, and it will continue to get worse the longer we drag out the inevitable transition to net zero emissions.”
Yes, but how long will it take? Hopes of progress are threatened today by the global fad for electricity-gobbling data centres. The Australian government is demanding the proponents supply their projects with renewable energy, but other countries aren’t so sensible.
It’s premature to despair of humanity’s ability to hold warming to the Paris Accord’s limit of 1.5 degrees. Although the global average for 2024 was 1.55 degrees above the pre-industrial average already, this isn’t enough to put the aim beyond reach. Because the Paris Accord temperatures are measured as moving averages over 20 years.
The UN Environment Program tells us that “it remains technically possible to get on a 1.5 degree Celsius pathway, with solar, wind and forests holding real promise for sweeping and fast emissions cuts”.
But it says that countries need to set more ambitious national goals. So we can get there, but how long will it take? And will we invoke tipping points, rendering warming irreversible, in the meantime?
Scientists identify multiple potential tipping points. One, in particular, is focusing minds in Europe. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is a giant system that circulates warm air from the equator to Europe.
“It’s why Europe, at the same latitudes, has a more benign climate than the Americas,” explains Dr Trish Lavery of the ANU’s National Security College Futures Council.
“More and more models are showing it slowing. There’s debate about whether it could slow bit by bit or suddenly stop. If it suddenly stops, Europe could be up to 10 degrees Celsius colder over winter. It represents an existential threat to Europe.”
The government of Iceland designated the collapse of AMOC an existential risk in November, opening formal planning for food and energy supplies in worst-case scenarios.
“This has kicked off a fair bit of funding and attention in Europe,” says Lavery, a former OECD strategic foresight counsellor. “There’d be no nice little pastures with fluffy little sheep grazing – some areas would be covered with ice.”
A paper published in April suggests that a shutdown of AMOC is possible by mid-century – sooner than thought.
To play for time, scientists and governments increasingly are showing interest in projects that could postpone such drastic events. “This is why we have the world’s largest geoengineering project on the Great Barrier Reef, out of Southern Cross University,” says Lavery.
The university’s Daniel Harrison explains: “It might sound like science fiction, but ‘marine cloud brightening’ is being seriously considered as a way to shield parts of the ocean from extreme heat.”
By spraying seawater from ship-mounted water cannon, researchers form clouds that reflect sunlight back into the sky. It works. Now the focus is on how to get maximum effectiveness.
“Scientists think that coral reef dieback is one of the first possible tipping points,” says Lavery. “Reefs are important to protect coasts from storm surges, to protect habitats for fish, to protect coastlines from erosion.”
Another, more drastic, idea for “solar radiation modification” is for large numbers of planes or drones to release sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to form clouds to bounce sunlight spacewards. This is in the theoretical phase, but a US-Israeli start-up called Stardust already has patents.
“It’s important to remember,” says Lavery, who works on potential governance mechanisms for how any such projects might be managed, “that these don’t solve the problem. It only provides a Band-Aid to buy us a bit of time to do the hard work of mitigation of climate change”.
Drill, baby, drill? Without more global political will, we may be drilling ourselves to death.
Peter Hartcher is both international and political editor. His political column appears on Saturdays.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.
