Why Australia Is Burning

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wildfires are devastating Australia, incinerating an area roughly the size of West Virginia and killing 24 people and as many as half a billion animals. Today, we look at the human and environmental costs of the disaster, its connection to climate change and why so many Australians are frustrated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s response. Guest: Livia Albeck-Ripka, a reporter for The Times in Melbourne a reporter for The Times in Melbourne who spoke with Susan Pulis, a woman who fled the fires with kangaroos and koalas in her car. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: After Australia’s hottest and driest year on record, Mr. Morrison has minimized the connection between the wildfire crisis and climate change and declined to make moves to curb the country’s carbon emissions.Many Australians entered the new year under apocalyptic blood-red skies as smoke from the fires choked the country’s southeastern coast. “I look outside and it’s like the end of the world. Armageddon is here,” one woman in Canberra said.The fires have burned through dozens of towns, destroying at least 3,000 homes. Now, unbridled by continuous fire fighting, the blazes have returned to some scorched areas to level what is left. Rupert Murdoch controls the largest news company in Australia, and his newspapers have contributed to a wave of misinformation about the cause of the fires.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is the Daily.
0:10.0	Today, the Prime Minister of Australia is calling for a high-level investigation into how the country's government has responded to the devastating wildfires there.
0:22.0	My colleague, Livya Albeck-Ripka, on the events that led up to this moment. It's Monday, January 13th.
0:35.0	Livya, you're on the ground in Australia covering these wildfires that have been raging throughout the continent.
0:41.0	What have you been seeing these past few weeks?
0:44.0	So the scenes that are unfolding here in Australia are totally unprecedented. We do have bushfires here in Australia, but what we're seeing now has not happened before.
0:56.0	It's been labelled the worst fire season ever recorded, and apocalypse, and nightmare, and like looking into the gates of hell.
1:04.0	This has been the hottest and driest year on record in Australia.
1:10.0	Several bushfires burning outside of Sydney have combined into what's being called a mega blaze.
1:15.0	It's not really one large fire, but hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller fires that started across various states along the South-Eastern coast of Australia.
1:25.0	They traveled down the coast, just becoming more immense and ferocious.
1:31.0	Officials Friday warned the bushfire was too big to put out. There are over 100 fires burning in the state.
1:37.0	And so these fires have created smog and smoke haze.
1:42.0	Sydney's skyline is renowned for being one of the most beautiful in the world, but it was far from its best today.
1:48.0	You probably saw images of the harbored, totally covered in smoke.
1:52.0	I can't excite me harb of you that we all know and love virtually made invisible by this thick smoke haze coming in.
1:59.0	In Canberra, the air pollution was recorded as the worst in the world, worse than Delhi even.
2:05.0	The pollution levels in some parts more than 17 times above hazardous levels, while major landmarks, including Parliament House, are barely visible through this smoke.
2:14.0	And some estimates put these fires at more than eight times larger than those in California that wiped out the town of Paradise.
2:23.0	Emergency officials warned that for some communities, if they wait too long, they might not be able to get out.
2:30.0	They've destroyed nearly 2,000 homes at this point.
2:33.0	Residents are coming to terms with shattered livelihoods.
	...

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