The US election is symptomatic of a new, gloomier political reality facing those concerned with global efforts to avert climate catastrophe. Since the issue of climate change first gained widespread attention in the early 1990s, it has never been far from the centre of political debate in most Western countries. As the pace of warming has increased, and its impacts have become more visible, you might expect that it would retain that place or even gain in importance in the minds of politicians and the voting public. In the US this year, the opposite has happened.
Not even the multiple weather-related disasters the country endured during the presidential campaign could shift the dial. Hurricane Helene roared out of the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the southern Appalachian mountains in late September with devastating winds and catastrophic flooding. Entire towns were swept away, and more than 230 people were killed. Two weeks later another major hurricane hit Florida. It didn’t matter. The climate crisis didn’t rank as highly as it previously had in <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/">polls of voters’ concerns</a>, and it was barely mentioned by Joe Biden, his replacement as Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris or Donald Trump during their campaigns.
The lack of discussion of or concern about climate change in this election wasn’t a sign that efforts to limit warming are going well. Quite the opposite. The decades of green rhetoric by politicians and the never-ending round of global climate summits have got us nowhere. Total global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and the rate of increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere (which are the most accurate measures of lack of progress) is accelerating. 
Over time, the gulf between the rhetoric used by politicians hoping to establish their green credentials and the grim reality of a society still well and truly hooked on fossil fuels has become harder and harder to ignore. This is, no doubt, part of the explanation for the growing phenomenon of “climate apathy”. For many years now, every time an election comes around we’ve been told by supposedly progressive parties like the US Democrats and Labor in Australia that climate change is a major challenge demanding urgent action. Again and again, though, when these parties come to power they fail to do anything more than the bare minimum about it.
You might object, in the case of the Biden administration, that the green rhetoric was matched to a degree by action. To the extent that Harris sought to draw attention to climate policy at all during her campaign, it was to highlight Biden’s “trillion dollar” investment in clean energy. At the same time, though, she made clear her continuing enthusiasm for fossil fuels. She was proud, she said, that the administration had “increased domestic gas production to historic levels” and that during her time in office the US has carried out “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history”. On both counts, she had every right to brag: in the 2010s the US overtook countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the largest oil and gas producer in the world, and it hasn’t looked back since.
Taking climate change seriously demands finding ways to wind down the fossil fuel economy. With something like this, you can’t “have your cake and eat it too”. However much you might invest in clean energy (and it’s true the Biden administration invested a lot), if that investment is being directly counteracted by significant increases in the production and consumption of fossil fuels, then what’s the point? 
We’ve had years of “climate wars” and “climate elections”. This time it was different. This was, when it comes to the climate, a “what’s the point?” election. We shouldn’t be overly surprised. When—despite what the scientists have been saying for decades and despite their own green rhetoric—those in power continually send the message that it’s not only okay but commendable to continue to expand the fossil fuel economy, it’s only natural that some would start to question whether climate change is really worth worrying about.
Donald Trump, of course, was only too happy to capitalise on this sentiment. Unlike the Democrats, Trump has always been very open about his enthusiasm for fossil fuels and disdain for climate science. During his campaign <a href="https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1852547593873526930">he promised</a> to “terminate the green new scam, one of the great scams in history”, and scoffed at the prospect of sea level rises, saying “Who the hell cares?” and joking, in <a href="https://www.rev.com/transcripts/elon-musk-and-donald-trump-interview">an interview with Elon Musk</a>, that “you’ll have more oceanfront property”.
Trump sought to link the Democrats’ climate initiatives to the inflationary wave that hit the US and much of the rest of the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Biden administration, he said in July in his <a href="https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/read-donald-trumps-full-rnc-speech-accepting-gop-nomination/3432055/">speech to the Republican National Convention</a>, has “spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the green new scam, and that’s caused tremendous inflationary prices”. He promised to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the cost of energy for US consumers.
The Democrats had no real answer to this. Having established that they too were enthusiasts for the “drill, baby, drill” mentality, they could hardly turn around and denounce Trump for it. So, by and large, they remained silent. This strategy, predictably, didn’t work well. While Trump supporters were thinking “What’s the point of action on climate change?”, many potential Democrat supporters were thinking “What’s the point of voting?”. Millions of those who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home this time. The Democrats’ promise of a “Trump-lite” administration inspired few.
Last time he was in power, Trump implemented a range of policies favourable to the fossil fuel industry—including reversing or rolling back almost 100 environmental regulations related to things like carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars. He also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, a (theoretically at least) legally binding international treaty committing countries that signed up to it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His second term in the White House is likely to bring more of the same.
“That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe”, Walter Benjamin once wrote. “It is not that which is approaching but that which is.” Another four years of Trump is no new catastrophe for the planet. The catastrophe was already here. The terrifying thing is that this election will reinforce the tendency for people in countries like the US and Australia to think “What’s the point in trying to do anything about it?”

James Plested

‘Drill, baby, drill’: Climate change ignored in the US election

One of the core activities of any even vaguely serious socialist organisation is recruiting people. The reason should be obvious. You can’t change the world with ideas alone. To think that you can is to be like the “valiant fellow” Karl Marx refers to in the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.htm">preface to the German Ideology</a>, one who “had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity”. 
Just as you can’t protect yourself from drowning by fighting against “the illusion of gravity”, so too is it impossible to overcome capitalism with the idea of socialism. Capitalism, like gravity, exists as a reality independent of our individual ideas and intentions. We could spend our whole lives imagining, writing and talking (or, these days, creating Instagram reels) about how things could or should be different, but if we leave it at that, we’re unlikely to make even the smallest dent in the edifice of the status quo.
Ideas are important. Marx himself famously spent many years of his life researching, thinking and writing about the dynamics of capitalism and how it can be overthrown. He realised early on though that, as he put it in 1844 in his<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm">
draft introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right</a>, “The weapon of criticism cannot ... replace criticism by weapons”, and that “material force must be overthrown by material force”.
How then to create the kind of “material force” that could pose a challenge to the capitalist system? Theory, Marx went on to say, “also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses”. If your anti-capitalism is restricted to the inside of your own head, it’s useless, but if you can join together with enough people of a similar mindset you can start to do things like organise protests, strikes and other potentially powerful “material” expressions of socialist politics.
Socialist ideas, in other words, become a material force through socialist organisation. And the bigger the organisation, the more powerful the force.
Organisations can draw on the collective knowledge and experience of their membership to educate and train new layers of activists (hence <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/wibg/ch08.htm">Leon Trotsky’s comment</a> “the memory of the working class is in its party”). They can debate and test political strategies and coordinate actions to maximise their effectiveness. They can pool resources and skills to increase the reach of their organising, publicity and recruitment efforts (the capacity to regularly produce a publication like Red Flag is an example). 
It’s because they understood this that Marx and his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels were serial joiners, and builders, of organisations. In 1847 they joined the London-based group the Communist League. The league, Engels wrote, “consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress”. It had a set of rules and produced socialist publications. Most famously, as of February 1848, it had a manifesto, written by Marx: the Manifesto of the Communist Party (more commonly known as The Communist Manifesto).
Later in their lives, in 1864, Marx and Engels helped form the International Workingmen’s Association. The International, like the Communist League before it, was a formal, membership-based organisation with a constitution, a program, various levels of leadership, regular congresses and publications. It aimed to draw together the various strands of the socialist movement in Europe into a single, cohesive and thus more powerful whole.
Marx and Engels and Co. may well have done this with a little more flair than (unfortunately) many of today’s socialist organisations can muster. The basic principles, however, remain the same. Socialists don’t want just to sit around thinking or talking about changing society; we actually want to change it. And just as in Marx’s day, the main prerequisite for that (beyond the reality of capitalist exploitation that first creates the conditions for working-class resistance) is to bring together a critical mass of like-minded people into an organisation.
Of course, you don’t need to be a Marxist to understand the importance of building political organisations. The Greens, the Labor Party, trade unions, environmental NGOs—all of them put time and resources into recruiting new members and supporters. It’s one of the ABCs of rank-and-file trade unionism, for example, that you should make notes about conversations you have with your co-workers to keep track of issues that come up and individually tailor your recruitment efforts.
The more recruitment is going on among organisations of the left like trade unions, the better. The fewer and smaller we are, the easier it is for the established institutions of capitalist society to govern in the interests of the rich and powerful. Their side is highly organised. In addition to the capitalist state, with its army of bureaucrats, its police and prisons and its many instruments of ideological control (state-funded media, the education system etc.), there’s a mass of industry peak bodies, think tanks, conservative NGOs and so on to help defend the status quo. The more disorganised and atomised our side is, the less potential there is for us to challenge that imposing edifice in any serious way.
Organisations recruit people in ways appropriate to their circumstances. Parties like the Greens can recruit in large part merely through the high profile they have in political life. That doesn’t work so much for revolutionary socialists because, for now at least, we don’t have much of a profile. The pool of people who might be open to getting involved with a revolutionary socialist organisation, with the relatively high level of commitment that entails, is also much smaller than for parties like the Greens. That’s why socialists concentrate our efforts among students (who, historically, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-role-of-students-in-radical-struggles">have played a key role</a> in many radical struggles), participants in protest movements and existing trade union activists. 
Complaining, <a href="https://x.com/hierobadge/status/1842732951420940761">as some do</a>, that it’s inappropriate for socialists to try to meet and recruit people at rallies, whether opposing the genocide in Gaza or around any other issue, ends up just being an argument against socialists recruiting, full stop. Protests attract the most radical and committed layer of people in society, and these are exactly the kind of people socialists want to recruit. We don’t want to do this out of a desire to “profit from the movement” or “impose an outside agenda” or any of the other anti-socialist tropes that come up. We want to do this because—taking the question of Palestine as an example—we think building a bigger socialist movement in Australia and around the world is key to taking on the immensely powerful military, economic and ideological forces standing in the way of Palestinian liberation.
If you oppose socialist politics, and think, for example, that there’s a better way to win Palestinian liberation, then argue, organise and recruit on that basis. If you’re right, then you will hopefully be able to prove it in practice. If, instead of doing that, you just want to complain about socialists recruiting as if it is in itself something reprehensible, then (assuming you’re not actually just a reactionary aiming to defend the existing order from challenge) you’re not damaging just socialists; by casting suspicion on the idea of recruitment and organisation in general, you’re damaging the entire left.

Why socialists recruit

In scenes reminiscent of the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7370">S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum</a> (WEF) at Crown Casino 24 years ago to the day, thousands of anti-war and pro-Palestine protesters descended on the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in Southbank this morning to disrupt the opening day of the Land Forces military expo. 
Land Forces <a href="https://landforces.com.au/">describes itself</a> as a “platform for interaction between defence, industry and government ... to meet, do business and discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the global land defence markets”. It might more accurately be described as a (bacon-wrapped) turducken of state-sponsored violence—a place where corporate, government and military purveyors of mass terror facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza can pat each other on the back and celebrate another year of profiting from death. 
The protest was organised by a coalition of groups led by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/studentsforpalestineaus/?hl=en">Students for Palestine</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/disruptwars/?hl=en">Disrupt Wars</a>. “It’s outrageous that eleven months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 people, the Victorian government has welcomed one of the world’s biggest international weapons conferences into the heart of our city, supported by public funds”, Bella Beiraghi, a member of Students for Palestine at the University of Melbourne and co-chair of the rally, told Red Flag.
The protest aimed to cause as much disruption to the opening day of Land Forces as possible. On the other side—determined to ensure everything would run smoothly for the merchants of death assembling for the expo—stood a mass of heavily armed police. As if the 1,000+ Victorian contingent wasn’t enough, additional riot police were <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1833377769184702498">seconded from NSW</a>.
As it was 24 years ago on the opening day of the WEF across the road at Crown Casino, so it was again today: a few minor skirmishes between protesters and police were enough to trigger sensationalist media reports and outrage from politicians—the same politicians, notably, who’ve expressed very little, if any, outrage about Israel’s genocide in Gaza—about supposed “protester violence”. 
Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/television-interview-sunrise-28">condemned protesters</a> for “throwing things at police”. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan implied that protesters threatened community safety. She also called on state Greens MP Gabrielle de Vietri, who missed a session of parliament to attend the protest, to “hand back the keys to her office”. (On the contrary, de Vietri should be commended for attending.)
As was the case at S11, anyone at the protest this morning who saw how things unfolded will tell a very different story to the account given by the media and politicians. Whatever “protester violence” there was paled in comparison to that of the police.
Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/melbourne-anti-war-protest-to-cost-tax-payers-15-million/386b2c74-0c61-4005-932e-a911db5188f7">yesterday revealed</a> that the Labor government was spending $15 million on policing for Land Forces. It’s possible that there were more police around the Exhibition Centre this morning than protesters. In the days leading up to the protest, they had constructed a barricade of steel fencing around the entire perimeter of the venue. Every gap in the barricade was protected by row upon row of heavily armed police. 
Back in the 2000s, police had to make do with batons and horses for brutalising protesters. Of course, as anyone who found themselves in a part of the s11 blockade the police were determined to clear will tell you, they could do more than enough damage just with those instruments at their disposal. 
Today, in addition to the same old batons and horses, they’ve got a whole new arsenal of so-called “less-than-lethal” weapons to play with.
Play with them they did. First came the pepper spray—which <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2016/03/16/lethal-in-disguise-the-health-hazards-of-pepper-spray/">has been known to cause</a> loss of consciousness and death in extreme cases. Again and again, police sprayed large quantities of it more or less indiscriminately into the crowd. As the protest went on, the tally of those struck down and in the hands of medics steadily rose. 
Next came flash-bangs and rubber bullets. Red Flag
spoke to Catherine Robertson, a Victorian Socialists <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/robertson">local council candidate</a> and rally marshal, who said she was attempting to move people away from the danger when she was struck in the wrist by a rubber bullet. Many others were also hit, including some who were already being treated for the effects of pepper spray. 
There is a clear trend of escalating police violence against protesters in Victoria in recent years. However disturbing it is, though, to see people temporarily blinded and coughing up their lungs from pepper spray or wounded by rubber bullets, it’s nothing compared to the horrors the people inside the Land Forces expo are capable of unleashing on the world. 
Amid the chaos of this morning’s protest, Red Flag
spoke to Aran Mylvaganam from the Tamil Refugee Council. “The Land Forces conference”, Aran said, “is exhibiting modern weapons that are going to be used in wars that are killing tens of thousands of people around the world. At the moment, there are millions of people who have been turned into refugees because of these kinds of weapons”.
“As a young kid”, Aran recounted, “I was living in Sri Lanka. I was learning about the modern weapons the Sri Lankan government was receiving from the West ... People in the Global South get used to one weapon, and they learn to survive and hide from these weapons. Then these industries come up with more advanced weapons that make it harder for people to survive conflicts”. 
During the Sri Lankan government’s war on the country’s Tamil minority, Aran says, his school was bombed by Israeli-built Kfir fighter jets. “I lost my brother and many of my other family members and friends, and that’s one of the reasons why I ended up in Australia as a refugee.”
This is the reality that all the outrage about supposed “protester violence” aims to cover up. We live in a world in which it’s “normal” for more than <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/264434/trend-of-global-military-spending/">US$2 trillion to be spent annually</a> on waging or preparing for war—and for companies like those represented at Land Forces to profit handsomely from it. We can see the results of all this spending in things like the genocide inflicted on the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka and, today, on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 
Heaven help humanity if we allow things to go on like this much longer. If someone wants to piff a water bottle or even some horse shit at some of the human faces of this capitalist death machine, then, frankly, who could blame them?

Thousands protest Land Forces military expo in Melbourne

Australia’s political class is busy transforming the country into a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-the-us-australia-alliance-against-china">base of operations </a>for a possible US war with China. That, you might think, is bad enough. Now Peter Dutton wants—with his nuclear power plan—to throw a significant new bit of (radioactive) “spice” into the mix.
Just imagine. It’s 2040, and China has just launched an invasion of Taiwan. The US declares war, and begins the mobilisation of its own and its allies' forces across the Indo-Pacific region. Tens of thousands of US and Australian military personnel are massed, ready for action, on bases around Australia. British and US nuclear-powered submarines are dispatched from ports in Western Australia and Queensland (parking their submarines in Australian ports being the only part of the AUKUS deal that was actually delivered).
The Chinese military has meticulously prepared for this scenario over many years. It knows its only hope for a quick and relatively casualty-free victory lies in crippling, as much as possible, the other side’s ability to counterattack before it gets started. So at this point the first barrage of Chinese hypersonic missiles rains down. The targets aren’t just military facilities but also critical infrastructure—ports, major highways and bridges, data centres and (of course) power stations.
How would you feel about living next to one of Dutton’s seven planned major nuclear power stations in this situation? You might think an attack like this is unlikely. Surely, even in the event of a major war, the contending powers would stop short of targeting civilian infrastructure in such a destructive way. This belief is, unfortunately, a fantasy. You need only look at what the Israelis have done to Gaza—with the full support of their allies in countries like the US and Australia—to know that in a situation of all-out war, anything and everything would be deemed “fair game”.
<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/nuclear-arsenal-must-be-on-australia-s-agenda-argues-defence-expert-20190701-p52306.html">Some of Australia’s foreign policy establishment</a> believe that a scenario like this might be avoided if only we take the next step after establishing a nuclear power industry and create our very own nuclear weapons “deterrent”. It’s possible Dutton himself has an eye to taking this path. He’s no doubt aware that the kinds of resources, skills and technology that would be needed to establish a “peaceful” nuclear power industry are exactly the same resources, skills and technology needed to produce nuclear weapons (hence Western hysteria about Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear program).
It’s testament to the level of historical amnesia about the realities of so-called nuclear “deterrence” during the Cold War between the US and Russia that anyone but the most Strangelovian psychopath would think a nuclear-armed Australia is a good idea. A world in which countries like Australia go nuclear, thus further accelerating what is already<a href="https://www.economist.com/international/2023/08/29/a-new-nuclear-arms-race-looms"> a new global arms race,</a> wouldn’t be one in which the populations of the contending powers were somehow rendered safe and secure. It would, rather, be a nightmare of the ever present threat of mutual annihilation in which the best you could hope for, either as a member of the armed forces or as a civilian, was that death would be quick.
I know this, because I’ve lived through it before. I was born on a British military base in West Germany and lived there and on bases in England during the early 1980s peak of Cold War tensions. My dad was in the British air force and was a navigator on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Vulcan">nuclear-armed Vulcan bombers.</a> 
In 1980, the British government <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1500124311">published a pamphlet titled </a><a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1500124311">Protect and Survive</a>, which contained instructions on “how to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack”. This included things like building an “inner refuge” inside your house which “should be thick-lined with dense materials to resist the radiation, and should be built away from the outside walls”. The pamphlet and an associated media campaign were designed to allay public anxiety about the threat of war. Everyone knew, though, that it was just for show. The reality of what would happen in the event of war was more honestly portrayed in the bleak (to say the least) joint Australian and British television drama <a href="https://youtu.be/vgT4Y30DkaA?si=0XVTNyKGOaWdYlfn">Threads</a><a href="https://youtu.be/vgT4Y30DkaA?si=0XVTNyKGOaWdYlfn">.</a>
My dad regularly had to participate in military exercises that simulated what to do when war broke out. This involved getting British bombers in the air fast enough to ensure that any Russian attack could be countered by a large-scale counterattack. There was no real expectation that bomber crews would come back from these missions, nor that there’d be anything much to come back to. 
If ever present feelings of impending violent doom happen to be your thing, then nuclear “deterrence” and the “logic” of mutually assured destruction could really help you flourish. For everyone else, it’s probably better to try to build a world where our collective “safety” isn’t maintained by the threatened use of weapons that could wipe out entire cities in an instant.
Can we assess the merits of nuclear energy in isolation from its possible contribution to a new nuclear arms race that could once again place humanity under imminent threat of civilisation-ending catastrophe? We could, but it would be delusional. 
You can, and nuclear power advocates <a href="https://x.com/GrogsGamut/status/1803270883634716901">like Dutton do</a>, envisage all kinds of new technologies and designs that will supposedly make nuclear entirely risk free. Nuclear power stations could in theory be fuelled by <a href="https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium">thorium</a> instead of uranium, thus ameliorating some of the problems of toxic pollution and waste that beset today’s nuclear power industry. But none of the new, supposedly clean and safe technologies nuclear advocates talk up actually exist today in any form close to implementation. The only path available to a nuclear power enthusiast is the same, dirty, toxic, uranium-fuelled path that’s existed since the dawn of the nuclear era. 
And going down that path will be <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/uk-s-nuclear-plant-will-cost-nearly-three-times-what-was-estimated-20240620-p5jna1#:~:text=Britain's%20Hinkley%20C%20generator%20in,will%20cost%20about%20$90%20billion.">extremely slow and mind-bogglingly expensive</a>. The new Hinkley C nuclear power station currently being built in Britain has been delayed by more than a decade and is set to cost, by the time it opens in the early 2030s, around $90 billion. For nuclear power actually to make a significant contribution to solving the climate crisis, you’d need to build thousands of new power stations at a cost of many trillions of dollars.
There are better options. 
Renewable energy is <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-power-half-the-cost-of-coal-and-gas-one-third-the-cost-of-nuclear-says-lazard/#:~:text=In%202024%2C%20Lazard%20finds%20onshore,MWh%2C%20depending%20on%20local%20conditions.">much cheaper to build and operate than nuclear</a>, and it has the added benefit of not putting the world on a path to the apocalypse. There are challenges that have to be addressed, such as the need to build large-scale stores of energy (batteries, pumped hydro, green hydrogen and so on) to make up for the intermittency of renewables like wind and solar. If we’re talking about spending trillions of dollars on new energy infrastructure though, this seems eminently doable. 
Can we head off Australia’s nightmare nuclear future before it really begins? Doing so will take a serious fight. It’s not only Dutton we have to worry about, but the Labor Party that, by signing us up to the AUKUS deal, took the first steps down the nuclear path.

Australia’s dark, twisted nuclear fantasy

Conservatives in Australia and around the world love attacking universities for their supposed “woke” culture and failure to protect free speech. The Coalition government under Scott Morrison was so concerned about the issue that, in 2018, it commissioned a <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22media%2Fpressrel%2F6607701%22">formal inquiry</a> into it. And in the years since, right-wing politicians, commentators, and institutions like the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA) haven’t ceased talking about what they claim is a <a href="https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/parliamentary-research-briefs/parliamentary-research-brief-the-free-speech-crisis-in-australian-universities-and-how-to-solve-it">“crisis of free speech”</a> on campuses.
Last year, the IPA released its<a href="https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/research-papers/free-speech-on-campus-audit-2023"> Free Speech on Campus Audit 2023</a>. It found (unsurprisingly, given this exercise in propaganda involved little that resembled genuine research) that restrictions on free speech abounded. Among other things, the IPA complained that “freedom of expression is put at risk by university policies which prohibit a wide variety of speech including ‘insulting’, ‘unwelcome’ and ‘offensive comments’”. It also warned against the adoption of free speech codes which “restrict speech deemed ‘unsafe’”. 
Right-wingers are avowed enemies of the notion that students should be protected in any way from ideas or speech they may find offensive or that make them feel unsafe. Given this, you might have expected that when students in the US, Australia and around the world began exercising their right to free speech by protesting in support of the Palestinians, right-wingers would have defended their right to do so—even if some students were upset by it.
And when the university managers attempted to silence the students, as they have so brutally in the US—using violence to repress the students’ political expression—you would have expected right-wingers to be up in arms. Isn’t this precisely the repressive, offense-adverse culture of universities they continually complain about? Isn’t this cancellation at its worst and most violent? 
Apparently not. Instead of celebrating the flourishing of free speech that the campus pro-Palestine encampments represent, the right have been united in their calls for harsh repression by university authorities and, where that fails, the police.
This has been most stark in the US. There, neither liberals nor conservatives have had any qualms about bringing the full force of the law down on the heads of the students. Starting with Columbia University in New York, the site of the first Gaza solidarity encampment, masses of police have been mobilised to smash up protests. As of 9 May, more than 2,000 protesters had been arrested, and many injured.
In Australia too, right-wing politicians like Peter Dutton have pushed universities to crack down on the campus protests. In <a href="https://www.2gb.com/peter-dutton-questions-labor-governments-mixed-responses-to-anti-israel-slogans/">an interview with radio station 2GB </a>on 9 May, Dutton equated Palestine supporters chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” with “what Hitler chanted in the 1930s”, and he has repeatedly <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/dutton-calls-on-unis-to-shut-down-pro-palestinian-protests-20240502-p5fogj">called on universities and the government</a> to do more to repress the student encampments. 
The Liberals’ education spokesperson Senator Sarah Henderson similarly described the pro-Palestine encampments at universities as “intolerable”. Talking to Sky News on 9 May, she claimed to believe that “free speech and academic freedom are fundamental on university campuses”, but then wheeled out, by way of justification for a crackdown, the completely ludicrous and unfounded claim that other students’ “right to go about [their] studies peacefully” was being threatened. The universities themselves contradict this claim—one of the reasons they have not been able to crack down on the protests is that they do not violate the universities’ codes of conduct, which include prohibitions on violence towards other students. 
Even the erstwhile free speech warriors at the IPA have switched overnight into the pearl-clutching, “call the police” camp. In an 2 May <a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/no-safe-spaces-for-jewish-students-at-universities-20240430-p5fnkg#:~:text=There%20are%20no%20%E2%80%9Csafe%20spaces,but%20this%20time%2C%20it's%20different.">article for the Financial Review</a>, current IPA senior fellow and former executive director John Roskam said it was “wishful thinking” to assert that the Australian Palestine encampments are peaceful, and implied that criminal charges should be laid against students.
This hypocrisy points to the real reason for the right’s claimed concern with “free speech” at universities. It’s not really a concern about “freedom” or “free speech” in general. Instead, it’s exclusively about the ability of the right to effectively promote and propagate its ideas on university campuses, as well as in the mainstream media, schools, churches and all the other places where conservatives are accustomed to having their views predominate.
The right abhors the fact that in the much degraded, but still relatively free atmosphere of intellectual engagement and exchange that exists at universities, progressive and left-wing views tend to prevail, particularly in disciplines like the humanities. It hopes that by constantly complaining about the supposed university “free speech crisis” it will pressure universities to somehow tip the scales of debate to the right, creating a “safe space” for fragile and under-confident right-wingers to speak their minds and counter the hegemony the left enjoys over political life at many campuses. These are the institutions training the future politicians, state administrators, commentators and CEOs, after all—attendees need to be hardened up to run the system, not learning to care about dead Palestinian children.
The right simply cannot tolerate an area of society where their politics aren’t accepted as gospel and challenges to their authority are dismissed as fringe concerns. So when they complain about the stifling of conservative speech on campuses, it’s more a matter of right-wingers feeling resentful that they are isolated and that a large majority of their fellow students are likely to find their views repugnant. This is less a matter of so-called “cancel culture” than one of “cowardice culture” on the part of the right—of being intimidated out of voicing particular opinions by the likely social consequences of doing so.
Seen in this light, the right’s unceremonious junking of its professed commitment to free speech in the context of student pro-Palestine protests makes perfect sense. If your aim isn’t to foster free speech as such, but merely to promote an atmosphere in which right-wing speech can flourish, then the situation on campuses today is dire indeed. Instead of feeling safer and more confident to express their views, supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other campus right-wingers are running scared. 
What Israel is doing in Gaza is so thoroughly indefensible that there’s no hope of winning anyone much to support them through open debate and discussion. The right can go some way to addressing this problem in broader society via a constant barrage of pro-Israel propaganda from politicians and the media. The brave stand made by students at universities around the world means that there, stronger measures are necessary.

Right-wing hypocrisy on free speech

Israel’s assault on Gaza is one of this century’s greatest atrocities. Given the volume of evidence—broadcast day by unrelenting day on social media as well as via more traditional media outlets such as Al Jazeera—all you really need to understand this is to have a basic level of humanity. But if you would prefer to rely on the judgement of those regarded as experts, those judgements are mounting by the week.
Human Rights Watch (HRW)—an NGO that has been monitoring human rights abuses around the world for more than 30 years—recently <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/04/gaza-israeli-strike-killing-106-civilians-apparent-war-crime">completed an investigation</a> into what, in a crowded field, stands as one of Israel’s most barbaric single actions in its war to date. HRW describes the incident, drawing on accounts from witnesses, as follows: 
“On October 31, 350 or more people were staying at the Engineers’ Building, just south of the Nuseirat refugee camp. At least 150 were seeking shelter after fleeing their homes elsewhere in Gaza. Without warming, at about 2:30pm, four aerial munitions struck the building within about 10 seconds. The building was completely demolished.”
At least 106 civilians, including 54 children, were killed in the attack. This included, according to HRW’s associate crisis and conflict director Gerry Simpson, “children playing football, residents charging phones in the ground-floor grocery store, and displaced families seeking safety”. 
HRW’s investigation “found no evidence of a military target in the vicinity of the building at the time of the Israeli attack, making the strike unlawfully indiscriminate under the laws of war”. It notes, too, that “Israeli authorities have provided no justification for the attack”. To HRW, then, the conclusion is clear: Israel’s strike on the building was a war crime.
The report also makes clear this wasn’t an isolated incident. It refers to data from Airwars, an NGO that tracks the impact of conflicts on civilians, showing that since the beginning of its assault on Gaza, “195 likely attacks by the Israeli military killed from 1 to 9 civilians, 107 attacks killed between 10 and 59, and 4 killed between 60 and 139”.
The scale of the carnage that has been inflicted on the people of Gaza for more than six months is immense. And there’s no doubt further investigation will show what any reasonable observer already knows: it’s not a few incidents here or there that are crimes, but the entire Israeli war.
HRW’s message to Israel’s allies like Australia is simple. They should, it says, “suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel ... Governments that continue to provide arms to the Israeli government risk complicity in war crimes”.
Western leaders like US President Joe Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese love to pose as champions of human rights. So when a recognised authority on the subject like HRW makes a call like this, you might expect they would take heed.
If you were to judge purely on what they have been saying
in recent weeks, then you might think they had. As Israel’s war has dragged on, its Western backers have been prepared to voice some criticisms. This has particularly been the case since its murder, on 1 April, of seven aid workers—including Australian woman Zomi Frankcom—from World Central Kitchen. 
In a <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/04/02/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-death-of-world-central-kitchen-workers-in-gaza/">statement</a> published the day after that incident, Biden said he was “outraged and heartbroken”. “This conflict”, he went on, “has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed” (no word, notably, of who they were killed by). Albanese, for his part, said in a <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/transcript-press-conference-0">press conference</a> on 3 April that Israel’s killing of the aid workers was “completely unacceptable”.
Saying things are “outrageous” and “unacceptable” is one thing. Actually doing anything about it is quite another. Despite mounting pressure, including <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/6/us-democrats-urge-biden-to-halt-weapons-transfer-to-israel-amid-gaza-war">from Democratic Party representatives</a> in the US Congress, the Biden administration has so far refused to put any conditions on future military aid to Israel. 
At the time of the 1 April attacks on the World Central Kitchen aid convoy, Biden <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/us/politics/biden-israel-weapons-deal.html">was pushing for Congress</a> to approve the sale of up to 50 US-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel in a deal worth more than US$18 billion. Should the deal go ahead, it will come on top of the billions in military aid and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/06/us-weapons-israel-gaza/">more than a hundred individual arms sales</a> the US has sent Israel’s way since 7 October. Without continuing US support, Israel’s capacity to carry out war crimes like the one investigated by HRW would be severely limited.
The Australian government doesn’t directly export weapons or provide military aid to Israel like the US does. It’s more than happy, though, for Australian companies to have a foot in the door of the genocide trade. 
Between 2017 and 2023, the government issued 322 export permits for military or “dual use” goods headed for Israel, and figures from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade show $13 million worth of arms and ammunition were exported to Israel by Australian companies in the past five years.
The Australian government also appears to have no qualms about dealing with Israeli corporations directly involved in the Gaza genocide. The missiles that struck the World Central Kitchen aid convoy were fired from a Hermes 450 drone manufactured by Elbit systems—the same Israeli company Australia recently <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/04/04/zomi-frankcom-elbit-systems-airstrike-drone-900-million/">committed to paying $917 million</a> of taxpayer funds for the supply of components for the Australian Defence Force’s infantry fighting vehicles.
If you stumbled on the scene of a mass shooting, and instead of doing anything to stop it you pulled a gun from your own bag and handed it over to the shooter, you’d be regarded as an accessory to murder. Governments that—despite the mountain of evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza—don’t stop providing it with the planes, bombs, guns and ammunition it needs to continue its genocidal massacre should be seen in the same way: not just as risking complicity in war crimes, but as facilitators of them.

Western arms enable Israel’s war crimes

Measured by the sheer volume of stuff produced, capitalism is a very successful system. According to <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=1W">World Bank data</a>, in 1960 global gross domestic product (GDP)—which measures the monetary value of goods and services sold—was just under US$1.4 trillion. By 2022 it had risen to $101 trillion. The world’s population has increased a lot in that time, but the volume of stuff produced has increased by far more.
How useful are all those products and services?
The overriding goal of production under capitalism is profit, not poverty reduction or human happiness. What determines what is produced, and when, where and how, isn’t a thing’s usefulness—whether it fulfils a genuine need—but how much money it will make for the person selling it. Defenders of capitalism say that this is the most efficient way to organise the economy. But reality tells a different story.
Much of what is produced is, put simply, trash. For some capitalists, this means trash in a very literal sense. Think, for instance, of the vast and ever increasing quantities of unnecessary plastic and other packaging we’re drowning in, only a small fraction of which is recycled. Producing all this rubbish is highly lucrative. The global packaging market <a href="https://spnews.com/worlds-1-17-trillion-packaging-market-set-for-further-growt/">is worth more than US$1 trillion</a> and is growing rapidly.
Another, bigger, section of the capitalist class, while not producing trash in an immediate sense like the plastic peddlers, is nevertheless producing things that will by design become trash a few months or years after being purchased.
As capitalism has developed and grown, so too has the role of built-in obsolescence: purposely making products to not last. The waste of resources and human labour involved is mind-boggling. Take “fast fashion”. In 2018 (the last year the Environmental Protection Agency <a href="https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/textiles-material-specific-data">published data</a>), 11.3 million tonnes of textiles were dumped in landfill in the US alone. In Ghana, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-parts-ghana-into-toxic-landfill/100358702">a centre for the “recycling” of clothing</a> discarded by consumers in the West, locals are forced to live side by side with giant piles of discarded clothes. 
It’s a similar picture with cars, computers and mobile phones. They could be made to last much longer than they do. The economy would be more sustainable, and our lives better, if they were. But this would undercut the capacity of the companies involved to sell ever increasing quantities. Your iPhone must die so that Apple’s profits can live!
Built-in obsolescence should be something that generates widespread rage against the system. The fact that it doesn’t, and that many people—particularly in wealthier countries—think nothing of disposing of clothes they’ve bought after wearing them only a few times, reflects the success of decades of capitalist propaganda geared towards making disposability seem, if not a virtue then at least something that’s entirely normal and unobjectionable. The phenomenon of “fast fashion” is just the tip of a very large iceberg. 
The alienated reality of working-class life is helpful too from the perspective of a capitalist class always on the lookout for ways to sell more stuff. In his 1844 Manuscripts, Karl Marx wrote, “The more the worker spends himself [in labour], the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own”. 
Our working life exhausts our energies and dulls our minds. The consumer culture of capitalism is offered, in a similar way to how religion functions, as a kind of compensation for this loss. If you can just earn enough to buy into the latest clothing trend, upgrade your mobile phone or get a new car, then—so the non-stop bombardment of advertising tells us—all your worries will be washed away and you’ll finally be happy. The daily grind of life in capitalism empties our souls, the better to fill them with trash.
Another side of capitalism’s extraordinary productive capacity is darker still. There is a significant, and growing, section of the capitalist class engaged in producing things of a genuinely high quality and durable nature. The purpose of this class of products, though, isn’t in any way to improve our world, but to destroy it. Some capitalists produce trash. Others produce terror.
According to market research company <a href="https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/global-defense-industry-outlook-153569545.html">MarketsandMarkets</a>, in 2022 the inaptly named global defence industry was worth US$2.2 trillion. It has been enjoying a growth spurt. A powerful section of the global capitalist class is making massive profits supplying all the fighter jets, drones, missiles, ammunition and other weapons required for Israel to inflict mass death and destruction on Gaza and for Russia to do the same in Ukraine. There are even more lucrative opportunities associated with growing tensions between the US and China.
The longer the wars go on, and the greater the level of death and destruction inflicted, the more opportunities for economic growth there will be—for arms companies, at least.
If, instead of capitalism’s profit-driven, trash and terror economy, the immense capacity of global production were directed towards satisfying human needs, we could rid the world of poverty and other major problems virtually overnight. We could produce housing instead of fighter jets and bombs. And we could make public transport networks, renewable energy systems and clothing and other essentials that are built to last instead of wasting trillions on plastic trash, “fast fashion”, built-to-fail devices and the saturation advertising required to convince people they should buy this stuff in ever growing quantities.

Capitalism’s trash and terror economy

The media never tire of wheeling out stories about young people, workers, the unemployed—basically anyone not from the moneyed classes—being lazy, entitled brats who, if not treated with a stern hand by the authorities, will bring society to ruin. 
But when it comes to being lazy and entitled, the rich and powerful are by far the biggest offenders.
The response to the new “right to disconnect” law, which was approved by parliament on 12 February and will come into effect next year, illustrates the point. The law is hardly radical. It merely provides the weakest of backstops for what should already be the norm: that employees don’t have to do work-related things like answer phone calls or emails from their boss outside of the hours they are actually paid for. 
Did this stop the usual suspects from crying blue murder? Of course not. 
Sky News host and Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was among those <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/andrew-bolt/right-to-disconnect-a-perfect-sign-of-australias-decline-andrew-bolt/video/733dd4e922ff23dc6188c41f56510b6d">decrying the new law</a>, which he described as “a perfect sign of Australia’s decline” and a reflection of “this something for nothing culture that we’re developing”. Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox was also put into a spin, threatening, in response to the new law, that businesses “are indicating that flexibilities in workplaces such as leaving early to pick up the kids or going to the dentist will be cut back”. 
If anyone is the lazy, entitled brat in this situation, it’s the boss, not the worker. They’re the ones demanding they get something (someone else’s labour) for nothing. 
It’s like a toddler’s tantrum. The message from Willox is that if you don’t let your boss harangue you at any time of the day or night—whenever the mood strikes them—and do some work for free, you should expect them to stamp their feet, scream and do whatever they can to make your life a misery
It’s been the same, too, with Labor’s proposed changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts. Those in the very top income brackets are now going to get only ten extra lollipops instead of the original twelve, while the extras will be distributed among those on lower incomes, who will now get two or three extra lollipops instead of the original one or none.
This change, while not going nearly far enough, makes things a little fairer. But try telling that to the rich whingers whose large stock of extra lollipops is going to suffer a very slight cut. Taking candy from a baby is easy. Taking candy from the big babies of Australia’s rich and powerful is very hard.
When Labor’s tax changes were announced in January, Liberal Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor described them as representing a “war on aspiration”. “It’s absolutely extraordinary”, he <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/coalition-accuses-anthony-albanese-of-declaring-war-on-aspiration-ahead-of-looming-changes-to-stage-three-tax-cuts/news-story/959b4d483b39a51b08d1d05c8e007ae7">told Sky News</a>, “because if you’re not rewarding people for investing, taking risks, building businesses, creating jobs, paying taxes, then they simply won’t do it. This is what Labor doesn’t understand”. 
No doubt Taylor intended this as a defence of the rich. When you unpack it though, it’s not complimentary at all. 
<a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/inequality-on-steroids-as-bottom-90-get-just-7-of-economic-growth-since-2009/">Research released last year</a> by the Australia Institute, a public policy think tank, found that, in the decade from 2009, the top 10 percent of Australian income earners pocketed 93 percent of the wealth created by economic growth. In the years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, that trend has continued. According to <a href="https://media.oxfam.org.au/2024/01/wealth-of-three-richest-australians-has-doubled-since-2020-as-cost-of-living-pressures-for-many-continue-to-bite-oxfam/">an Oxfam report</a> on global inequality released in January, the total wealth of Australia’s 47 richest billionaires increased by 70 percent, or $120 billion, between 2020 and 2023.
Considering the windfall Australia’s richest have been enjoying, Taylor’s claim that there will be no more incentives for them to work and invest if a few thousand dollars are shaved off their tax cut makes them seem like, well, big babies. If the government dares to stem the flow of wealth and privileges accruing to Australia’s richest people even a little, then you’ll have an almighty tantrum on your hands.
When the topic is big babies, we’d be remiss for not mentioning what in recent Australian history has arguably been the most tanti-prone cohort of all: property investors. No-one is more coddled in Australia today than the 630,000 or so people who,<a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-s-most-prolific-property-investors-are-also-the-best-paid-20220809-p5b8d2"> according to Australian Taxation Office data</a>, own two or more investment properties. Not only do these people receive the entirely unearned windfall flowing from sky high rents and constantly rising house prices, but they are also the beneficiaries of various extremely generous tax concessions. 
According to an analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office, <a href="https://www.maxchandlermather.com/tax_concessions_to_property_investors_blow_out_to_39_billion">released by the Greens</a> last year, the total cost of property tax deductions and the capital gains tax discount was about $39 billion a year and will total $524 billion over the next decade. 
This is many times more than Labor is planning to spend on the construction of new social housing under the Housing Australia Future Fund. And the bulk of the money is <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-capital-gains-discount-and-negative-gearing-benefit-the-rich-and-destroy-housing-affordability/">flowing to the richest 10 percent</a> of Australians.
Handouts to big babies have helped turn the housing system into a giant money-sucking machine funnelling wealth from the bottom rungs of society to the top—from renters and working-class mortgage holders to property investors and the big banks. 
Heaven forbid that anyone should suggest that this completely unfair system should be changed even a bit. The government must continue to shovel wealth into the gaping maw of the investor class—or else!
Australia’s richest people are by far the country’s biggest whingers. Their extreme sensitivity to the suggestion that not everything should go their way warrants the label conservatives love to apply to supposedly lazy and entitled young people: snowflakes.

Rich whingers dominate Australian politics

It’s more than 50 years since scientists first came to understand that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activities could be drivers of a potentially catastrophic warming of the world’s climate. It’s more than 30 years since the issue gained serious attention and politicians began promising to do something about it.
In 1992, world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—more commonly known as the Rio Earth Summit. It was there that the first major global climate agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was signed.
In a <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-united-nations-conference-environment-and-development-rio-de-janeiro-brazil">speech to the summit</a>, US President George H.W. Bush boasted that he had “come to Rio with an action plan on climate change. It stresses energy efficiency, cleaner air, reforestation [and] new technology”. He appealed to leaders of other industrialised nations to make “a prompt start on the [Framework] Convention’s implementation ... Let us join in translating the words spoken here into concrete action to protect the planet”.
The star of the conference, however, wasn’t Bush or any of the many other world leaders and celebrities in attendance. It was a 12-year-old Canadian girl by the name of Severn Cullis-Suzuki—the daughter of scientist and environmental activist David Suzuki. Cullis-Suzuki, together with her 9-year-old sister and a few friends, had formed a group called the Environmental Children’s Organization and launched a fundraising drive to pay for their trip to Rio.
Cullis-Suzuki delivered what would come to be known as “the speech that silenced the world”. “I am here to speak for all generations to come”, she said. “I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet, because they have nowhere left to go. I am afraid to go out in the sun now, because of the holes in our ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air, because I don’t know what chemicals are in it.
“All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions ... [But] you don’t know how to bring the salmon back up in a dead stream. You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can’t bring back the forests that once grew where there is now a desert. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.”
In the aftermath of the summit, Cullis-Suzuki was feted and travelled the world as an environmental campaigner. You could have been forgiven for thinking, for a time, that her appeal had hit its mark—that while the challenges posed by environmental destruction and climate change were immense, world leaders were at least steering things in the right direction.
We know today this wasn’t the case. All the talk by Bush and other world leaders of “concrete action to protect the planet” was just for show. Behind the scenes, away from the cameras and the uncomfortable exposure to children’s fears about the future, the “business as usual” of the capitalist death-machine rolled on unabated. It rolled on through the 1997 Kyoto climate summit, through Copenhagen in 2009, Paris in 2015 and Glasgow in 2021. It rolled on despite the endless stream of words and promised actions, and despite the periodic proclamations by politicians and media that this or that breakthrough had been made.
Today, Cullis-Suzuki is in her mid-40s, and by any measure the situation for the world’s climate and environment is massively worse than it was when, as a 12-year-old, she delivered her speech in Rio.
In 1992, global CO2 emissions totalled 22.6 billion tonnes. By 2022 they had risen to 37.2 billion tonnes—an increase of 65 percent. Earth’s life-support systems—the ecosystems and natural processes on which human society depends for its survival—are everywhere in a state of crisis, if not outright collapse. Extinction rates are accelerating further from already record highs, with up to a million species likely to be lost in the coming decades. 
The world’s atmosphere and its oceans, lakes and rivers are being polluted with ever increasing quantities of toxic chemicals, plastics and other detritus of human society, with devastating consequences for both environmental and human health.
In the past two years, we’ve witnessed an accumulation of signs that the climate crisis may be accelerating beyond what scientists’ already worrying models have predicted. This year is set to be the world’s hottest on record by a significant margin. The global mean temperature for 2023 is currently sitting at 1.46 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, only fractionally below the 1.5 degree “safe limit” that was established as a global target at the Paris summit in 2015.
A recent paper by James Hanson—famous, among other things, for being one of the first to sound the alarm on global warming in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVz67cwmxTM">testimony to the US Senate</a> in 1988—argues that scientists have underestimated how fast the planet is warming. <a href="https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889">The paper</a>, published in Oxford Open Climate Change, found that Earth is likely to pass 1.5 degrees of warming by 2030 and reach 2 degrees before 2050. This is a level of warming that, according to scientists, risks triggering feedback loops such as the release of large amounts of methane from the Arctic permafrost that could propel us into a “hothouse Earth” scenario of runaway warming that could threaten the viability of human civilisation as a whole.
In a rational society, these developments would have been greeted by those in power with growing alarm and recognition of the need for rapid change. We, however, do not live in a rational society. We live in a capitalist system that, day by day, is descending further into a state of irrationality and barbarism at every level.
Despite the growing scale of destruction, the response of global leaders in politics and business remains more or less the same as it was in the 1990s. When the need arises—such as when gathered for the latest global climate talk-fest—they proclaim their enthusiasm for a green transition in which, just like the US plan that George H.W. Bush boasted about in Rio, things like “energy efficiency, cleaner air, reforestation, [and] new technology” will somehow magically solve everything in the near future.
If anything, there’s been a regression on this front. It’s hard to imagine the Rio Earth Summit having been hosted by the head of a major global oil company. Yet that’s exactly what we’ve seen with the latest UN Conference of the Parties summit—COP28—which took place in early December in the Persian Gulf petro-state of the United Arab Emirates and was hosted by Sultan Al Jaber, chair of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). 
Predictably, Al Jaber used the summit to argue against the phasing out of fossil fuels, saying it would<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/03/back-into-caves-cop28-president-dismisses-phase-out-of-fossil-fuels"> “take the world back into caves”</a>. ADNOC produced 2.7 million barrels of oil a day in 2021 and plans to double that by 2027.
How could this have been allowed to happen? How is it that Severn Cullis-Suzuki’s 1992 “speech that silenced the world” could today be used in school curriculums and at corporate retreats as an example of “convincing communication” when, if you go by what’s happened since, it convinced none of the political or business leaders in the room that day of anything at all? 
People talk about Cullis-Suzuki as the 1990s version of Greta Thunberg. It’s a good comparison. Both were children who very capably made highly charged and emotional, but also entirely rational, pleas for world leaders to deliver the change we need to avoid catastrophic climate and environmental breakdown. Both were, initially at least in Thunberg’s case, widely celebrated and became famous the world over as the “voice of their generation”. And both were, when you look at the broader sweep of history, entirely ignored.
The climate and environment movements themselves share some of the blame for this. An excess of credulity and trust in those in power has arguably been the greatest weakness. People have been far too prepared to believe leaders like Bush, or today the likes of our own Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, when they declare their commitment to a green transition that is always somehow just around the corner. 
Participants in these movements, particularly at a leadership level, have been much too inclined to regard politicians as good faith actors making decisions based on what, by their lights, is in the public interest. Seen in this way, it may appear as if the problem remains one of ignorance—that they simply don’t understand the science and therefore the true cost of their inaction. This might, at a stretch, have been true of some in the 1990s, but it makes no sense at all today. The science of climate change is clear, and politicians have no shortage of intelligent people to explain it to them. 
Another thing that, in recent decades, has hobbled the climate and environment movements is what Indian activist and writer Arundhati Roy has called <a href="https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/globalism/arundhati-roy-the-ngo-ization-of-resistance/">“the NGO-isation of resistance”</a>. Already in the 1990s, there existed a significant number of well-funded global environmental organisations, the leaders of which had ready access to the corridors of power. Over subsequent decades that sector has continued to grow, and is represented in Australia by organisations like the Australian Conservation Foundation. 
The multimillion-dollar budgets of such organisations—used to fund, in Roy’s words, a kind of “resistance” that is “well-mannered, reasonable, [and] salaried ... with a few perks thrown in”—depends on the contributions of wealthy donors. This dependency represents both a disincentive to radicalism, and an incentive to lay claim regularly to “wins” that supposedly demonstrate the organisation’s effectiveness. 
Their existence is bound up with the idea that there’s no need for any radical reshaping of the economy and society and that change can come via the “proper channels” of lobbying and polite discussion. That, suffice to say, makes them very useful to politicians like Albanese wanting to gain a green rubber-stamp for their latest “ambitious” climate non-plan.
If we’re to have any hope of halting the world’s slide towards total climate and environmental breakdown, we must dispel all illusions about what’s going on. When you strip it back to the fundamentals, it’s all very clear. The immense and ever-increasing profits being generated by the global capitalist class from the exploitation of the world’s human and natural resources would be threatened by any serious effort to transform society in the interests of sustainability and a safe climate. The people who run the world—both the captains of industry themselves and politicians who serve them—are therefore determined to preserve the status quo as long as possible.
These people are psychopaths. They may well nod along to emotional appeals from children to preserve the planet for future generations. But their vision of the future is one in which tens, if not hundreds, of millions of children will suffer and die for the sake of capitalist power and profit. If the past 30 years of failure on climate have shown anything, it’s that no amount of lobbying, rational argument or polite discussion is going to convince them to change course. We need to build a movement so powerful and disruptive to the operations of the capitalist system that it either forces our leaders to act or forces them out of the way.

Thirty years of failure on climate: How did it come to this?

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, the response from Western leaders was immediate and unequivocal. Condemnation was heaped upon Russian President Vladimir Putin for his brutal military advance, which, as tanks rolled along the highways in a first thrust towards Kyiv, was already imposing a devastating toll on the Ukrainian people.
Within days, the United Nations had passed a motion condemning the attack. NATO convened an emergency meeting and promised to support the Ukrainian resistance. The US Congress hastily passed a bill to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/09/1085509937/house-advances-13-6-billion-in-ukraine-aid-along-with-government-funding">release more than US$13.6 billion in aid</a>, a figure that by 31 July this year had <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-much-aid-the-u-s-has-sent-to-ukraine-in-6-charts">grown to $76.8 billion</a>. Australia has chipped in, to date, a total of A$910 million.
In a <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/09/21/remarks-by-president-biden-and-president-volodymyr-zelenskyy-of-ukraine-after-expanded-bilateral-meeting/#:~:text=And%20as%20I%20made%20clear,our%20commitment%20to%20those%20values.">speech in September</a>, US President Joe Biden explained the rationale. “The entire world has a stake”, he said, “in making sure that no nation, no aggressor is allowed to take a neighbour’s territory by force”. Other Western leaders have expressed similar sentiments. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/24/anthony-albanese-says-russia-must-end-ukraine-invasion-as-pro-putin-protesters-march-on-kirribilli-house">said in June</a>: 
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegal, is a breach of international law. The people of Ukraine are showing incredible courage in fighting not just for their national sovereignty, but fighting for the international rule of law to be upheld.”
In October 2022, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, <a href="https://x.com/vonderleyen/status/1582630271287021570?s=20">spoke out against</a> “Russia’s attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity”. These, she said, “are war crimes. Cutting off men, women, children of [sic] water, electricity and heating with winter coming—these are acts of pure terror. And we have to call it as such”.
Von der Leyen was right. These are war crimes. Take the terrible siege of Mariupol, which lasted from February to May last year. The city was surrounded and bombarded continuously for weeks on end. Its residents were denied electricity, heat, water, food and medical supplies. “It’s a complete catastrophe”, one resident <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mariupol-suffers-siege-russia-ukraine-war-goes-rcna19454">told NBC News</a>. “The shells hit anywhere and everywhere. There is no safe place in the city.”
If something is a war crime in one place, it seems logical that it would be a war crime in other places too. To the extent that something like “international law” exists, that’s how it’s supposed to work. And, indeed, when it comes to Ukraine, Western leaders like Biden, Albanese and von der Leyen talk as if their concerns about Russia’s crimes are based on a commitment to universal principles and norms. 
In recent weeks, however, as Israel has carried out exactly the same kind of crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza, we’ve seen just how flexible these supposed “principles” really are.
There’s a clear correlation between the plight of the Ukrainians fighting off Russian invasion and that of the Palestinian people and their resistance to the brutal occupation and apartheid policies of Israel. Like the Ukrainians, the Palestinians are fighting for their national rights against a vastly more powerful and well-armed adversary bent on crushing them. Like the Ukrainians, their land has been invaded and occupied and their cities have been laid siege to and bombed into rubble.
In fact, the crimes committed against the Palestinians by Israel over more than 70 years are of an order of magnitude greater than anything carried out, so far, by Russia in Ukraine. The establishment of Israel in 1948 was accompanied by a genocidal campaign in which thousands of Palestinians were killed and hundreds of thousands forced to flee, the vast majority never to return. Palestinians call it the Nakba (catastrophe). Since then, Israel has waged a continuous campaign of expansion, corralling the Palestinians who remain into ever smaller and more tightly controlled enclaves.
To say Western leaders are reluctant to make the very clear and logical connection between Ukraine and Palestine would be an understatement. Not only do they not make the connection, they have entirely turned the truth on its head, arguing in effect that the Palestinians, rather than the Israelis, are the ones doing the oppressing. 
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attack on 7 October, we heard again and again about Israel’s “right to defend itself”. With Biden leading the way, politicians across the West gave a green light to what came next: the attempt to inflict a second Nakba on the Palestinians in Gaza by carpet-bombing their homes and demanding that more than 1 million people relocate to the south. This would be as if, in the context of Ukraine, Western leaders had given their full support to Russia’s invasion on the basis that it was merely “defending itself”—<a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/29/europe/ukraine-azov-movement-far-right-intl-cmd/index.html">as Putin claimed at the time</a>—from the threat posed by the militants of the Azov regiment, known for its affiliation with the fascist right.
In a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/20/joe-biden-tv-address-to-nation-oval-office-speech-vladimir-putin-hamas-aid-for-israel-ukraine">19 October speech</a>, Biden made a direct connection between Hamas and Putin, arguing that “they both want to completely annihilate a neighbouring democracy”. To the extent there’s an “annihilation” going on in Palestine, though, it’s being carried out by Israel against the Palestinians. This has been the case for more than 70 years. It was clear before 7 October, and it’s even clearer in light of what’s happened since.
From the standpoint of the kind of universal principles and values Western leaders claim to adhere to, it’s the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who should be supported. The fact that the likes of Biden and Albanese have instead backed Israel—even going so far as to block motions pursued through the United Nations aimed at bringing a halt to the massacre in Gaza—tells you everything you need to know about how empty all their talk of human rights and the “international rule of law” really is.

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