“Driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion”. That’s how Lee Zeldin, the new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/lee-zeldin-epa-ends-the-green-new-deal-aa81de06">describes his mission</a>. Zeldin is cutting a large number of environmental regulations, including those restricting companies from polluting waterways, emitting toxins like mercury and releasing smog. 
He is also overturning the EPA’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the legal underpinning of much climate-related regulation in the US. The idea is simple—companies should be able to do whatever they want to turn a profit, regardless of the damage they inflict. For Zeldin, environmental justice “has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists”, and now it’s all about energy dominance, which, according to Zeldin, “stands at the center of America’s resurgence”.
Combating climate change is well and truly out of favour in the age of Trump. There has been a <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/war-on-woke-banks-macquarie-joins-mass-exit-from-net-zero-alliance-will-australias-big-four-follow-suit/">mass exit of banks</a> from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and companies from Starbucks to Meta have been dropping climate goals and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f100bedb-16cb-4f5e-8f64-9a10d5c43a51">purging their websites</a> of references to climate action. This is having effects beyond the US: EU officials are currently considering a range of measures to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-is-looking-to-roll-back-climate-accounting-rules-32c72856">water down its Green Deal</a>.
And it’s not like the situation was all that hopeful before Trump came to office. Only 15 of the signatories to the Paris Agreement (a miserable 8 percent) met the five-year deadline this February to update their climate goals (Australia was not one of them). In an irony appropriate to our twisted world, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is currently <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-17/climate-change-religion-trump-zeldin-epa-wind-back-rules/105057538">clearing miles of the Amazon rainforest</a> to build a four-lane highway for the next UN climate change conference, COP30, this November.
The commitments in the Paris Agreement (most of which have not <a href="https://www.unep.org/resources/production-gap-report-2023">been kept</a>) were aimed at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century. That goal is now a distant dream, with the planet likely to suffer temperature increases of 2.6 to 3.1 degrees by 2100, according to the United Nations’ “<a href="https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2024">Emissions Gap Report 2024</a>”. With a new wave of environmental destruction under way, we can expect an even warmer world. 
A 2021 report by the Australian Academy of Science tells us what that world might look like. “<a href="https://www.science.org.au/supporting-science/science-policy-and-analysis/reports-and-publications/risks-australia-three-degrees-c-warmer-world">The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world</a>” predicts that the Great Barrier Reef, along with 99 percent of the world’s corals, will be gone. There would be a 100 to 300 percent increase in extreme fire days like those that created the Black Summer bushfires. “Once in a century” coastal floods would happen almost every year by 2100, and fruit and vegetable crop yields would be reduced by 14 percent. Meanwhile, the number of days each year over 35 degrees would increase from an average of 3, 12 and 11 in Sydney, Brisbane and Darwin respectively to 11, 55 and 265—meaning Darwin would face heat stress days for nearly three quarters of the year.
There is no question about who is to blame for this catastrophe. Just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of all global emissions between 2016 and 2022, according to last year’s “<a href="https://carbonmajors.org/briefing/The-Carbon-Majors-Database-26913">The Carbon Majors Database: Launch Report</a>”. These companies are run by executives whose first priority is increasing their profits and gaining an advantage over their rivals; concern for the environment only gets in the way of that. Most of us do not get to decide whether society’s resources are put towards new coal mines or wind farms, decisions that are made behind closed doors by people looking to maximise their bottom lines, supported by politicians who want to maximise their country’s economic growth. 
Liberal climate activists have at times believed that certain capitalists could come to the planet’s rescue—after all, Elon Musk is building electric vehicles, and the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation put over a billion dollars towards climate philanthropy. Yet today Musk is Trump’s DOGE lieutenant in the war on climate, and he’s profiting from it—Zeldin’s deregulation will allow Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas to carry out more freely its <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/189275/elon-musk-climate-change-industrial-policy">regular environmental violations</a>. In March, Bill Gates <a href="https://centrist.nz/bill-gates-backs-away-from-climate-change/">shut down</a>
his climate philanthropy organisation Breakthrough Energy, soon after describing himself as “frankly impressed” by Trump.
The fundamental problem is that protecting the environment costs money. Back in 2021, Gates introduced the idea of <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc808">“green premiums”</a> in his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by which he meant the additional cost associated with a business doing anything clean, whether that’s using renewables rather than fossil fuels, or sourcing something locally rather than shipping it around the world. Gates was tackling a problem that is insurmountable under capitalism—it is almost always cheaper to pollute and destroy than go “green”. So this is what businesses tend to do. 
The same logic applies to states. Energy scientist Vaclav Smil estimates that affluent economies would need to spend 20 to 25 percent of their annual GDP on transitioning to clean energy for 25 years to achieve net zero by 2050. Given that many, including Australia, are currently heavily dependent on fossil fuel production and export for their revenue and economic competitiveness, the idea they would jeopardise that and channel resources towards environmental protection is fanciful. Just how fanciful is demonstrated by the huge gap between what politicians say they are committed to and what actually happens in relation to environmental policy. 
States are themselves also major polluters. According to the Carbon Majors Database, only a quarter of emissions between 2016 and 2022 were attributed to investor-owned companies, with the rest attributed to states and state-owned companies. These companies want to remain competitive and minimise costs just like private companies do.
The argument that fossil fuel companies have “captured” states, and all we need is strong governments willing to stand up to them, therefore clashes with reality. States and corporations have a vested interest in ignoring or reducing environmental regulation when it stands in the way of profit. As the most valuable exporter of coal and LNG, Australia enjoys big revenues and gains important leverage over other countries. It has no interest in giving that up so long as the system of competing nation-states endures.
Increasing military competition makes fossil fuel production still more indispensable. We are now entering a new era of imperialist tensions, with Europe rearming and the US entering an arms race with China. No military can operate without oil (the US Army, for instance, is estimated to use <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/12/elephant-in-the-room-the-us-militarys-devastating-carbon-footprint">269,230 barrels of oil a day</a>), and no state will give up its military. In this context, ruling classes will seek to increase oil and steel production, while wars themselves will devastate the climate. In two years Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is estimated to have produced more greenhouse gas emissions than the Netherlands does annually, according to a report by the <a href="https://en.ecoaction.org.ua/climate-damage-by-russia-24-months.html">Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War</a>. You can only imagine what effect a new world war could have.
Advocates of climate action have often applied the analogy of wartime mobilisation to show that that sort of social and economic reorganisation is possible if the political will exists. During World War II, for example, military spending soared to over 40 percent of GDP in Europe and the US and massive economic restructuring was imposed on society. Yet today, instead of a climate mobilisation, we face the beginnings of yet another horrifying war mobilisation.
The point nevertheless stands: a green transition is technically possible; it is the logic of capitalism that makes it a political impossibility. One estimate for the cost of the global green transition is given by the McKinsey Global Institute. In its 2022 report “<a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/the-net-zero-transition-what-it-would-cost-what-it-could-bring">The net-zero transition</a>”, it estimates an annual average of US$9.2 trillion, about 8 percent of global GDP. This is a fraction of what the combatant nations spent during WWII. Today you could take the world’s $2 trillion current military spending and $7 trillion fossil fuel subsidies and you would hit this figure. This would also greatly reduce the ability of states to carry out genocide and oppress other countries.
In a rational society, this could only be a good thing. But for capitalism, it is suicide. 
The alternative is simple: socialism. A world without war and waste, in which society is built for human need rather than the power and profits of a tiny few. In a socialist world, the challenges of a green transition would be practical rather than political: What are the problems we face, and how do we deal with them?
In Australia, the first thing to do would be to stop building new coal mines and instead build solar farms and wind turbines. Take the military budget over the next decade and you could fund thirteen major rail projects like Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop. A mass expansion of public transport like this could take millions of cars off the roads, freeing up hundreds of kilometres worth of lanes and parking spaces to begin greening our cities with trees. This would reduce emissions and dramatically reduce urban heat islands, reducing peak summer temperatures by up to 5 degrees. It would also just be nice.
Globally, such a transition would mean transforming the insane operation of trade and manufacturing, to make production and distribution more efficient. It would mean getting rid of planned obsolescence, a capitalist lunacy whereby companies design products with a limited life span so that they can sell more of them. And it would mean scrapping pointless industries, like military production, that are a drain on the world’s resources for no gain. 
The psychopaths who run the world are not going to let us seize their factories, transport networks and machinery and run them for people rather than profit. They won’t let us disarm their militaries either. To save the planet, we need to build a global movement capable of overthrowing them and creating a democratic alternative to this destructive system.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe

“Don’t dump on us again”, says Wendy Farmer, president of the Latrobe Valley community group Voices of the Valley and a local community organiser for Friends of the Earth. The Latrobe Valley is one of Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton’s proposed sites for nuclear power reactors, which would replace the Loy Yang coal power station. 
The region is already saddled with several toxic industries. As Farmer explains to Red Flag, “We have a waste-to-energy, we have a lead smelter, we have a magnesium smelter, we have the power stations ... Just today I’ve gone outside and you should see the coal dust on my rubbish bins. It is just everywhere. People are like, ‘Why are we being the dumping ground again? Why are we just being told once again what’s good for us and what we need?’”
Wendy knows what it’s like for a community to be treated as expendable. She became an activist in 2014 during the Hazelwood coal mine fire, which lasted for 45 days. The fire blanketed the area with smoke, causing the deaths of at least 60 people according to extensive research carried out by Voices of the Valley. This was no accident, but a result of the owner ENGIE’s cost-cutting and negligence. “They knew the risks two days before the fire got into the mine and chose to ignore it. I think they put a couple of extra staff on over the weekend, when we were gonna have the hottest, windiest weekend. Any fool could have read that.”
The fire might also have been prevented through the mine’s watering system, a critical safety measure meant to keep the coal face wet and guard against bushfires, which the owners had previously dismantled.
“My husband at the time worked at Hazelwood”, Wendy says. “Hazelwood knew that things needed to be repaired. Hazelwood knew that they didn’t have the water where they needed it.” You can never completely trust a company, she says. “Industry has known about asbestos, yet they’ve used it. Industry has known about the stone [in kitchen bench-tops], yet they’ve used it. Industry has known about dangers before and covered them up.” 
If companies like ENGIE axe safety measures and governments cover up their crimes, why should we expect nuclear to be any different? Wendy describes Dutton’s nuclear proposal as a fantasy: “No plan, no proposal, no detail”. But her objections run deeper than that. The risks of a nuclear failure weigh heavily on a community with such a recent history of disaster and injustice. 
“If there’s a failure and the kids are at school or anywhere else”, Wendy says, “nuclear disaster would kill ... That sort of radiation you don’t have much chance. If the kids are at school, it’s too late to go and get them. And if they’re not dead, the damage is done. You can’t reverse the damage”. Worse still, Wendy explains, the valley sits on an earthquake fault line. “We’ve had many earthquakes. It’s only a matter of time before we have a big one.”
Fortunately, through Hazelwood the community taught itself how to fight toxic industries. On the morning Dutton’s proposed sites were revealed, Wendy organised a snap protest outside local Nationals MP Darren Chester’s office. “The people who joined the anti-nuclear rally were pretty upset, pretty pissed off”, Wendy says. “‘How dare they? We don’t want nuclear reactors.’”
Not everyone is opposed to nuclear, however; the community’s views are mixed. According to a <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/victoria/poll-shows-majority-of-aussies-support-nuclear-power-plan/news-story/72e344f1aea990623d38b98f64787115">News Corp survey</a> last month (which polled only 113 people), 59 percent of Latrobe Valley residents would be comfortable with a nuclear reactor being built in their state or region. “A lot of people who support nuclear are supporting it because there will be jobs. But in fact there won’t be jobs for 30 or 40 years”, says Wendy. Construction on the nuclear power plant cannot begin, Wendy explains, until after Loy Yang has been shut down and rehabilitated, which won’t be for at least a decade.
Affordable energy is the other argument opening people to nuclear. But nuclear-generated power is far more expensive than renewables, given the extensive capital costs. According to the <a href="https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/gencost">GenCost 2023-24</a> report published by the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), while wind and solar PV combined are estimated to cost between $73 and $128/MWh, large-scale nuclear will cost between $141 and $233/MWh, or $230 to $382/MWh for small modular reactors.
“Hazelwood was a David and Goliath”, Wendy says. “I felt the community won. For sure the company weren’t punished enough, but the community won. We have to stand together and we can win this.”

No to nuclear in the Latrobe Valley

Last year was the hottest in recorded history. The <a href="https://library.wmo.int/records/item/68835-state-of-the-global-climate-2023">State of the Global Climate 2023</a> report, released last month by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), found that the annual global mean surface temperature for the year was 1.45 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average. This takes the planet a hair’s breadth from 1.5 degrees of warming—the 2015 Paris Agreement’s supposedly safe upper limit before potentially catastrophic, runaway warming kicks in.
In the foreword to the report, WMO Secretary-General Professor Celeste Saulo declared that the year “broke every single climate indicator”. The report charts atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide levels, as well as ocean heat content, global mean sea level and the coverage of marine heatwaves. All hit record highs. The only lines going down in the report’s legion of graphs are those tracking ocean pH levels (indicating record ocean acidification), and the extent of the cryosphere (the frozen parts of the earth, indicating record ice loss).<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Daily-Global-Surface-Air-Temperature-Anomalies.png" alt="" /></figure>
The report details the colossal toll these changes inflicted in 2023. Tropical cyclone Freddy, which formed off Australia’s north-west coast in February, was one of the longest-lived storms of its kind and potentially the most powerful. Freddy crossed the Indian Ocean from east to west, tore the roofs off Madagascar and, after making final landfall in Mozambique and Malawi, ultimately killed more than 1,000 people. 
That disaster was just one among many. Flooding in the Greater Horn of Africa killed hundreds and displaced millions. Storm Daniel bombarded the eastern Mediterranean, inflicting the greatest toll in Libya, where at least 4,700 people were killed. Wildfires killed more than 100 in Hawaii, and New Zealand experienced the worst flooding in its history. Much of the world, too, was ravaged by droughts and heatwaves, the impact of which was—though harder to quantify—arguably the most devastating of all.
Concealed on every x-axis in the WMO’s charts is the responsibility of the global capitalist ruling class, whose crimes can reveal themselves only with the passage of time. Today, Joe Biden opens oil fields in Alaska, Anthony Albanese gas fields at Scarborough and Narendra Modi coal mines in Jharkhand. Tomorrow the air they seeded with ever-increasing quantities of greenhouse gases will bring new, and greater, disasters.
Their culpability is recorded by the <a href="https://productiongap.org/">Production Gap Report 2023</a>—published by the Stockholm Environment Institute. It found that, collectively, global governments are planning to continue expanding fossil fuel production until at least 2050, by which time emissions will be 350 percent above the level consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, and 150 percent above what’s needed to limit it to 2 degrees. 
2023 not only broke records—it broke record-breaking. The mean temperature was 0.16 degrees above the previous record set in 2016. This is a huge jump, which if repeated this year will take us to 1.61 degrees above the pre-industrial average. <figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Daily-Sea-Surface-Temperature.png" alt="" /></figure>
Ocean heat is another example. On the average day last year, nearly a third of the world’s ocean was affected by a marine heatwave, with the daily average coverage of 32 percent eclipsing 2016’s previous record of 23 percent. It’s a similar story with Antarctic sea ice, which had a yearly maximum 1 million square kilometres below the previous record—a loss of ice almost twice the size of France and a drop below the previous record more than four times that seen in the past. Plot these figures on a graph and it’s clear 2023 was a breakthrough year for warming.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Daily-Antarctic-Sea-Ice-Extent.png" alt="" /></figure>
The trend has continued in 2024. The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reports that this year’s <a href="https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-february-2024-was-globally-warmest-record-global-sea-surface-temperatures-record-high">January and February were the hottest on record</a>. By its calculation, we have already passed 1.5 degrees. C3S found that the <a href="https://climate.copernicus.eu/warmest-january-record-12-month-average-over-15degc-above-preindustrial">twelve-month average</a> up to the end of January this year was 1.52 degrees. We can’t know yet exactly how this trend will continue. Natural climate variation is substantial. Phenomena such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, for instance, can vary ocean surface temperature by as much as 2 degrees from year to year. This is why the WMO measures climate change using a 30-year average.
The meaning of this unprecedented year of warming is still being debated. In an <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00816-z">article published in Nature</a>, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin Schmidt wrote, “No year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023”. He observed that the discrepancy between expected and observed temperatures “remains about 0.2 degrees” after all factors are considered—an anomaly that “could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates”.
Whether or not a tipping point has been reached, an acceleration of warming is widely accepted. Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen has been arguing this for years. Between 1970 and 2023, the global average temperature increased at a rate of 0.19 degrees per decade, according to an analysis by <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-why-the-recent-acceleration-in-global-warming-is-what-scientists-expect/">Climate Brief</a>. The latest CMIP6 models of climate change have the current rate of warming at 0.29 degrees per decade, 53 percent faster than the rate since 1970. Hansen and his colleagues have a similar projection, “estimating warming of around 0.32 degrees per decade”—an acceleration that corresponds to the WMO’s findings. Both are substantially faster than the 0.24 degrees per decade projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, released in 2023. 
Hansen recently <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/scientist-global-warming-accelerating-claims-b2441103.html">told the Independent</a> that, based on his analysis, the 1.5 degrees target is “deader than a doornail” and 2 degrees is on its deathbed. Whether or not these thresholds are dead in a scientific sense, they are—as the Production Gap Report makes clear—politically little more than skeletons. World leaders show no sign of leading a break with the fossil fuel-dependent business as usual of capitalism today. Under these conditions, there’s little chance that even the grimmest of scientists’ projections will be averted.

1.5 degree warming limit ‘deader than a doornail’

The year is 2070. A global catastrophe—climate change, nuclear winter, civil war: pick your poison—recently ended civilisation and opened a new chapter in your life. So far you’ve ridden it out smoothly in your luxury bunker, but one day you’re swimming laps in the pool, living out your Bond-villain dream, when an alert blinks on your home security console. 
Someone has gotten past your defences. Dressing quickly, you ascend past your artificially sunlit garden, wine vault, bowling alley and greenhouse to arrive through a secret door into the above-ground mansion you’ve long since abandoned. Armed like Sergeant Angel at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibzZEy1Jhm4">the end of Hot Fuzz</a>, you step onto your driveway and see a woman with a bundle in her arms.
Rewind back to the present day. “Honestly”, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Latvia J.C. Cole explains to Douglas Rushkoff, author of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff">Survival of the Richest</a>, “I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food. I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma”. You might live out the apocalypse in style, but will you be able to feel good about it?
This is where Cole’s niche comes in. He’s one of the many entrepreneurs marketing bunkers and militarised retreats for the wealthy, but with a spin—he’ll give you a good conscience while the world burns. As Rushkoff explains, “for US$3 million, investors not only get a maximum security compound”, but also a stake in a network of local farm franchises that would do their best to “ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible”. 
Strangely, Cole hasn’t yet managed to convince anyone to invest. Perhaps he underestimates how willing his target market would be to use their guns and guard dogs to deal with any desperate people who might appear in their driveways, rather than bothering with farming franchises or anything else that might help those people survive.
Around the world, private islands, secluded valleys and remote pastures are disappearing behind the walls of luxury compounds. By buying them, the super rich hope to insulate themselves—not only from blast, heat and radiation, but from the consequences of their actions. And as all the biggest bunker-builders know, the best insulation isn’t the kind of “communitarian spirit” Rushkoff attributes to Cole’s venture. It’s bullets and fire.
SAFE (Strategically Armored &amp; Fortified Environments) president Al Corbi recently spoke to the <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/bunkers-billionaires-survive-apocalypse-cost-features-1235822762/">Hollywood Reporter</a> (THR) about his company’s construction of an island fortress for a wealthy client. He explained that the client wanted to protect his family, “so we wound up literally building a 30-foot-deep lake skimmed with a lighter-than-water flammable liquid that can transform into a ring of fire”. That’s only the beginning: the property has flame throwers, gassing systems and anti-aircraft water cannons that, THR explains, “can also blow rainbows into the air as a backdrop to a barbecue or create rainfall on a sunny day”. 
Elsewhere in America, hundreds of thousands of migrant agricultural workers toil in up to 46 degree Celsius heat during the summer, deprived of water, shade and rest. Corbi’s rainbows won’t shine over them; instead the rabble will face a wall of fire.
Another project of Corbi’s was Reliance Industries chairman <a href="https://www.omnihomeideas.com/design/celebrity-homes/mukesh-ambani-house-in-mumbai/">Mukesh Ambani’s US$4.8 billion Mumbai residence</a>. The skyscraper features an artificial snow room, allowing Ambani to enjoy a winter wonderland even as his company—owner of the largest oil refinery in the world—helps strip the snow from Kashmir and the Himalayas. The right kind of bunker can insulate you not only from guilt, but from the warming world you have created.
Last December WIRED published an <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-compound/">in-depth investigation</a> into the construction of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s huge compound in Hawaii. Replete with tree houses, an estate 80 percent the size of Sydney’s CBD and a bunker twice the size of the average Australian home, the compound is likely to cost over A$400 million. Following WIRED’s reportage, interest has spiked in these colossal projects, <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12974609/What-know-Worlds-billionaires-building-bunkers-assembling-fortresses-outside-mansions.html">the </a>Daily Mail asking, “What do they know? World's billionaires are building bunkers and assembling fortresses outside their mansions”. 
If the billionaires’ hope really is to escape the global disasters they are helping to bring about, and not just to LARP as supervillains, then there’s some bad news. They don’t dream of being a lone (or partnered) survivalist like Bill from The Last of Us. They dream of life in a palace, waited upon by a legion of staff and defended by a private army.
Rushkoff’s fascination with billionaire preppers began when he was flown to the desert to give a speech on the future of technology, only to find himself in a room with just five men “from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world”. The issue they really wanted to ask about was the apocalypse. After a broad-ranging discussion about where and how, a single question occupied them for the rest of the hour: “How do I maintain authority over my security force?”.
Even in the nihilistic war of all against all imagined in apocalyptic fiction, the masters still need their slaves. “What,” one of Rushkoff’s clients asked, “would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?”. Pharaohs they may be—the richest people in all human history—but capitalists like Zuckerberg will never be able to escape their working-class gravediggers.

Billionaires go bunkers

The Dirty Life of Mining in Australia: A Travelogue 
By Lindsay Fitzclarence. Interventions, 2023; 214 pages. 
Reviewed by Cormac Mills Ritchard
“Blasts make floors crack and houses shake”, journalist Tom Joyner reports about Williamstown, a suburb in the Western Australian mining town Kalgoorlie. Northern Star Resources’ mine has drilled tunnels deep beneath the houses, in which it carries out regular blasts. 
“Lifelong local Fay Henderson said after years of fighting, she is exhausted and feels a sense of dread that it will not be long before Williamstown is gone altogether. “‘I think that it eventually has to pass that we just won’t be here, that the mine will engulf us eventually.’”
The Dirty Life of Mining in Australia, by Lindsay Fitzclarence, is a valuable resource. Setting out from Morwell in eastern Victoria, and travelling to Broken Hill, Roxby Downs, the Kimberley, Mount Whaleback and Kalgoorlie, he combines research with journaling to paint a picture of mining’s devastating effects across the continent.
The environmental effects are visible in the moonscape of open-cut pits and waste rock mounds, artificial lakes and craters filled with metallic and chemical tailings. Featuring in Fitzclarence’s photography, swathes of land have been cleared for these facilities. 
The human cost is detailed painfully throughout the book. Mines are less easily forgotten than their victims. The Line of Lode Memorial in Broken Hill pays tribute to 800 dead miners. In Kalgoorlie’s Eastern Goldfields Miners Memorial, there were 1,484 names at the time Fitzclarence visited.
Often, the deaths result from capitalists sacrificing safety for profits. Morwell is one example—in 2014, a grassfire ignited a coal mine in a blaze that streamed from the coal face for 45 days, leaving homes “invaded by ash and shrouded in polluted and toxic air”. This poisoning led to at least 60 excess deaths before the fire was put out, according to research by Voices of the Valley (community activists had to compile evidence themselves in the face of a government cover-up). This could have been prevented, but the owners had dismantled the mine’s watering system.
Another example is Broken Hill’s lead-bearing winds. Broken Hill Prospecting (now BHP) established mines there in the 1880s. “On windy days, lead-rich dust from the smelters landed everywhere”, Fitzclarence explains. “It settled on the roofs and drained into drinking water tanks. Cattle, sheep and dairy cows ate grass covered in lead dust, which flowed into the food chain.” Lead poisoning was responsible for many of the miner deaths marked in the memorial. 
Recounting the radical history of Broken Hill, Fitzclarence shows that miners and their families didn’t take this lying down—they forged the most militant union town in Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet Broken Hill’s children still suffer from lead-induced brain damage, making them “more than twice as likely to have developmental delays than the national average”, according to research from 2015.
If resistance has shaped mining, mine owners have tried to shape the resistance. The industry claims to be the backbone of many regional towns. But towns like Newman in Western Australia have been emptied of people by the use of fly-in fly-out (FIFO) workers. 
Keeping its FIFO workers in a company camp allows BHP to watch them closely during and even after their twelve-hour shifts, including through room searches. The high levels of psychological distress a staggering one-third of all FIFO workers suffer are the industry’s answer to mining town militancy. 
The industry’s official history is one of entrepreneurs building Australia’s prosperity. Fitzclarence devotes a chapter to this “dominant narrative”, which reduces humans and the natural world to commodities and views Australia as terra nullius with mineral riches free for the taking. 
Fitzclarence develops his critique using the ideas of Naomi Klein and Tony Birch. Birch calls it an “exploitative capitalist extraction mentality”; Klein calls it “extractivism”, a “habit of thought” that led us to believe we could “dig and drill out the substances we desired while thinking little of the trash left behind”.
These narratives are important—the industry’s Promethean and “civilising” portrayal of itself arms its marketing departments with ample talking points. But compelling as Klein’s and Birch’s descriptions are, they remain limited. 
In his conclusion, Fitzclarence suggests that “the world of mining needs to develop a very different mindset”. But capitalism will brook no such change. If current mine owner CBH Resources decided to prioritise reducing lead tailings over increasing revenue in Broken Hill, or if Northern Star Resources abandoned its tunnels under Williamstown, or if BHP decided to share its Mount Whaleback earnings with the local Martu and Niabali peoples, how would their profits suffer? And if their profits suffered, how soon would a competitor, richer by its ruthlessness, outmatch and acquire them?
The murderous, degrading and dehumanising exploits of mining capital in Australia that Fitzclarence exposes are the best proof that there is little mining capital will not do for profit. The way forward is the path of resistance like that paved by the workers of Broken Hill.

Dirty deeds, done in the dirt

Electric vehicles are touted as a key part of the “green transition” to a low-carbon future, and therefore crucial to saving the natural environment. Unfortunately, they don’t live up to the hype.
There are now more than 1 billion cars and trucks on the world’s roads. Collectively, they are responsible for three-quarters of transport emissions, and 18 percent of total emissions. Cities are cloaked in their smog, which fills hospitals with people suffering heart and respiratory problems. Growing up next to a main road can stunt lung growth by 14 percent, and the air pollution cars contribute to is responsible for 12 percent of all deaths.
Cars are not just destructive—they’re expensive. In Australia, the average yearly cost of keeping one (fuel, rego, insurance and maintenance) has gone from $9,000 to $15,000 in the last year, according to Carbar’s <a href="https://www.carbar.com.au/blog/five-tips-for-buying-a-car-during-inflation/">Future Finance and Mobility Report</a>. Compare that to the most you can pay for public transport in Melbourne—a yearly myki Passpass costs $1,950. Riding or walking is inexpensive or free, and healthier. 
But for most people, the alternatives are not options. In 2017, 5 million people across Australia’s five largest cities, some 34 percent of their population, didn’t live within walking distance of regular public transport, according to a <a href="https://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2019-07/Outer-Urban-Public-Transport_WEB_FA-hi_res.pdf">report by Infrastructure Australia</a>. Many of those that do live within walking distance of public transport know that it is not necessarily a viable alternative to cars—a door to door trip might take fifteen minutes in a car, but anywhere from one to two hours on PT.
It’s no surprise, then, that the majority of people commute by car. Driving can also be much more pleasant: a comfortable, air-conditioned bubble that goes where you need, when you need to. Think of the alternative! Trams and trains packed like sardines, frequently short-shunted and delayed. Buses loud and hot and often frankly mythical, claiming to have passed you by invisibly while you wait another twenty minutes. 
Driving can also be horrible, of course—a rat race for road space, parking and time. Capitalism, not content with devouring most of our waking hours with work, tempts us with the possibility of clawing back a few minutes every morning and evening.
It hasn’t always been this way.
Motor cars were originally luxury transport for the rich. And they arrived, not on roads built for them, but on streets filled with workers and the poor. If their right to careen through the cities meant ploughing their vehicles into the bodies of the poor, it didn’t bother them. But people didn’t take it without a fight. As Jeff Sparrow details in Crimes Against Nature: “They denounced the drivers and their cars for selfishly monopolising a space that had previously belonged to everyone. The rich were widely seen as using the violence of their cars to terrorise working-class people off the roads”.
People marched and threw stones, using all the means at their disposal to hold back the advance of cars. The rich were forced to respond. They flaunted speed-limiting laws until they were lifted, issued propaganda to concoct the notion of the world’s “love affair” with cars. By 1925, their success could be measured by the 21,000 Americans, using one example, who died on the roads that year. 
Pioneering the blame-shifting strategies of the fossil fuel and fast food industries after them, the auto industry invented the idea of “jaywalking”, which became a crime in Los Angeles in 1925. “The idea behind jaywalking was a radical one: that the street was not for people, but for vehicles”, Daniel Knowles notes in Carmageddon: How cars make life worse and what to do about it. At the price of hundreds of thousands of deaths, the auto industry everywhere slowly secured victory.
This victory wasn’t simply ideological, deflecting blame and brainwashing consumers. As laws and city planning more and more reflected the interests of car owners and manufacturers, soon infrastructure began to shape consumers’ choices. Trams had to share roads with cars and be bogged down with them; people couldn’t walk the streets with their families without fearing being run down by aristocratic highwaymen. 
Knowles explains that roads act as barriers that make it easier to get around in a vehicle, and harder to get around by any other means. The more cars there are, the more cars there will be—a cycle that gained pace as governments built more roads to deal with traffic. This “induced demand” is borne out by a study of US cities from 1980 to 2000, which found that “a 10 percent increase in the amount of road space led to a 10 percent increase in the amount people drive”. Another contributor to this feedback loop is that, as more people drive, city outskirts become more viable as residential areas. Property developers buy the land (refusing to invest in public transport), increasing urban sprawl and, consequently, the number of people who need to drive.
Cars were not simply a way for the rich to flaunt their wealth and travel without the unwashed. The auto industry is one of the most profitable in the world, raking in trillions of dollars each year. For the capitalists, there really is no alternative—public transport basically always runs at a loss. Hong Kong’s MTR, the city’s metro rail, is a rare exception, but this is due to a “rail plus property” model, sourcing most of the returns on its investment by developing land, bought from the government at a bargain price, and selling it to private companies at a value inflated by the railway.
On the other hand, cars create profits all down the line. Everyone has to buy their own individual vehicle and will do so several times in their life. The desire to “green” these profits is why Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop, a proposed 1,000 km/h transport system that has been described as a “death trap”, and which to date has proven unworkable. 
According to Musk’s biographer, the proposal was intended to scuttle California’s plan for high-speed rail, something that would have eaten into Tesla’s profits. People like Musk, and the fact that public transport is a financial sinkhole (seen from a purely capitalist profit-making point of view) have driven today’s new obsession with electric vehicles.
Given that EVs are still individualised vehicles, the only thing they purport to resolve is emissions: they don’t address the expense, the traffic jams, the road deaths, the heat islands caused by asphalt roads or the gigantic use of urban space. 
Yet their carbon credentials are also a farce. In <a href="https://www.truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/MDIA/Green-Economics-Paper-by-Richard-Smith-140109.pdf">Green Capitalism: The God That Failed</a>, Richard Smith observes: “Only 40 percent of an average car’s pollution is emitted during the car’s ‘driving’ life stage”. Most of the damage is done in the “production of all the steel, aluminium, copper and other metals, glass, rubber, plastic, paint and other resources that go into every automobile”, as well as the manufacture and the transport of these materials. 
So Tesla’s cars have <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052815/who-are-teslas-tsla-main-suppliers.asp">huge carbon emissions</a> well before being assembled in a factory—lithium from China, cobalt from Congo, nickel from Western Australia, electronics from Japan, a battery from South Korea and a battery chiller from Italy.
By 2030 there are projected to be 2 billion cars on the road. Boris Frankel estimates, in Fictions of Sustainability, that electrifying these vehicles would require up to 4 million tonnes of neodymium—“100 to 200 times current annual mine production”. It’s a similar story for copper, cobalt, platinum, lithium and nickel. Electrifying the world’s individualised road vehicles would require a massive upscaling in mineral extraction, with all the attendant destruction of the capitalist mining industry. 
Take the Ok Tedi Mine in Papua New Guinea producing copper, silver and gold. In Fight the Fire, Jonathan Neale uses it as an example of the destruction involved in mining and processing these metals. The extraction uses “acids and great heat to separate out the desired material”, creating 70 million tonnes of acidic sludge every year. All of this is dumped into PNG’s second-largest waterway, the Fly River, where it has “poisoned the land of 50,000 people in 120 villages downstream”.
Rio Tinto’s Bougainville copper mine wrought similar devastation, provoking a rebellion from the islanders that turned into a civil war. The PNG government put it down, with Australian helicopters, and 20,000 Bougainvilleans were killed. 
When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese or US President Joe Biden talk about “embracing the future”, this is what they have in mind: a thousand Ok Tedis and Bougainvilles, from Congo to Chile, to support an emergent “green” capitalism that creates as many problems as it purports to solve.

Cars, class and capitalism

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last week welcomed a UNESCO World Heritage Committee decision not to list the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger”. But what is “great news” to Plibersek is not great news for the reef. 
Leonard Cohen once wrote, “Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied”. Well, everybody knows that the reef is dying. The scientists know it. The committee who overruled them know it (recognising that it “remains under serious threat”), and Plibersek knows it. All the same, she has the nerve to celebrate the committee’s decision, which hasn’t even been made—the committee has simply delayed its determination for another six months, apparently to give the federal government time to act.
Since 2010, federal governments have been trying to stop formal international recognition of the reef’s perilous situation. If UNESCO were to list the reef as “in danger”, of course, it would only confirm what everybody knows. But for our climate-conscious rulers, what matters is not what is happening, only what is said to be happening. The most likely outcome of the listing would be more pressure to save the reef and additional funding and support from UNESCO to protect it.
But that is not what concerns the Albanese government, any more than the Morrison government before it. It understands that the Great Barrier Reef is a litmus test to determine how serious the government is about protecting the environment. An “in danger” listing would be a black mark against its environmental record, and could lead to the loss of heritage status—a trophy prized by the tourism industry. In other words, it would be bad for business.
For this reason, Sussan Ley (environment minister in the Morrison government) in 2021 went on a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-01/unesco-great-barrier-reef-world-heritage-listing-recommendation/102594476">“whirlwind tour”</a> of countries represented on the committee, successfully lobbying for their support to avoid the listing. Plibersek has <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/why-un-scientists-singled-out-the-great-barrier-reef-for-criticism-20230801-p5dswy.html">had no scruples about similar efforts</a>, declaring that she “spoke with the director-general [of UNESCO] personally on several occasions”, as well as with UNESCO ambassadors from other countries, impressing on them how different her government is from the last. For her, “Lobbying is about telling the truth about what we’re doing”.
But in the age of “net zero”, the truth is whatever governments want it to be.
In the <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/archive/2023/whc23-45com-7B.Add-en.pdf">draft decision</a> released at the end of July, the committee pointed to “new, but still recent commitments” and “initial actions” by the federal government, such as a $1.2 billion funding boost to the Reef Trust and a phase-out of gillnet fishing (which will take until 2027). 
Yet anyone concerned with the truth might be inclined to point out that the government’s own Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority considers climate change “the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef”. That’s according to the Authority’s <a href="https://www2.gbrmpa.gov.au/learn/threats/climate-change">position statement on climate change in 2019</a>, which explains that, to protect the reef, it’s necessary to take “the strongest and fastest possible actions” to reduce emissions.
Plibersek might point to her decision to reject Clive Palmer’s proposed coal mine (which would have been adjacent to the reef), a decision she has used to trumpet her climate credentials. But her trumpet cannot drown out the great brass ensemble belching out carbon: 116 new coal and gas projects in the pipeline, along with four approved coalmines and sprawling gas projects like Scarborough in development. 
Ninety percent of the heat created by these carbon emissions will be absorbed by the ocean, in which there are already unprecedented ocean surface temperatures and marine heatwaves, another of which is predicted to hit the Tasman Sea later this year. As I wrote previously for Red Flag, these heatwaves have been described as <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/wildfires-seas">“wildfires of the seas”</a>, destroying marine life much as a bushfire does terrestrial life.
Coral is the basis of ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef, providing a foundational source of food and shelter. Temperature changes stress the corals, forcing them to expel algae, a symbiote that provides them with food as well as their vivid colouring. This process “bleaches” the coral, exposing its white skeleton. Corals can live like this for a time, but frequent heatwaves will eventually finish them off—and that’s exactly where we’re headed. Kimberley Reid, a research associate with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and Monash University, explained in an August CNN interview that, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/australia-great-barrier-reef-unesco-decision-climate-intl-hnk-scn/index.html">with current global policies plotting a course for 2.7 degrees warming</a>, “We’re very clearly on track to see at least a 99 percent decline in global coral reefs, and if that doesn’t scream the reef’s in danger, then I’m not sure what will”.
The oceans absorb not only heat, but carbon itself (a third of it, in fact). Combine H2O and CO2 and you get H2CO3, otherwise known as carbonic acid. Slowly and steadily, the ocean is acidifying, a process that reduces the ability of corals to build their skeletons. All this is still only a small slice of the picture. Heatwaves destroy kelp and seagrasses, and lead to mass fish die-offs. Increased ocean surface temperatures make tropical cyclones and floods more severe, damaging reefs and tearing up seagrass meadows. Rising oceans erode the coasts and erase nesting habitats.
Before such a wave of destruction, Labor’s “initial actions” are scraps to be swallowed up like krill as the climate crisis opens its maw wider.
And what of the government’s “recent commitments”? They are little more than a chloroform rag Plibersek used to smother the World Heritage Committee. Labor’s upgraded target of 43 percent emissions reductions by 2030 would not even meet Australia’s obligations under the Paris Agreement, which sought to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. In such a scenario, coral reefs are projected to “decline by a further 70-90 percent”, according to the Authority’s policy position. 
By opening rather than closing coal and gas projects, the government is helping to push the world towards a warming of 3 degrees. Or worse.
In such a world, the Great Barrier Reef will be dead, not “in danger” (or so Plibersek might console herself).
PHOTO: Coral bleaching off Heron Island in Queensland in 2016. Credit: The Ocean Agency/XL Catlin Seaview Survey/Richard Vevers

Everybody knows the reef is dying

If eight people could build two bombs with $700 worth of material and destabilise the global oil market, “What does that say about the tactics currently being employed in the climate movement?” Quoted in an interview with Vulture, this is the premise of Daniel Goldhaber’s environmentalist thriller How To Blow Up a Pipeline. Like the book of the same name by left-wing academic Andreas Malm, the film argues that the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure is justified.
Unsurprisingly, questioning the sanctity of private property over human life is controversial: Goldhaber and co-writers Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol had to finance the project themselves because no one else would. Capitalist publications like Forbes sit comfortably in the “no, unjustified” camp, but it isn’t alone (in his book, Malm points to Extinction Rebellion’s principle of non-violence). Property destruction is deemed violence. But what equivalence can there be between it and the violence of the ruling class? Slashed tyres vs. poisoned waterways; smashed glass vs. police murders; destroyed pipelines vs. mass poverty.
Sabotage is conceived as self-defence in How To Blow Up a Pipeline. But righteousness sets apart what otherwise is common between the subjects and the crews of classic heist movies. They are dogged by the dangers of disaster and discovery, and Gavin Brivik’s compositions (augmented by oil drum samples) lend a paranoid excitement to their plan, paying homage to Tangerine Dream’s scores for Michael Mann, while some of the synthscapes suggest Hans Zimmer’s Blade Runner 2049, evoking its dust-choked, dystopian vistas.
In structure too, the film takes after heists like Reservoir Dogs. Flashbacks explore with great empathy one of the questions Malm poses: What would drive people to blow up a pipeline? Xochitl, a student activist, loses her mother to a heatwave. Her friend Theo (Sasha Lane), who recalls a childhood bathed in acid rain caused by a nearby oil refinery, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Michael (Forrest Goodluck), a Native American self-taught bomb expert, whom we first see on a bus to the action, is jostled awake to a landscape riddled with oil pumps, which echo the flare stacks blighting his home in North Dakota (shot on the reservation where Goodluck’s family live).
These sequences are a compelling criticism of gradualism and tokenism: Michael is exasperated by his mother’s conservancy, which “makes white people feel better, makes [his mother] feel better and does nothing”; Xochitl gives up on divestment because “by the time any market solution does shit, billions of people will be dead”. At times, the exposition is unbelievable (one activist naïvely invites another into their plan moments after they meet in a bookstore) or the dialogue mechanical, sacrificing subtlety for brevity. But the point is solid: fossil capital destroys lives in a thousand ways and provides a thousand justifications for adopting radical politics.
Fossil infrastructure features as the passive antagonist: oil refineries, pipelines and pumps loom omnipresent in the background, subduing the protagonists. It appears when Xochitl smokes with Theo after her mother’s death: girt in barbed wire, an oil refinery fills two-thirds of the frame. It lurks behind them again after Theo’s diagnosis. To destroy these instruments of doom would, it seems, create a chink in the industry’s impenetrable armour. Xochitl argues, “We have to show them how vulnerable the oil industry is”. Blowing up a pipeline, they hope, will make oil “unviable on the market”.
In the short term, however, it does the opposite. The overall effect is to raise the price of oil, so the profits soar of those companies that haven’t been disrupted. As Nathaniel Flakin points out in a review for Left Voice, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines “led to record profits for fossil fuel companies”, as they took advantage of scarcity. To even imagine a scenario that would “price fossil fuels out of the market” as Xochitl argues, you would need tidal waves of destruction, affecting the industry from one end to the other. Could such a thing be done?
It’s hard to imagine. How To Blow Up a Pipeline presents sabotage as a vulnerability of the oil industry, when in fact the tactic takes the movement onto terrain most favoured by the state, with its incredible capacity to surveil and repress. Terrorism invites the greatest repression and does the least to prepare the forces of the left for it. Xochitl argues that they could win a legal precedent of a right to self-defence, as if courts would ever sanction destruction of private property. Here, the state appears not as the instrument of capitalist rule, but instead one that could be turned against fossil capital. The diegesis seems to confirm this: in this world, the FBI is content with a couple of scapegoats, as if they were taking away bankers and not eco-terrorists.
Malm dismisses the idea that the state favours this. “The enemy has overwhelmingly superior capabilities”, not only against sabotage but “in virtually all fields”, he writes. Yet capitalism does have a weak spot: it’s dependent upon the labour of billions of workers to keep business as usual profitable—not just oil workers, but retail workers, transport workers and healthcare workers. Most, if not all, of the subjects of How to Blow Up a Pipeline are working class, but the only people who are coded as workers are “part of the problem”—armed property inspectors or the oil workers Michael brawls with.
The possibility that any of these people have collective power seems remote. And yet waves of property destruction like Xochitl hopes for are most likely to be generated and sustained in the shade of a revolution. But that would put workers’ power on the cards, a far deeper-reaching alternative. With a rejection of this possibility, the only option left is to pressure the capitalist state.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline demonstrates a deep compassion for the victims of fossil capital. It’s a gripping thriller made all the more nail-biting by its subject. Unlike criminal capers, this heist doesn’t put individual egos and ambitions at stake, but the planet. They have to succeed. But whether or not they blow up the pipeline, they can’t: their strategy won’t end fossil fuels.

'How to blow up a pipeline' review: The courage and futility of sabotage

Another day, another extreme weather event with a one-in-a-something chance. This time, ocean surface temperatures are breaking all records, resulting in marine heatwaves stretching from New Zealand to the Galápagos Islands to the British Isles. The chance of this unprecedented heat? One-in-256,000, according to <a href="https://twitter.com/BMcNoldy/status/1668255350305193985">Brian McNoldy</a>, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.
Thousands of fish have washed up on the coast of Texas, killed by the ocean’s low oxygen levels (a result of rising temperatures). They aren’t the only ones, and they won’t be the last: Thomas Smith, a professor of environmental geography at the London School of Economics, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/06/23/ocean-heatwave-northatlantic-uk-climate/">told the Washington Post</a> that if the heatwaves surrounding Ireland and the UK continue, they could lead to the mass death of kelp, seagrass, oysters and fish. 
Then, depending on the direction of prevailing winds, Smith said, they will lead to “a more turbulent atmosphere, and the associated storms and heavy rainfall”. Or, if the winds don’t blow, “the surrounding heat has the potential to form a heat dome that might exacerbate summer heatwaves”.
Just as increased atmospheric heat results in higher sea temperatures, ocean warming influences the whole weather system. Warmer surface waters can lead to stronger, wetter storms and hurricanes, and conversely to droughts and heatwaves. But what happens below the ocean’s surface can be even worse. 
Dan Smale, the lead scientist of a 2019 study into marine heatwaves, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/04/heatwaves-sweeping-oceans-like-wildfires-scientists-reveal">compared them to wildfires</a>, destroying kelp and seagrasses as a fire does forests—and in turn wiping out a major vehicle for carbon sequestration. Toxic algal blooms follow, like smoke after fire, consuming precious oxygen and poisoning everything up the food chain. Rising ocean temperatures also cause coral bleaching. 
Put all this together, and the foundation of many of the world’s marine ecosystems is put at risk, threatening a food source that more than 3 billion people depend on.
Explaining the changes in heat is complex, but the scientific consensus is that the major causes are El Niño and climate change. The warm El Niño phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation can raise Pacific Ocean temperatures by as much as 2°C, resulting in cascading weather system effects across the globe. Climate change, meanwhile, now forms the base upon which natural weather variation is founded: ocean warming due to greenhouse gases is reportedly almost 1°C.
The last record for ocean heat was in 2016, an El Niño year. Then, the Pacific was racked by a three-year-long marine heatwave that killed more than 100 million cod and a million seabirds. Most of the years since have been La Niña, leading to cooler Pacific waters that have masked the subsequent years of warming. 
With the return of El Niño, climate change reveals itself again in full force and, with it, the crimes of those pushing ahead with massive fossil fuel projects. When these “carbon bombs” detonate, they will hit the world’s oceans, reefs and marine ecosystems like wildfire.

Wildfires of the seas

How do the carbon footprints of the Australian Financial Review’s Rich Listers compare to the rest of us?
Take their jetsetting lifestyles for a start. A couple years ago Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, mining magnate and number two on the list, bought a $98 million private jet. With a little digging, you can find out the model, tail number and even where it’s been. 
In just the first five months of this year, Forrest’s Bombardier Global Express 7500 (one of the largest private jets on the market) has made 59 flights. According to one tool that allows the “climate-conscious” super-rich to <a href="https://compareprivateplanes.com/private-jet-free-tools/emissions-calculator">compare the emissions of different private jet models</a>, Forrest’s emissions from these trips amount to more than 700 tonnes of CO2. Compare that to what <a href="https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitters-produce-over-1000-times-more-co2-than-the-bottom-1">the average person emits</a> in a year: 4.7 tonnes. Twiggy’s jet fuel-guzzling commutes put him in the top echelon of the 1 percent, who are collectively responsible for <a href="https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/1-super-emitters-responsible-over-50-aviation-emissions/">50 percent of aviation emissions</a>.
These personal emissions, however, are but a drop in an ocean of oil. In a report published last year, <a href="https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/carbon-billionaires-the-investment-emissions-of-the-worlds-richest-people-621446/">Carbon Billionaires: The investment emissions of the world’s richest people</a>, Oxfam found that, once capital investments and company operations are included, the emissions of the richest billionaires are 1 million times higher than an average person’s. 
The luxury consumption of billionaires is the smallest part of their contribution to global warming. Yet carbon footprints usually record emissions created only through personal consumption. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the very concept of a “carbon footprint” was the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook">invention of an advertising firm working for oil giant BP</a>, which attempted to shift the blame for pollution from big companies to ordinary people.
By conceiving of the population as a collection of emission-producing individuals, it seems as though we all need to “do our part” to cut emissions. Some may have to do more than others, sure, but we all need to act individually to get as close to zero emissions as possible, whether that’s by installing solar panels on our homes, buying more expensive fuel-efficient or electric cars, ditching the car altogether for a bicycle or giving up air travel. 
This “carbon footprint” view of the world obscures important questions: Who is it that chooses what products are available? Who decides how they are produced? Who controls the energy and transport infrastructure? The Rich List is not just an inventory of Australia’s biggest consumers; it is a list of the people who control the economy.
What difference do a couple of rooftop solar panels make if Gina Rinehart, number one on the Rich List, decides to open another coal mine? What difference does riding a bike make when Lindsay Fox, number 23, puts another fleet of Linfox trucks on the road and stymies attempts to increase rail freight? 
The Rich List is also the climate’s most wanted list: the magnates who make billions mining coal, the retailers who wrap all our goods in plastic, the media moguls who help them get away with it.
Clipping their wings would be a good start, but a walking capitalist is just as dangerous as a flying one: their carbon footprints are so colossal that a single step can blacken the globe.

Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe

No to nuclear in the Latrobe Valley

1.5 degree warming limit ‘deader than a doornail’

Billionaires go bunkers

Dirty deeds, done in the dirt

Cars, class and capitalism

Everybody knows the reef is dying

'How to blow up a pipeline' review: The courage and futility of sabotage

Wildfires of the seas

The Rich List is a climate ‘most wanted’ list

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