Heavy rains are finally starting to extinguish the distastrous bushfires that covered a last part of eastern Australia during the last couple of months (and of course, bringing floods). Back while they were still burning, James Raynes tweeted a series of images he adapted from Australian recruitment posters from the First World War, which I think lampoon the state of right-wing climate politics in this country rather brilliantly:

The reason why they're so clever is that they subvert denialist arguments against effective climate action by redeploying them against Australia's most sacred myth: Anzac. The above image, for example, points out that on the argument that Australia's carbon emissions are so much smaller than those of the United States or China that reducing them will make no difference, then logically we shouldn't have bothered sending our tiny army against Germany's much bigger one, either. Check out Raynes's other images below (the Boer War credits one is particularly amusing).

Will this kind of meme game have any effect? I don't know, but apparently talking about science doesn't help, so it must be worth a shot. But as our government seems to be moving from climate change denialism to climate disaster denialism, the messaging may already be out of date.

The original posters, all from 1915, can be found at: Wikimedia Commons; Imperial War Museum; National Library of Australia; Wikipedia.

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