A recent article at The Washington Post, “In the Australian outback, climate change widens the racial divide,” blames both racism and climate change for Australian Aboriginal people living in a hot Australian outback town. This is nonsense. Poverty is the main cause of their suffering, and part of the cause is high energy prices and poor infrastructure.
The Washington Post (WaPo) claims that extreme heat is “surging around the world” because of climate change, and points to the plight of Aboriginal people in one South Australia town as an example.
Before getting into the specifics of the story, it is important to note that extreme heat is not surging. While global average temperatures seem to have risen modestly over the past hundred-plus years, this does not translate to higher temperatures everywhere. Natural heatwave-producing events like El Niño have a much stronger impact on regional temperature spikes than the 1 degree of warming over the past century.
WaPo writes that the town of Coober Pedy’s “mostly white residents” live below ground in “dugouts” repurposed and expanded from old opal mines. The Aboriginal people live on the hot surface.
The article says that the Aboriginal people are 17 percent of the town’s population, and only sixty percent of the town’s residents live in underground homes, meaning it is impossible that it is even mostly Aboriginal people living on the hot surface, while all the white people are living comfortably underground. This makes for shoddy reporting on WaPo’s part, perhaps to minimize the white sufferers in order to make the story fit the racism narrative. Certainly, WaPo could have used a fact check here. In any case, the surface-dwellers “swelter without air conditioning or rack up enormous electricity bills.”
This sweltering is due, according to WaPo, to South Australia’s increase in average temperature of 3 degrees over the past century, “and predicted to rise up to four degrees more by 2050.”
It’s inconvenient that, according to Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), the record high temperature for Coober Pedy was set in 1979, at a station that was shut down in the late 90s. More recent data from the Coober Pedy airport, which is artificially hotter because of the urban heat island effect, as explored by meteorologist Anthony Watts in his U.S. temperature station audit, doesn’t come close to the 44.2°C record of 1979.
Another issue with WaPo’s assertions is that the predicted rise of 4 degrees Celsius comes from projections using a climate model scenario called RCP8.5; a model pathway that has been widely abandoned by climate scientists for being outrageously inaccurate, and impossible to achieve, as discussed in Climate Realism here.
The real issue with the heat in Coober Pedy isn’t that it is getting so much hotter there, but rather that they have unreliable and extremely expensive electricity, which WaPo admits. WaPo explains that as is common with extremely remote towns in the outback, “Coober Pedy is not connected to the national energy grid,” and “it buys power from a privately owned solar-wind-diesel plant before selling it to residents.”
The Coober Pedy hybrid plant relies primarily on wind and solar, the majority share of energy generation comes from those sources while being backed up by diesel generators. It is heavily subsidized, but even that has not lowered prices for residents. It was unpopular right away as people realized that the cost would end up being more than double that of other alternatives considered.
So, the poorest in the town are often unable to pay their bills. This has nothing to do with climate change itself, but rather is a result of the government pushing wind and solar power to the exclusion of reliable coal generated electricity as part of its efforts to fight climate change. It has everything to do with the economics of living in an off-grid town in a naturally hostile environment, and the hidden costs of renewables.
WaPo’s attempt to imply racism is to blame for Aborigines’ suffering from heat is shameful. The causes of the suffering, if suffering there is, are the fact that Coober Pedy is located in the arid, desert like region northern South Australia, historically known for its extreme heat and low rainfall, and the high poverty rate in the town. Both of these issues are exacerbated by the country’s green energy policies that are restricting domestic coal use and relying instead on intermittent, expensive wind and solar. Those are the factors responsible for any suffering there. WaPo should be ashamed of itself for falsely raising the specter of racism to advance its failing climate disaster narrative.
