No, Washington Post, Climate Change is Not Racist Against Australian Aboriginal People
By
Linnea Lueken
March 24, 2025
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.
https://climaterealism.com/2025/03/no-washington-post-climate-change-is-not-racist-against-australian-aboriginal-people/
