Our climate hell rips off Groundhog Day, without the happy ending

There’s a grim symmetry between the existential cadence of Harold Ramis’ 1993 classic Groundhog Day and our current climate moment in all its grand fury. 

It’s not just the parallels evoked by the universe of awfulness that envelopes the misanthropic weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) and which increasingly lend content to the bleak strokes of today and tomorrow. The similarities coalesce more closely around the agony that arises when confronted with gargantuan monotony and the weight of its ensuing futility.  

The achievement of Groundhog Day was to distil these feelings in a comedy that functions, at its mind-bending margins, as horror. It more or less begins when the dissatisfied and uncongenial Connors finds himself (for reasons never explained) trapped in a time loop, doomed seemingly forever to relive Groundhog Day in a cloying limbo: same people, same conditions, same everything. From there he treks a caged wilderness blurred by confusion and resignation, eventually embracing nihilism as you would a long-time friend.   

At his nadir, a stultified Connors memorably steals a car, driving both himself and the bewildered groundhog Thelma & Louise-style off a cliff in a bid to smash the time loop. Another time he throws himself off a tall building with all the elegance of an Olympic diver, while on other days he alternately stands in front of a truck and duly drops the hotel’s communal toaster into his bathtub. Eventually he gives up on escape and simply toys with the freedom conferred by zero consequences: eating non-stop, manipulating people and playing God.   

Trapped but immortal, he comes to ask: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

It’s a question that resonates with the climate crisis in a way that the film’s solid redemptive arc doesn’t. Like Connors for much of the film, no matter what we do, no matter how much pressure is brought to bear on government, no matter how many warnings climate scientists repeatedly publish, we seem forever trapped in a wasteland of climate denial, hypocrisy and deceit finessed by government conceit. But unlike Connors, in our lived reality the subtext of Groundhog Day may as well be text: there’s nowhere to go, there’s no escape, the crisis is here. 

We can discern this in federal Labor, which won government pledging to end the climate wars and transform the country into a “renewable energy superpower”. A party, in other words, elected on the mellifluous understanding it could and would act on the existential threat posed by runaway global warming.  

Since assuming power, however, this same party has exploited the absence of a climate trigger in federal environmental laws to approve four new coalmines — bringing the number of fossil-fuel projects approved under this legislation to 740 — while doing little to alter the nation’s unenviable status as a “planet wrecker”, a title which flows inexorably from its standing as the third largest exporter of fossil fuels worldwide. 

As things stand, both the recent and planned expansion of oil and gas extraction in Australia by itself has been calculated to give way to some 12.6 billion tonnes in additional emissions, an amount International Oil Change says is equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 25 new coal plants. But unruffled and unperturbed as ever, the Albanese government soldiers on, quietly championing the continued expansion of fossil-fuel projects through the billions it funnels the sector under the benign-sounding Export Finance Australia and the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility. 

It’s in this way Groundhog Day speaks to the weight and sheer frustration of climate anxiety. That sense of time moving forward — of progress being made — is reduced to a monstrous deception. The same phenomenon is brought to the fore in the various other assaults the government wields against the observable reality of global warming. Among them its proposed changes to CO2 sea dumping laws; its underreporting of annual greenhouse gas pollution; its failure or refusal to purge the Climate Change Authority of all those with links to the fossil-fuel industry, and, not least, its blind faith in the wholly discredited, fossil-fuel appeasing technology of carbon capture storage.  

When confronted, the government shrinks from these inconvenient truths, hiding behind its tapestry of empty climate targets and its flawed climate policy, though notably ignoring the ways in which the latter, by design, likewise permit fossil-fuel expansion under the (probably illegal) scam of carbon credits. 

And so, in much the same vein as Sonny and Cher’s “I’ve Got You Babe” unfailingly reminds Connors every morning of his trapped existence, so too does Labor’s unnerving attempts to speak reality into existence remind us of ours. “We have addressed the challenge of climate change by taking it seriously,” declares Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “You’re seeing it, and you’ll see more of it,” he repeats weeks later. That is, “We have acted, because I say so,” never mind the myriad actions to the contrary.  

If you feel gaslit, it’s because you are. Where once the challenge was to overcome gaudy climate denialism in all its obvious and ugly manifestations, today it resides in the thorny dissonance created by pledges that few, it would seem, are prepared to keep. 

In such climate hypocrisy Australia hardly stands alone, as the experiences of both the Biden administration in the US and Canada’s Trudeau government so painfully attest. But it nonetheless remains disorienting in a more profound way to watch leaders do away with outright climate denial and replace it with a level of climate concern that bears no relationship to their genuine commitments. 

In this version of Groundhog Day, both the leading cast and their lines are subject to change, but never the story’s underlying plot: the antecedents of climate denialism remain fixed and unmoving, whether or not climate activists have won the rhetorical war on global warming.

This might explain, at least in part, why more than one in two Australians today do not consider climate change with the urgency it deserves, notwithstanding the increasing pace of climate destruction. Though it’s possible that some have truly been blinded by the government’s deceit, it’s likely in the case of others that the rhetorical whiplash of knowing otherwise has simply caused them to gravitate towards the nihilism of surrender. To feel distanced from both time and reality itself — the idea that nothing ever changes so therefore nothing ever matters, as Connors puts it. 

But here, in this moment, Connors’ logic doubles as both reality and fiction. Reality, because no honest appraisal of the Albanese government can escape the conclusion it is exacerbating global warming. And fiction, because our environment — unlike that of Connors — is not fixed, but literally deteriorating before our eyes under the forces unleashed by global warming. We’re stuck in a time loop, yes, but one that shifts us ever closer to midnight and down the road to oblivion.

And therein lies the bracing horror of our version of Groundhog Day. Before us looms a seemingly endless stream of tomorrows, all coloured in deepening shades of unheralded suffering. But one day civilisation will meet a final tomorrow, and there the plot of our climate moment begins to fade.

This is the tragedy that awaits should government fail — in a way that Connors didn’t — to break our climate loop.

Are you one of those Australians who isn’t particularly perturbed by climate change? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.