“Melbourne may be an unhappy home for its 24,000 homeless residents”, begins Prosper Australia’s <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/speculative-vacancies-2025-data-update/">2025 Speculative Vacancy report</a>, released on 27 November, “but it remains surprisingly hospitable to the 32,000 dwellings within the metropolitan area that sat entirely empty throughout 2024”.
In a humane world there would be a simple mathematical solution to this problem: 32,000 houses minus 24,000 homeless people equals no-one homeless and at least 8,000 homes to spare. Instead, we live in a world where property hoarders speculate while the homeless are left to die on the streets.
The report uses water usage to map empty homes across nearly 2 million dwellings in the greater Melbourne area. Those using zero litres of water per day over the year are classed as completely empty—that’s the 31,890 dwellings referenced above, the number of which has increased by 16 percent since the previous year. In addition to that there are the houses averaging between zero and 50 litres per day (50 litres is about equivalent to a dripping tap). The average daily water use in a single-person Melbourne household is 200 litres, so these houses are likely occupied for less than a quarter of the year. Many may be empty all year but have water leaks or use water for gardening.
When you factor in these “underused” homes, the total number of vacant homes in Melbourne totals a shocking 100,945. As the report points out, these houses “could theoretically house everyone on the Victorian <a href="https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/applications-victorian-housing-register-vhr">social housing waiting list</a> twice over”. That housing list includes people like Maya, interviewed recently by Kate Ashton in her <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/social-public-housing-wait-times-victoria-family-violence/105655044">ABC article</a> “Family violence survivors waiting years for social housing as demand surges in Victoria”, published on 15 September. Maya fled an abusive relationship in 2017 and was eligible for social housing as a priority applicant on the Victorian Housing Register. Despite this, she was left waiting eight years for housing for her and her two children.
Thousands pay with their lives for this artificially maintained scarcity of housing. In October the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released its <a href="https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/homelessness-services/specialist-homelessness-services-feature-analysis/contents/about">Specialist Homelessness Services: feature analysis</a> report, which collected data on those who have received support for homelessness. It estimates that in 2023 there were an average of “nine potentially avoidable deaths per day” in this cohort—that is, nine people every day who might have lived had they received the necessary care and support. Their lives are cut brutally short in a society that could have ended homelessness, but instead, politicians continue to allow the number of empty homes to grow while the social housing waiting list grows longer and longer.
So why are so many homes left empty?
Prosper Australia describes it as a “rational decision” on the part of the owners. And it is, in its twisted way. But this seems counterintuitive—surely, they’d want to make money from renting out their properties? The thing is that the real estate market is so hot, and the taxes on it so porous, that in just a few months the potential profits in capital gains can eclipse a whole year’s rent. Domain’s <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/research/house-price-report/september-2025/">“September 2025 House Price Report”</a> found that Melbourne house prices rose 2.2 percent from the June quarter, a median increase of $23,045 in just three months. In the same period an owner receiving Melbourne’s median rent of $580 (according to Domain’s <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/research/rental-report/september-2025/">“September 2025 Rental Report”</a>) might make around $7,500.
If an owner is leasing their property, then they risk missing a peak in the market while they’re giving a notice of eviction to their tenants—losing potentially tens of thousands in profit. 
Governments aren’t just aware of these problems. Their policies have created them. Capital gains and negative gearing tax concessions have cultivated a financialised housing market that is not primarily about making money from rent, but about the increasing value of capital. The human right to shelter has been made dependent, in Australia today, on the whims of an investor class for whom housing is primarily a commodity rather than something designed to meet basic human needs. Rental properties at least have the side effect of housing people. Investment properties don’t even need to do that.
Taxing empty properties would be a good start. But Labor’s Vacant Residential Land Tax (VRLT), which applies to residences that are empty at least half the year, was collected on only 1,779 properties in 2024. “It’s a farce”, housing activist and former Victorian Socialists Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb told Red Flag. “Labor is taxing less than a fiftieth of the 100,000 homes that we know are empty for most of the year. They get to look like they’re doing something while they let property hoarders get away with murder.” 
Van den Lamb, known for his social media handle “purplepingers”, has managed to build a database of more than 1,000 vacant homes in Victoria alone, some of which are squatted by those in need of housing. If he can do that with the help of community submissions, you can only imagine what state and local governments could do if they took this issue seriously. “But they’d rather spend millions <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/israel-gaza-protests-in-melbourne-victoria-police-bill/105792396">policing anti-genocide protests</a> and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/being-homeless-is-not-a-crime-cbd-security-guard-program-under-scrutiny-20250918-p5mw3r.html">hiring security guards</a> to harass homeless people than police the criminals responsible for our housing crisis”, Jordan says.
Even if the VRLT were applied to all the empty houses, though, it’s unlikely it would make a big difference. Properties are taxed 1 percent of their total value for the first year they’re vacant, up to a maximum of 3 percent after three years. Given Melbourne’s median house price rose 7.7 percent this year, this is only a seventh of what property speculators stand to gain. If they’re willing to give up rent, this tax is unlikely to change their minds.
A simple solution would be for empty investment properties to be seized and turned into public housing. This is the kind of drastic measure that would be appropriate for what amounts, in the context of our growing homelessness crisis, to a form of social murder. For Australia’s capitalist governments, though, this would be regarded as the greatest sacrilege against the right of property investors to turn a profit.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

‘We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas’: Labor turns blind eye to Melbourne’s 100,000 empty homes

The Albanese government has released its plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050, with a target of 62 to 70 percent reductions by 2035. It is a hoax.
There are two ways to obstruct climate action: denialism and deceit. The Liberals have given us plenty of experience with the former. Labor is trying its hand at the latter. Its “<a href="https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/emissions-reduction/net-zero">Net Zero Plan</a>” intends to neutralise the political issue of climate action (not the actual emissions) through a smokescreen of good vibes and creative accounting. When Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison was dragged kicking and screaming into presenting his net-zero plan in 2021, it was widely derided. Chris Bowen, now federal climate minister, at the time said it was a scam, not a plan. The same can be said for his, which differs very little in its essence.
Like Morrison’s, it is imbued with techno-mysticism, praying that solutions like green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage become commercially viable, to prevent any real costs to capitalists. Like Morrison’s, it cooks the emissions books so long they’ve turned black—claiming that Australia has already reduced emissions 29 percent on 2005 levels (every year Labor and Liberal governments arbitrarily raise the amount of carbon they estimate the land is taking out of the air). Like Morrison’s, it lets companies continue to increase their emissions. All they have to do is pay for some carbon credits to “offset” them.
Labor’s targets, despite what Albanese claims, are not “backed by the science”. In fact, the Climate Change Authority, which developed them, revised its numbers down after consultations with business. The Australian Academy of Science <a href="https://www.science.org.au/files/userfiles/support/submissions/2024/aas-submission-cca-2024-issues-paper.pdf">supports a target of 74 percent by 2030</a> and net-zero by 2035 as the only path consistent with the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping well below 2 degrees warming. Yet even this would be insufficient, as either of these targets—as the Academy points out—covers only a fifth of Australia’s emissions: those produced within its borders, never mind all the coal and gas exported overseas!
Yet to say that the target needs to be higher, or the plan more effective, misses the point. The point of the Net Zero Plan is to help us reconcile the irreconcilable—Labor claims to be reducing emissions while expanding
fossil fuel exploitation.
Since Labor formed government in 2022, it has approved 31 new coal, gas and oil projects. In an analysis released this month, “<a href="https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/albanese-governments-fossil-fuel-approvals/">The Albanese Government’s fossil fuel approvals</a>”, the Climate Council estimated that these projects’ total lifetime carbon emissions will be 6.5 billion tonnes, equivalent to fifteen years of Australia’s current emissions. The colossal North West Shelf “carbon bomb” is meant to run until 2070, twenty years after we ought to have entered Labor’s new utopia of “green jobs and growth”.
In squaring this circle, the best thing Labor has got going for it is the Liberals themselves. Incapable of shedding its climate denialism, the Coalition has been the perfect foil, allowing Labor to present itself as a sensible climate pragmatist. It can pull off a feat the conservatives never could—cementing Australia’s climate-wrecking future under the mask of progressivism.
The consequences are extreme, as the first <a href="https://www.acs.gov.au/pages/national-climate-risk-assessment">National Climate Risk Assessment</a> (NCRA) makes clear. After delaying it for almost a year, the federal government released this report just days before its Net Zero Plan, hoping to control the story. It’s no surprise why—the NCRA spares no detail about the destruction the climate crisis will wreak. There are plenty of the ever-reddening heat maps you might expect, but the report also considers the details on the ground, like how heat will warp railways and impede supply lines, and how harsher droughts will increase suicide rates. It’s as close as you get to a totalising view of the cataclysmic crisis we’re facing.
Heatwaves are already the deadliest natural hazard in Australia, and will increase in intensity in the coming decades. At 3 degrees of warming, the NCRA predicts that heat-related mortality will more than triple in Melbourne and quintuple in Sydney and Darwin. Plant life will suffer greatly, swathes of our natural environment being destroyed and some of our most important carbon sinks being crippled. Between 40 and 70 percent of native plant species will be at risk.
More than 1.5 million people in Australia will experience sea level rise and coastal flooding by 2050 (when the NCRA expects us to hit 2 degrees warming), doubling to 3 million by 2090 (at 3 degrees). Combined with the threat of bushfires and inland flooding, 1 million homes will be at “very high risk” by 2050, rendering them uninsurable.
Indigenous Australians will be worse affected. The rate of sea rise in the Torres Strait is almost double the Australian average, and flooding will double by 2050. Remote communities deprived of adequate telecommunications infrastructure, housing and health care will be isolated when disasters strike. At the same time, the poor city suburbs where Aboriginal people are overwhelmingly concentrated are already urban heat islands, barrios of concrete and asphalt (like Blacktown and Sydney’s outer west) where heatwaves will kill the greatest numbers of people. 
Labor is paving the way for this future. Its plans and targets are not half-measures but cover for expanding fossil fuels. We can’t allow them to obscure that fact.

The new climate denialism: Labor’s Net Zero Plan

If you were to try to distinguish a house from a cave, you might ask: “Is it cold? Is it damp? Do fungi grow there?”. By this metric, some caves around the world would pass as houses, but many of our houses would pass as caves. 
Cold homes in Australia: Questioning our assumptions about prevalence, a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629623001846">study</a>
by the Australian Centre for Housing Research, monitored homes through the winter in 2022. It found that during that time, 81 percent averaged below 18 degrees Celsius, the minimum “healthy” standard of indoor temperature set by the World Health Organization. 
The effects of cold on the human body can be deadly. Colder temperatures cause blood vessels to constrict to reduce heat loss, increasing blood pressure and raising your risk of heart disease and strokes. Likewise, cold, dry air can narrow your airways, making chronic bronchitis, emphysema and asthma attacks more likely. A report by the University of Melbourne Professor Rebecca Bentley, published in 2024 with the headline “Your cold house is bad for your mental health” also found that those who cannot afford to keep their homes warm are 49 percent more likely to report depression or anxiety.
The cold is more deadly in Australia than it is in Arctic-straddling Sweden. Research published in the Lancet in 2015, “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, found that 6.5 percent of all deaths in Australia are at least partly attributable to cold weather, almost twice Sweden’s 3.7 percent. Thousands are dying from the cold, and the danger doesn’t end there.
Asthma Australia surveyed 5,041 people in 2022, finding in its report <a href="https://asthma.org.au/about-us/advocacy/housing/">Homes, Health and Asthma in Australia</a> that one in three people have mould in their homes, while one in two have problems with either mould or dampness (water damage, condensation, water leaks or flooding). Black mould spores can cause asthma attacks, allergic reactions and immune system disorders. One couple recently interview by the Sydney Morning Herald explained that the mould in their flat made them sick for months with <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-toxic-blooms-hiding-in-many-of-our-homes-and-a-new-way-to-find-them-20250526-p5m29i.html">vertigo and cyclical vomiting</a>. This isn’t just a problem in old, poorly ventilated homes. The 2015 Nationwide Condensation Survey found that more than 40 percent of new buildings had problems with condensation and mould.
So why are our houses so crap? It certainly isn’t because we don’t know better. Building shelters is something human beings have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. The cumulative effort of countless generations struggling against the elements has taken us from animal skins to adobe bricks to heaters and fibreglass insulation. The wind catchers used in Iran today—ingenious chimneys that use basic physics to displace hot air inside a home and replace it with cool air—date back thousands of years, while ancient Roman villas commonly used <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/hypocaust">hypocausts</a> that acted as a system of underfloor central heating.
The gap between the kind of housing we’re forced to endure and what science makes possible is immense. Australia’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) rates houses out of ten stars. A 10-star home is one that remains comfortable all year with little or no heating or cooling, while a 0-star home provides almost no protection from the outside climate at all. 
In a 2022 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/13/freezing-indoors-thats-because-australian-homes-are-closer-to-tents-than-insulated-eco-buildings">piece in the Guardian</a>, “Freezing indoors? That’s because Australian homes are closer to tents than insulated eco-buildings”, the head of the University of New South Wales School of the Built Environment, Phillip Oldfield, calculated the amount of power that differently rated homes would require to be kept at a comfortable temperature. “If [a house] received a 2-star NatHERS rating”, he wrote, “it would need 27,349kWh’s of electricity. If we assume $0.20/kWh, the cost would be $5,470 per year. A 6-star home would require 8,249kWh and cost $1,650, while a 10-star home would need only 100 kWh, costing a mere $20 a year.” The average Australian home has a NatHERS rating of just 1.8 stars. 
Although new buildings and major renovations are now required to meet a 7-star rating (and most do not go above this minimum), 70 percent of all homes were built before national energy efficiency standards were introduced in 2003. There is no national standard for that 70 percent, which includes most of the properties leased out by landlords today. The only state requirements are in Victoria and the ACT—which now require landlords to install ceiling insulation (i.e. the absolute bare minimum).
Paying for proper insulation and double-glazed windows would eat into the profits made by property hoarders and developers. So it doesn’t happen. Instead they pass on the costs to those who end up living in their houses, who face the terrible choice: pay thousands each year to warm their homes, or suffer through the winter cold and the damaging consequences for their health. 
For most people, this isn’t a real choice. They can’t afford to stay warm. Finder’s <a href="https://www.finder.com.au/news/heating-hardship-winter-2024">August 2024</a>
Consumer Sentiment Tracker found, based on a survey of 1,049 respondents, that one in two Australians had gone cold to avoid a high energy bill, with 36 percent avoiding using heating as often as possible, and 13 percent going cold all the time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Double-glazed windows are the norm throughout much of Europe, where triple-glazed windows are becoming common. We could raise the minimum NatHERS rating to 9 or 10 stars, reducing the need for heating and air conditioning to a bare minimum. All houses could be required to meet this standard before being leased or sold, and we could tax property hoarders and developers to subsidise those who own only a home or two to do so. 
We could mandate new building designs to feature cross-ventilation, so that we can cool our houses at night when it’s hot and avoid the build-up of condensation. We could mandate mechanical ventilation for old homes. With high standards of insulation, we could create houses that stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, something that will be increasingly important as the climate crisis worsens.
Houses where we can live with dignity are not beyond the reach of science, or our resources. They are only beyond the reach of our for-profit housing system.

Rent freeze? No. Rent, freeze: Australia’s winter housing nightmare

“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.

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

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