Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred has finally dissipated after rampaging across south-eastern Queensland and northern New South Wales for days. It has caused significant flooding, destruction to homes, widespread power outages and, tragically, the death of a 61-year-old man near Dorrigo.
Last week, as the cyclone approached the Queensland coast, Peter Dutton had his “Scomo moment”. He fled his home electorate north of Brisbane to the relative safety of a Liberal Party fundraiser in Sydney. Held in the deluxe mansion of billionaire Justin Hemmes, whose Merivale Group was recently sued by its staff over $129 million in alleged unpaid wages (roughly the value of Hemmes’ house), Dutton’s flight was a reminder that the rich live by different rules to the rest of us. In the face of disaster, they can use their money and connections to keep themselves safe. Most of us cannot.
Anthony Albanese was keen to emphasise that politics should be left out of these disasters. When asked about the possibility of calling an election this week, he responded that “this is not a time for looking at politics”. In the context of a warming world though, where the increasing frequency of extreme weather is intersecting with issues like growing inequality, housing insecurity, and the steady erosion of essential public services, these events are thoroughly political—whether politicians like Albanese admit that or not.
The exact development and path of Cyclone Alfred cannot, of course, be attributed to climate change—cyclones have struck south-east Queensland before. But the growing frequency of such disasters on a global level can be. Increases in ocean temperatures are <a href="https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2024/10/15/hurricanes-supercharged-by-climate-change.html">supercharging</a> cyclones and increasing their occurrence further from the equator. They are lasting longer, moving more erratically, and dumping more rain. Whatever the exact balance of “normal” and “climate change-fuelled” in Cyclone Alfred’s impact, governments like Albanese’s that fail to act on the climate crisis should be seen as sharing some of the blame for it.
The calls to “keep politics out of it” are part of an effort to conceal this reality, and the fact that instead of doing anything about climate change our leaders are bent on further fuelling it. Last September, Labor Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved three new extensions to coal mines in Queensland and New South Wales. The mines will now operate until at least 2070. By then, global average temperatures could be at 7.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, according to the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/05/temperature-climate-change-greenhouse-gas-niche-emissions-hot/#:~:text=If%20greenhouse%20gases%20emissions%20increase,times%2C%20the%20study%20authors%20predict">World Economic Forum</a>. Such a rise in temperature would make large parts of the world uninhabitable. 
Then there’s the massive Scarborough gas project, soon to be constructed off the coast of Western Australia by one of Australia’s premier polluters, Woodside Petroleum. Labor approved the project even though, according to <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org.au/article/woodsides-new-scarborough-gas-project-is-really-risky-business/">Greenpeace</a>, it will lead to up to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over its lifetime. This would make it the worst single emitter in Australian history. 
In addition to bringing the climate crisis to the fore, extreme weather events like Cyclone Alfred expose other failures and crises of capitalism. One of these is the chronic underfunding of government services. A worker involved in the Queensland government's Community Recovery program, who spoke anonymously to Red Flag in the days before Alfred made landfall, said the state was still scrambling to provide support to victims of the recent North Queensland floods. "There are people in Townsville who’ve lost almost everything”, they said, “and [they] are still waiting for government grants”.
More frequent flooding means less time for communities to recover before the next disaster hits. In the northern New South Wales town of Lismore, which saw devastating flooding only three years ago in February 2022, up to 1,200 people were still living in emergency or temporary accommodation as of last December, <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8533085/lismore-still-recovering-two-years-after-record-flood/">according to the Canberra Times</a>. Others are still homeless or have been forced to return and squat in ramshackle houses in flood-prone areas. No effort has been made to permanently house or relocate these people, who now face another round of flooding. 
Residents of towns in south-east Queensland, such as Logan, face similar issues, as many there also lost their homes in 2022. Now parts of Brisbane are flooding again, raising the possibility of homelessness for thousands more people. 
Labor under Albanese has done nothing to fix the housing crisis for anyone, let alone flood victims. What little remains of public housing stock in Australia is being demolished, rents have skyrocketed, and developers and landlords have been given free rein to make massive profits. Rather than spending more money on things—like more secure housing built away from flood-prone areas—that might actually help in a disaster, Labor has other priorities.
Shockingly, subsidies (aka. handouts) to fossil fuel companies increased by more than 31 percent in 2023-24 to $14.5 billion, according to the Australia Institute. This money could have gone towards emergency services, or investment in renewable energy, housing or welfare. Instead, it went to lining the pockets of fossil fuel bosses. 
On current trends, we can expect the frequency and severity of disasters like that of Cyclone Alfred to increase in coming decades. Unless we get organised and fight back against the likes of Albanese, Dutton, and the fossil fuel bosses they serve, it will be the working class and the poor that continue to bear the brunt of them. Whoever wins the next election, we need to bring back the climate war. Only this time we should see it, and fight it, as the class war it fundamentally is.

Connor Knight

Tropical Cyclone Alfred and the politics of ‘keeping politics out of it’

Karl Marx once quipped that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP, puts us at 28 farcical repetitions and counting. 
We shouldn’t be surprised. These conferences have always been, as Greta Thunberg put it in the
Guardian, “greenwashing conferences that legitimise countries’ failure to ensure a liveable world and future”. They are, at best, PR exercises led by the rulers of a capitalist system fundamentally at odds with a liveable planet. 
Still, they somehow manage to get worse every year. Held during the second-last week of November in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, COP 29 was the second conference in a row to be held by an authoritarian petro-state (last year, it was the United Arab Emirates). Ninety percent of Azerbaijan’s exports are oil and gas, which its president described as a “gift of God”. Amnesty International has accused Azerbaijan of using COP 29 as a pretext to crack down on environmental activists.
A “joint communique” of the leading states at COP 29 dubbed it “COP 29-Climate and Peace.” This is a total joke. According to a piece in AzerNews, an English-language newspaper in the country, Azerbaijan supplies around 40 percent of Israel’s oil imports and is trying to become a “significant player in the global defence market”.
 The so-called climate conference for peace is hosted by oil, gas and bomb barons currently helping fuel a genocide. 
There was also an element of corruption and profiteering. In pre-conference talks, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister, Elnur Soltanov, was caught on video boasting that his country “will have a certain amount of oil and natural gas being produced, perhaps forever”. 
Fossil fuel lobbyists and representatives of trade associations outnumbered the delegations of almost every country at COP 29. They used the conference to wine and dine with world leaders, lobbying and dealing as they went. So the conference wasn’t simply a useless greenwashing exercise—it probably made things worse.
One topic of discussion was securing a “new climate finance deal”: an attempt to convince high-income countries to provide more funding to support “the poorest and most vulnerable countries in adapting to climate change”, as explained by the World Resources Institute.
But without any serious commitment by the major polluting countries to stop or even slow their use of fossil fuels, the “new deal” is a bit like promising a thimble of water to someone you’re spraying with a flamethrower.
Three decades of these conferences have gotten us nowhere. The world is currently on track to reach two to three degrees of warming, which would be catastrophic. 
Leading climate experts wrote to the United Nations last week, calling COP “no longer fit for purpose” and suggesting that conferences should be held in countries that support action on climate change. But even if you removed some of the worst elements of COP, the fundamental problem would remain. Capitalists and their governments, despite the rhetoric, will simply not give up their fossil fuel profits, even if it means the planet burns. 
More than 100 years ago, at a very different conference held in Baku, the Russian revolutionary leader Grigory Zinoviev called on “workers of all lands and oppressed people of the whole world” to unite against capitalist barbarity. We must recapture some of that revolutionary energy to survive this catastrophe.

COP 29 was the worst one yet

Arms dealers will descend on Melbourne in
September for the Land Forces conference, a biennial meeting of the
military-industrial complex. From army chiefs to representatives of companies
producing and profiting from war, researchers developing new ways of killing
people, and politicians who start wars in the first place, the event will bring
together all the masters of war. 
Students
for Palestine, a university-based solidarity network, is organising a picket
and community protest outside the conference’s opening on 11 September. The
student protest is part of a week of action spearheaded by the activist
collective Disrupt Wars, including actions by various organisations,
collectives and affinity groups. 
The
website boasts of an expanded program compared to the last meeting in Brisbane,
designed to meet greater demand and interest. Weapons manufacturers are invited
to promote their goods on the expo floor; to let buyers “use all five senses to
gain a full appreciation of [their] product”. Every merchant of death and war
hawk from this continent, and many from beyond, will be networking and
up-selling, schmoozing and dealing with each other for three days in the centre
of Melbourne. 
A world
in which military expenditures rose nearly 7 percent last year, reaching US$2.4
trillion ($3.6 trillion in Australian dollars), <a href="https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2024/global-military-spending-surges-amid-war-rising-tensions-and-insecurity">according to the latest
figures</a> from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, portends
more future death and destruction.
We
can’t let the conference proceed without a public display of opposition to war
and war profiteering. 
Boeing,
the world’s fourth largest military contractor, will host a session open to all
Land Forces attendees. Boeing supplies the Israeli military with a murderous
array of fighter jets, attack helicopters and ordnance—all used to rain hell on
Gaza in the past nine months. 
Amnesty
International reported that a strike on Rafah in January, which killed 95
people, including 42 children, was probably carried out using a GBU-39 SDB
missile manufactured by Boeing in the United States. According to the US Air
Force, the missile uses GPS positioning technology to “provide navigation to
the target”, which supposedly “reduces the probability of collateral damage”. 
However,
Amnesty found the January strike “failed to distinguish between military
objectives and civilian objects and would therefore be indiscriminate”. Given
how precise these weapons are meant to be, indiscriminate appears to be an
improper description. It seems more likely Israel used Boeing’s guided missiles
in a very discriminating way to massacre civilians. 
Boeing
will be using the Land Forces expo to flog such genocidal, kid-killing
technology to all comers. 
This
type of guided weaponry will soon be manufactured in Australia, and
announcements related to it will make up another session at Land Forces. Last
year’s Defence Strategic Review, commissioned by the federal government,
recommended that Australia acquire more and develop its own long-range guided
missiles. 
The
Albanese government has since budgeted $4.1 billion to “better equip the ADF to
meet our strategic circumstances”. “Strategic circumstances” means the West’s
growing economic and military competition with China. And it’s not just
missiles, but intelligence and training. If you read between the lines, it is
evident that preparation for a possible war with China is the central thrust of
the Australian Army’s intervention into Land Forces. 
Every
pro-Palestine and anti-war activist in Melbourne should make it a priority to
come and protest against this disgusting conference.

Anti-war activists to protest military conference in Melbourne

When it was announced that CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, would head this year’s UN climate conference, known as COP 28, it seemed like a joke. It is surely obvious that asking the CEO of one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers to preside over a climate conference is a bit like asking Tony Soprano to lead an international conference on how to phase out the mafia.
It would be comical, if only the fate of billions of people didn’t hang in the balance. He has acted about exactly as you’d expect. A bit over a week before COP 28, Al Jaber claimed that there is “no science” showing that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees requires ending fossil fuel production and consumption. It is a shocking lie. You might wonder whether it has anything to do with ADNOC investing $150 billion into a series of massive new oil and gas projects, which it announced last November. 
It gets worse. In the days leading up to the conference, the Centre for Climate Reporting in the UK obtained documents that included talking points for Al Jaber and other United Arab Emirates officials, who planned to meet with at least 28 other countries and offer to help them develop and expand their fossil fuel industries. So, rather than the usual greenwashing exercise, the host nation had apparently intended to use the conference as a hangout for fossil fuel executives looking to make a buck (or billions of them). 
Further documents released by the Centre, and reported in the Guardian, showed that close UAE ally Saudi Arabia had detailed plans to “drive up the use of fossil-fuel powered cars, buses and planes in Africa”. Mohammed Adow, head of a climate NGO and thinktank Powershift Africa, likened the plan to the actions of a drug dealer, getting Africa hooked on oil and gas to guarantee future sales. 
Mustachio-twirling levels of evil—and COP28 hadn’t even begun. 
The conference has done nothing to inspire more confidence. One item on the agenda was the Global Stocktake—a balance sheet of how the world is progressing in relation to the targets set at the Paris COP conference in 2015. That’s easy: it’s been a disaster. 
According to a recent report by James Hansen, a former head of NASA climate research, the Paris goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees above preindustrial levels is “dead” given the current trajectory of warming—and we could even reach two degrees by the late 2030s. 
The latest Emissions Gap Report, released this year by the UN Environment Programme, found that under the Paris pledges we are on track for 2.5-2.9 degrees of warming by the end of the century. This assumes that countries stick to their pledges, which many have not. The message from both reports, and countless others, is that if we are to have any chance of averting catastrophe, we need to wind down the fossil fuel industry immediately. 
You wouldn’t know it from following the conference, though. The message to the world from COP28 is that we can and should continue to burn fossil fuels. 
One key initiative of the conference is the Global Decarbonisation Accelerator (GDA). According to a media release, the GDA is a “comprehensive plan for system-wide change”, designed to “speed up the energy transition and drastically reduce global emissions”. It is nothing of the sort. 
An open letter signed by more than 320 climate and civil society organisations, including Greenpeace and Oxfam, points out that the GDA contains “only limited commitments to address [fossil fuel] companies’ operational emissions, while ignoring the vast majority of their total emissions”, which are created when oil and gas are burned, not simply extracted. This is classic greenwashing—like the Australian government not counting in its climate reporting the emissions from fossil fuel exports.
An example is the pledge by companies to detect and fix methane leaks in oil and gas production, which the US has announced it will legislate. This will do nothing to halt or even slow down the growth of the oil and gas industries. If anything, the change could make them more efficient, and therefore more profitable and more attractive for investors. 
Twenty-two countries pledged to triple their nuclear power capacity by 2050, supposedly to help with the transition away from fossil fuels. This is supposedly another “win” for the environment. But nuclear power is dirty, expensive and dangerous, and its development is intimately tied to the proliferation of the other great threat to human civilisation: nuclear weapons.
Australia’s Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen announced from the conference that he had signed a pledge to triple global renewable capacity by 2030. But, again, this avoids the key issue. World leaders are signing pledges and making noise about anything and everything that doesn’t involve immediate steps to end the fossil fuel industry—the one thing that needs to happen. 
Greta Thunberg said at a protest outside COP26 in Glasgow two years ago that the conference was nothing more than a “PR exercise”, where leaders would do nothing but “blah, blah blah”. Since then, it has somehow gotten worse. We can’t trust any of these world leaders to save us—we need to get organised and do it ourselves.

Tropical Cyclone Alfred and the politics of ‘keeping politics out of it’

COP 29 was the worst one yet

Anti-war activists to protest military conference in Melbourne

COP 28 was worse than you can even imagine

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