Scorched-earth policies: Australia and climate change

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch. Upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required.

New customer offer for first 3 months only.

Speed slow. 135 gigabytes of network busy.

Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. What's the most disgusting food you've ever eaten? Well, odds are that somewhere somebody thinks that repugnant stuff is a delicacy. We visit a museum dedicated to disgust, sample an eyeball or two and find that the emotion is about far more than just food. And at the start of the year, Japan decreed that in translated documents, people's surnames will come First Prime Minister Abe Shinzo instead of Shinzo Abe. It's a small change that speaks of a far bigger shift in attitudes. But first, Australia is ablaze and there's no end in sight to the devastating bushfires that have been burning out of control since September. Today, authorities told almost a quarter of a million people to flee their homes, adding to what was already the largest peacetime evacuation in the country's history. Blistering temperatures and fickle winds this week are making matters worse. The country is readying its military to help. Australia's mostly volunteer fire service is utterly overwhelmed. An area the size of Cuba has already gone up in smoke. The human cost is rising. Hundreds of millions of animals are already dead. And for much of the country, the peak of the bushfire season may still be to come. The disaster raises pointed questions about the role of climate change. Last year, Australia experienced its hottest and driest year in recorded history. Yet the party of the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, includes outright climate denialists. And his policies have always favoured the fossil fuel industry. As fires scourge more and more of the country, the questions for Mr. Morrison are getting harder. But he continues to skirt the issue. What we will do is ensure that our policies remain sensible, that they don't move towards either extreme and stay focused on what Australians need for a vibrant and viable economy as well as a vibrant and sustainable environment. For now, millions of Australians are focused on a concern more immediate than either the economy or the environment. Their homes and their lives.

The situation is as bad as it's been, if not worse. Across Australia there are fires burning up and down the country.

Eleanor Whitehead is our Australia correspondent.

We're now at about 11 million hectares or more that's been burnt, which is more than the recent fires in California and the Amazon combined. We've had 2,000 or more homes destroyed. Hundreds of thousands potentially. Some scientists are saying up to a billion animals killed. And firefighters have told me they've seen kangaroos running out of the bush on fire. We've got at least 26 people dead so far as well. And that number might have been higher were it not for mass evacuations that have been well organized through this time.

And beyond evacuations, what's being done to combat the fires on the ground?

So most of the responsibility in Australia for firefighting falls to volunteer services. So these are guys who have abandoned their day to day jobs to try to protect their towns. They will protect homes, protect lives. With fire trucks hosing down the flames, they try and create containment lines by bulldozing trees, sometimes, sometimes digging trenches in the hope that the fire can't jump across it. And at the same time there are water bombing jets and helicopters which are dumping water on top of the. But what firefighters say is that fires of these scale are just too big to combat, that they can't be fought by humans. So it's all kind of passed through, I guess now then.

Yeah.

So the main fire has gone through, I guess.

And I met with a firefighter called Brendan o', Connor, who's a brigade captain in a village southwest of Sydney called Balmoral. And he gave me a tour of the town.

So. So what we got is a fire.

Coming from that north easterly direction which has crossed over.

So we drove around, up and down the road there. He showed me around. They lost several properties in the town. They'd been reduced to rubble. Just corrugated tin roofs and cars that are burnt out there. You can smell it before you drive into the town. They were hit by five fire fronts. So the destruction that was done was pretty severe. The trees, a lot of the bushland there standing just like matchsticks.

Do you get a sense for how dangerous it is for him and for others to tackle fires on this kind of scale?

It is immensely dangerous. He was saying that these fires are burning at hundreds of degrees. At one point he said that it was so hot that the sweatband in his helmet melted and it blistered across his forehead. And more Tragically, they lost two young firefighters, both of them fathers in their 20s.

And what about how this fits into sort of the broader response? Did he, as a local fire chief, think he's getting the support that he needs from those above him in the chain?

He didn't. And it's a complaint that's shared by virtually all volunteer firefighters that I've spoken to. He said he didn't have the kit that he needed. His brigade didn't have the kit they needed to fight the fire and they actually ran out of water when they were trying to protect the town.

And does that frustration kind of go all the way up the chain? There has been a lot of talk about the national response here.

Yeah. So the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, went on holiday to Hawaii in December just as the crisis was really escalating. He has been sort of slow to accept this as a national emergency. There was a long period where he was sort of dismissing the fires as the responsibility of the states. And lots of Australians feel particularly out about the pressure that's falling on volunteers because they've given up their day jobs to fight these towns. And it was only under intense pressure that the Prime Minister agreed to give them a one off payment for the very dangerous jobs that they're doing. And unfortunately, a lot of people saw it coming. Ex fire chiefs were warning as far back as last April that this year was going to be a terrible fire season because East Australia is in a crippling drought. They say they were asking for more money for water bombing aircrafts, but. But the government ignored them until fires escalated in December and then cash was found. And they also said that they asked for the government to deploy armed forces. Again, they were ignored until the crisis was escalating.

And this is a Prime Minister who campaigned on a platform that was fairly dismissive about climate change. I mean, do you think that a tragedy on this scale will be enough to shift that position?

I think certainly some people are looking at this crisis and wondering if that's the case. The Prime Minister now says that his government never denied the connection between these fires and climate change. But beyond that, there's no sign from the government that it's changing its course on climate policy.

But I mean, this beyond the immediate danger is surely going to have large, lasting effects on the country as a whole.

It will. It's going to have effects on everything from the economy to how Australians build their homes, where they think about living in the future, whether it's safe for them to live in some of these bushland areas. There are going to be serious consequences for tourism. Not Just in the short term, because lots of tourists have been involved in these fires, have been stranded on beaches and so on. But in the longer term as well, if they turn tourists off Australia, there are going to be consequences for agriculture as well. Farmers who've lost land and livestock, dairies now on the brink of bankruptcy. These industries are big employers and lots of them will be concerned about these fires. It's a crisis that's unlike other natural disasters in Australia in the past because it touches so many people. So even people who aren't in the fire affected regions are still choking on dirty air. There's been terrible air quality in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, the biggest cities in the country. And the ratings agency Moody's published research recently saying they think the cost of these fires is going to exceed the record of 4.4 billion, which was set by 2009's Black Saturday bushfires.

I mean, it's hard to view this as anything other than a cautionary tale for the story of climate change because it is such a visible disaster that has such seemingly clear links to a changing world. I mean, do you think it will change minds abroad, if not at home?

Well, climate change doesn't cause the fires, but it does make them more intense. I think for people who are in the immediate line of danger, it's not really a concern. They're more worried about protecting their lives and their properties. But certainly for people looking in, there's something particularly emotive about these flames, that they're so huge they can be seen from space, I think from outside. It's hard to look at this as anything else than a cautionary tale about some of the climate extremes that are lying in store.

Eleanor, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

How would you like a nice big plate of sannakji, a live octopus chopped up and eaten while still moving? Served with sesame oil and chili sauce, it's a delicacy in Korea. Several people choke to death every year when squirming, suckered tentacles get stuck in their throats. If that doesn't strike your fancy, how about some haukat? That's small cubes of Greenland shark. The animal urinates through its skin and its meat is toxic unless first left to rot and then hung to dry. Some say it's like chewing on a urine soaked mattress. Such delights are featured at the Museum of Disgusting Food in the Swedish city of Malmo. Our foreign editor, Robert Guest paid it a visit and found that not only is disgust in the stomach of the beholder, but also has a Surprising bearing on our judgments and beliefs.

The first thing you notice when you enter the Museum of Disgusting food is your ticket. It comes in the shape of a sick bag. There's a blackboard nearby that when I was there, said it was five days since the last person had vomited. The museum director, Andreas Ahrens, explained to me that at the bottom of the blackboard, the, there's a running total of how many chundering incidents have occurred since the museum opened in 2018.

So we put it up, we keep track of all the people who vomit. We're up to 81 so far.

And he said the record was set by a Belgian journalist, Arthur de Meyer.

So he vomited from every single thing except three. So he had 10 vomits in one day.

But he carried on.

He carried on. I think that shows a lot of mental fortitude that, like I would have given up after maybe the 3 3rd vomit or so. I don't think I would have kept on going.

So this isn't just going and reading about or looking at disgusting foods, it's tasting them.

You start off by looking at exhibits and films.

This is a replica of a monkey brain table from China and reading about.

The origins of various types of disgusting food. But then obviously you have to try them.

Okay, so what kinds of things are we talking about here?

So all these foods are things that are considered delicious somewhere, but which many people find repellent.

But it actually contains bull penises, testicles, sheep heads, and some balut eggs with duck fetuses inside.

Helpfully, quite a lot of the ingredients are drowned in alcohol and that makes them easier to stomach. Why don't you tell me about this stuff?

So this is Bevergel. It's the anal gland of a beaver that's been put. Put in alcohol. It does give the alcohol quite an interesting flavor.

Can you use just any old beaver's anal gland for this?

No.

It should definitely be the northern European anal gland that you use. It's definitely vastly superior to the North American beaver anal gland.

I mean, I presume you didn't go there just for the choice. Beaver anal glands. What is the purpose of this museum?

When you go to the museum, alongside the sheep's eyeballs and tomato juice, everyone will notice at least one exhibit that they consider a comfort food. And people are often surprised. I mean, Americans wonder why Twinkies and Pop Tarts are there. There was one visitor who was a Maasai from East Africa and was astonished to see a film of people cutting a little hole in a cow's throat and pouring out the fresh, warm blood and mixing it with raw milk and drinking it.

He went, how is this disgusting? I grew up with this. This is just normal food.

And Andreas told me that this is the point.

So we want people to kind of realize that you shouldn't really be judging the foods of other cultures as disgusting so easily. We're all equally disgusting. We all have our own disgusting foods.

When you realize that disgust is largely culturally conditioned, you can maybe open yourself up to new experiences and then maybe learn to be more tolerant and less fearful and suspicious of people from other cultures.

You say largely culturally conditioned? Not entirely. I mean, some of this is pure biology, right?

Yeah. I mean, disgust is a necessary emotion. If our ancestors hadn't had the capacity to feel disgust, they would have eaten lots of rotten meat and probably died. Disgust is influenced by genes. Some people are very sensitive to it, are disgusted by lots of things. Some people are much less sensitive to it.

But disgust isn't just about foods, really.

No. The word has two meanings in English. It can signify visceral revulsion or moral abhorrence. And the two categories are not always easy to separate. Many people feel physically sick when contemplating something that they find morally disgusting. Studies also show that disgust can affect our moral judgments. For example, people who are easily disgusted make harsher moral judgments when they're subjected to disgusting stimuli.

So again, this ties into how people respond personally, socially, politically.

This is the really intriguing finding. There appears to be a strong correlation between how sensitive people are to disgust and their political outlook. People who are very sensitive to disgust are much more likely to be socially conservative and hostile to and suspicious of immigrants.

Why is that? What's the hypothesis for the connection there?

One study found evidence that people who are particularly sensitive to disgust extend their preference for order in the physical environment, like having a tidy, clean room, to the sociopolitical environment. So they want to strengthen traditional norms. A possible explanation for why people who are sensitive to disgust might be also more likely to oppose immigration is that disgust evolved as a mechanism to protect us from sickness. And people often perceive the unfamiliar outsiders as potential vectors of disease, which historically has often been the case. When the strangers came to the Americas, they brought a lot of diseases to which the locals did not have resistance. Now, that sensitivity, that fear of outsiders, is incredibly anachronistic in an age where we have modern medicine. So it's not a helpful response now, but it is a deep seated one, and one that possibly we have to understand if we're going to get past it.

Well, I Mean, can we get past it? If it is deeply biologically rooted, how to get over it?

Well, you can't cure someone's heightened sense of disgust, but people can learn to overcome their revulsion against specific things. I mean, you think the proportion of people in rich countries who used to think that homosexuality was disgusting, that used to be nearly 100%. It's now very small indeed. People have just got over it.

If it can be culturally conditioned, it can be culturally deconditioned.

Exactly.

So with all that in mind then, you've tried to be open. You tried when you were at the museum to be open minded about things you'd eat.

Well, I thought it was my journalistic duty at the museum to try everything at the tasting bar. And they set out 13 dishes that were supposedly disgusting and I tried them all.

And how'd it go?

I actually liked more than half of them. There were some dishes like the weevils and the dung beetles which are kind of inoffensive but dull, crunchy. And there was only one food that made me sputter with horror.

Very salty.

Licorice. Salty licorice. Okay, I'll give that a go. Wow, that is salty. I thought the sensation was how you imagine a slug might feel if it was being force fed salt by a vindictive gardener protecting her petunias. It was awful. It was overwhelming. I took a bag home for my children and they have not forgiven me yet. And I've actually saved one for you. Would you like to try it?

How very kind.

Now just taste it with an open mind and tell me what you think it's like.

Oh my God. I think it's not very nice. I think I might never put salt on anything again. Anybody else want one of these?

Jason, you have proved yourself an open minded host.

Yes, and I should be perhaps a closed mouth host more often. Robert, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Most Japanese family names in use today date back to the late 1800s. But how the west hears or reads those surnames is changing.

For 120 years or so, when Japanese names have been written in a foreign language, particularly English, the usual Japanese name order is reversed.

Dominic Ziegler writes the Economist's Banyan column on Asian politics and culture.

Until now the Prime Minister would be referred to as Shinzo Abe. From now on the government would wants us to refer to him as Abe, Shinzo Abe being his family name.

And why this change? Why now?

I think it has a lot to do with a sense of confidence in Japan, particularly confidence by this rather conservative government. The sense is, at a time when China is rising and when America as an ally is kind of looking wobbly, it's time for Japan to stand on its own feet. And one tiny example of this is by insisting that foreigners use the Japanese name order for names, that Japan doesn't have to concessions for foreigners when it comes to rendering Japanese names. So, yes, it's a sense that Asia is on the rise, that Japan itself is feeling stronger. It's a matter of authenticity. It's a matter of normalizing things.

And why was the order the way that it was in the first place? Why did Japan decide to have the given name first as a convention?

Well, that's very interesting. I mean, of course, you know, many Japanese conservatives don't see why they should say their name backwards just for the convenience of lazy Western minds. But in fact, it was a Japanese decision in the 1870s that led to this curious reversal of name order. At the time, Japan felt that it was under an existential threat from Western imperial powers. Japanese reformers had seen China and South Korea being carved up like a melon by the British, by the French American powers. Shortly before, American warships had turned up in Tokyo Bay and demanded that a land that had been closed for two centuries open up and start trading with the U.S. the consequences, it was quite clear from the guns sticking out from the. From the warships would be dire for Japan. This was the threat. And the response amongst Japanese reformers was quite extraordinary and extremely radical. It was to modernize along Western lines as quickly as possible. Modernizing the military, modernizing education, modernizing governments. And this reversal of name orders was just a small part of that.

And so does this change kind of fit in with the kind of government, the kind of social change that Shinzo Abe or Abe Shinzo is trying to affect in Japan now?

Well, Abe Shinzo is something of a contradiction. On the one hand, he's a conservative who harks back to traditional Japanese values and traditional family values. And indeed, his hope is to change the constitution in ways that emphasize the family and the state over the individual. And of course, putting your family name first and your individual name second is part of that. But at the same time, he's promised to empower women. He's made a great show of this. But for many, many years, there is an official ban on married couples retaining separate family names. In practice, that means that wives nearly always have to take their husband's names. In fact, four years ago, there was a Supreme Court ruling on the matter, and one of the justices had to change her family name to her husband's in order to be able to sit on the court and in order, in other words, to be able to rul against the law. But she was in a minority and the law still stands.

And so now at the Economist, as confusing as it may be, for a short while anyway, we are to follow that convention. He is Abe Shinzo, not Shinzo Abe.

That's right. And indeed, when drafting the column, I suggested that we probably would change soon. We then had a discussion about our style, and the consensus was that we should change straight away. Of course, some Japanese, not many, choose Western given names, and many American Japanese have Western given names. So Fred Nakamura remains Fred Nakamura.

Ziegler. Dominic, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com radiooffer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here on Monday.