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Paper short abstract:

In colonised Australia's "carbon oligarchy" climate change poses an existential challenge to life, values and political action which makes a change into the use of renewable energy difficult and disruptive, and easy to suppress, through the unintended consequences of regulation and action.

Paper long abstract:

Climate change represents an existential crisis for colonised Australia and its carbon oligarchy. Climate change operates as a psychological, sociological and ecological phenomena/threat, running against a collective psychology which is expressed in values, both conscious and unconscious, ecological exploitation, and modes of communal sense and imagining. Current values lead to imaginings of technological solutions that minimally disturb conventional behaviour, while current modes of social organisation lead to the destruction of that organisation and its values, through unacknowledged ecological feedback.

In this complex milieu, even likely solutions act as displacements from challenges to social values, especially when solutions express a desire to maintain order free from unintended or disruptive consequences arising from that organisation. Regulations which have grown in the carbon oligarchy, constantly disrupt processes of change, while largely remaining invisible or unconscious.

This paper examines reactions to climate change in three NSW country towns. In one, a history of activism against mining and a program to become self-supporting on renewables has run into problems of cost, regulation and the maintenance of economic values. In another, local people have embraced a form of generosity which presses against economic 'common sense'. In a third, debate is shut down by a mining company's exploitation of historical rivalry between town and country.

In all cases the patterns of social and psychological process appear to limit what is possible, and call for a new mode of narrative and analysis, and new social aims.