In a public farce, the Liberal federal party room officially abandoned its support for reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Despite the hue and cry in mainstream politics, Australia’s climate trajectory is unlikely to be affected by the decision. As Adam Morton noted in the Guardian, at least there’s some honesty in the decision—the Liberals and Nationals never supported net zero anyway. 
The significance of the Liberals’ abandonment of net zero can be understood as a symbol of bigger political dynamics. It’s a victory for the conservative factions of the Liberals in their battle to pull the party further to the political right. And it’s an indication of the impact that the global far right is having on Australian conservatives. 
Net zero targets took off as a global greenwashing fad in 2021, supported by former US President Joe Biden, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. 
Net zero never meant zero carbon emissions, or even reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it involves “offsetting” emissions: net zero is the magical moment when the amount of carbon dioxide released is roughly equal to the amount being “offset”. 
There are three main problems with the approach.
First, the offsetting technologies do not work—at least, not anywhere near the level needed to offset the billions of tonnes of CO2 emitted every year.
Second, even if these technologies did work, the net zero approach assumes it is possible to reduce the effects of greenhouse gases on the environment by simply swapping them in and out, like a Catholic trading repentance for sin each Sunday. 
In reality, the myriad consequences of fossil fuel extraction, refinement and combustion and the subsequent impacts of rising temperatures on the environment and human society are impossible to measure and contain within a spreadsheet equation. 
Last, net zero was designed to allow countries to “commit” to targets that require no disruption to big business profits. They can be agreed on without disrupting production in the coal, gas or oil industries. That the target was unveiled by former PM Scott Morrison four years ago speaks volumes. Morrison, champion of the “gas-fired recovery”, famous for fondling coal in parliament and fleeing to Hawaii while the country burned, viewed net zero as a veil for covering his crimes against the planet. 
Given that the net zero target was meaningless to begin with, but provided a modicum of green cover, it’s reasonable to question why the Liberals would make such a fuss about dropping the policy. As support for it has become somewhat synonymous with action on climate change, the prevailing opinion among political commentators is that dropping net zero is electoral suicide. But there’s more to it. 
For one, polling conducted by the Resolve Political Monitor in early November suggests that public opinion on net zero has shifted since 2021, most notably among Liberal voters. Overall, almost a third of voters preferred ditching net zero; just 17 percent of Coalition voters indicated they want Australia to keep the target and do everything it can to reach it. Among One Nation and National Party voters, support for net zero was even lower. 
It’s not hard to see the electoral logic for the right. Ditching net zero will likely cost the Liberals moderate city voters, but it’s part of a broader right-wing political program aimed at winning back votes from the likes of One Nation, which is polling at record highs. 
Whether this is a viable strategy remains uncertain, as the Liberals have continued to haemorrhage votes to their right since ditching net zero. But for people like Andrew Hastie, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Angus Taylor, there’s more to politics than immediate electoral victory. This confounds mainstream commentators, who have largely maintained since Labor’s 2022 election victory that the Liberal Party must reorient to the moderate centre, cut back on the culture wars and resolve factional bickering if it is to return to government. 
This is not what is happening. Dumping net zero is only the latest step in the long march of the party’s hard right and conservative factions, part of a very public battle to shape the party in their own image. These are people with a vision for society, one that fits with the new hard-right norms of the Western world, and they are seeking to transform the Liberal Party into a vehicle for the world they want to see.
Perhaps the worst outcome of the Liberal Party dumping net zero is the greenwashing service it offers the Labor government. The government’s net zero plan is a hoax, designed to cover for its commitment to expanding fossil fuel production. But with the Coalition as the perfect foil, Labor can carry on its climate wrecking beneath a mask of lesser evilism.
Undoubtedly, Labor’s record of deceit on climate policy and net zero has helped to build widespread scepticism about climate action and renewable energy. Amid the cost-of-living crisis and rising energy prices, in which Labor has overseen the destruction of working-class living standards, the right has exploited net zero scepticism by playing to concerns about the affordability of renewables and linking renewables to the agenda of “woke elites”.
This emerging common sense is far from inevitable. Tackling the climate crisis is fundamentally in the interest of working-class people across the country, who already face the uneven burden of climate disasters. To turn the situation around, we need to ditch the pro-business sham of net zero. Tackling climate change requires challenging the profits of fossil fuel bosses, bringing the fossil fuel industry into public hands and massively expanding public investment in renewable energy.

Lily Campbell

Understanding the net zero circus

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.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

The new climate denialism: Labor’s Net Zero Plan

The federal Labor government’s extension of Woodside’s North West Shelf Project (NWS) in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, allowing Australia’s largest natural gas facility to operate until 2070, is an environmental disaster. 
Over its extended lifetime, the NWS will produce ten times more carbon dioxide emissions than the whole of Australia did in 2024, according to the Climate Council, which describes the extension as a “carbon bomb”. The approval also comes just weeks after Woodside spilt 16,000 litres of petroleum products into the ocean near the Ningaloo reef, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/28/woodside-toxic-spill-near-ningaloo-reef-world-heritage-area-under-investigation">reported by the Guardian</a>.
Environment Minister Murray Watt approved the extension less than 30 days after Labor’s federal election victory—faster than the Coalition had promised to move had it been elected. Watt was not even obliged to consider the climate impact when assessing the proposal, since the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBCA) does not require it.
That is thanks to Labor’s Roger Cook, premier of WA. Cook intervened late last year to prevent the EPBCA from being changed to include climate considerations in the environmental assessment process. In doing so, Cook did the bidding of the state’s mining and resources capitalists, and it’s already paying off.
What did need to be considered by both the federal and state Labor governments was the potential impact of the extension on nearby significant heritage sites. Murujuga, the area encompassing the Burrup Peninsula and surrounding islands on the Pilbara coast, is home to a rich and ancient collection of Indigenous rock art, some of which is estimated to be tens of thousands of years old. It’s also where the NWS natural gas processing facility is located.
An 800-page report on the effects of pollution on the Murujuga rock art was produced for the WA state government last year. It was made public less than a week before the NWS extension decision, along with an eight-page summary document. The summary says “the research indicates that the current levels of the pollutants of most concern for the rock art are lower” than the level that puts the art at risk of continuing damage.
Cook himself told reporters days before Watt’s decision that gas extraction has had no effects on the rock art, and that would continue to be the case.
Leading scientists say this is a lie. Speaking at a press conference on the steps of the state parliament, Benjamin Smith, professor of archaeology at the University of Western Australia, said that the government’s summary document “contradicts directly the findings inside the report”. Smith continued: “This report contains very serious evidence that industrial emissions are currently damaging the rock art at Murujuga”.
An anonymous scientist involved in the rock art monitoring program told the ABC’s 7.30
program: “The claim that we established that no further damage is occurring to the rocks is simply false”.
According to the ABC, Curtin University’s Emeritus Professor Adrian Baddeley, one of the report’s authors, accused the state government of “unacceptable interference” to modify a graph from the report in the summary. The change removed a line showing that “five of the [rock art] monitoring sites were experiencing pollutant levels above” the level that puts the art at risk.
This apparent cover-up would not be the first time the Cook state government has chosen to sacrifice Indigenous cultural sites for the interests of the mining and resources industry. In 2023, his government <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/wa-labor-capitulates-racist-campaign-against-aboriginal-heritage-law">repealed the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act</a>, which had been in effect for just one month, bowing to a racist campaign by farming, mining and pastoral interests.
Instead, the 1972 Aboriginal Heritage Act applies, which allows the state government to override heritage concerns due to “public interest”, with traditional owners given no right to review this decision. It was under this Act that Rio Tinto blew up two sites sacred to the Pinti Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples at Juukan Gorge in 2020.
Despite various gestures and phrases about “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, state and federal Labor governments are clearly committed to the fossil fuel industry. The North West Shelf Project is part of the Burrup Hub, a mega fossil fuel project involving facilities on the Burrup Peninsula for processing liquified natural gas taken from offshore gas fields. If completed, the Conservation Council of WA says the Hub will be the most polluting project ever developed in Australia.
Labor is willing to allow the destruction of priceless Indigenous cultural heritage and the further destabilisation of the planet’s climate so that the capitalists in charge of Woodside and other fossil fuel companies can continue to rake in billions in profit. We have to resist this. The Burrup Hub must be stopped.

Danica Rachel

Labor sacrifices Indigenous cultural sites, and the climate, for fossil fuel profits—again

“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

Students at the Australian National University in Canberra have defeated an attempt by campus Labor clubs to abolish the environment collective. 
Almost 300 students attended a mass meeting on 26 March, at which the new ANU Students’ Association executive, representing both factions of the ALP student clubs, tried to amend the constitution to create a committee in place of the collective, strip 80 percent of its budget, place the new committee under strict executive oversight and strip students of the right to vote at meetings. 
The pretext for such a brazen assault on environmental activism came from an audit conducted by a consultancy firm last year. The firm, NFP Success, specialises in advising not-for-profit organisations on how to “reach new levels of excellence”. 
Yet student unions are not like other NGOs. Nor should they be. Student unions are activist bodies steeped in a democratic culture and shaped by leading fights for justice. The environment collective has a 50-year history of supporting campaigns such as the anti-war movement when the US and Australia invaded Iraq, the Woomera Detention Centre refugee breakout, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the climate strikes and the Palestine solidarity movement. 
Auditors like NFP Success have no sympathy for this history, as its recommendations show. While the Gaza Solidarity Encampment was still active last year, its governance review claimed that there had been “too much focus on pro-Palestine campaigning” and argued: “[I]t is crucial the president avoids becoming too involved in divisive political campaigns”. 
The new ANUSA executive has its own reasons for opposing the environment collective. The ALP student clubs are stacked with careerist apparatchiks loyally promoting party policy, such as support for fossil fuel expansion and Israel’s war on Gaza. The consultant’s report provided a pretext for them to go on the offensive. They froze the collective’s funds earlier this year and drafted constitutional changes to abolish it. This semester, they have publicly argued that students can’t be trusted to run the collective. 
Our victory was not guaranteed. The traditions of activist student unionism are not as strong as they used to be. And anti-activist arguments cloaked in legalism can always find an audience on university campuses. The ANUSA executive had the resources of the student union behind it, sending out several official all-student emails. It also had sizeable social networks through which to call in favours. Supporters of the ANUSA executive were even found to be bribing students with offers of free beers in exchange for their votes.
The fightback coalition included Socialist Alternative members, students from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, the No Cuts at ANU campaign and, of course, members of the environment collective. 
We handed out leaflets around the campus, put up posters, made announcements in lectures, called around stay-in-touch lists and built networks through WhatsApp group chats. 
We only needed 25 percent of the vote to defeat the attack, but we won 42 percent. Importantly, our vote represented students who were won to a vision of left-wing, democratic, activist student unionism. 
Those traditions are more important now than ever as we stare down historic staff cuts, the threat of a rising far right inspired by Donald Trump, and the rolling catastrophes of climate disaster and war.

Nick Reich

How we saved the ANU environment collective

On a drizzly Sunday morning in early March, around 200 people gathered in Yarraville Gardens to protest air pollution in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Kids held placards that read “Clean our air”, “Protect our health” and “Filter the stacks”. 
The protest was organised by the Maribyrnong Truck Action Group (MTAG) to demand the state government and Transurban (the private company building the West Gate Tunnel) install proper filtration systems on the tunnel’s ventilation stacks. Without filtration, the ventilation stacks are nothing more than primitive chimneys releasing untreated exhaust fumes. MTAG has been organising protests like this for decades. Martin Wurt, rally chair and MTAG President, told the rally he could recall taking his now 30-year-old son to these rallies as a child.
As a transport, industry and logistics hub, Melbourne's inner west is subject to very high transport emissions, especially from trucks. The West Gate Tunnel will reroute trucks away from residential streets in the area. But the toxic diesel exhaust fumes of an expected 16,000 daily trucks will be released into Footscray, Seddon, South Kingsville, Altona North, Newport and Spotswood.
The technology and infrastructure to install filtration systems in the vent stacks already exist and could be used. But former planning minister Richard Wynne decided not to impose this costly burden on the two major construction companies building the tunnel, instead opting to gamble with residents’ health, vaguely committing to future filtration installation only “if needed”. 
Diesel fumes are a group one carcinogen, according to the World Health Organization, on par with cigarette smoke and asbestos. No exposure to diesel fumes is “safe”, and any dose causes damage. They contain a cocktail of at least 450 toxic chemicals, including arsenic, benzene dioxins, formaldehyde and the two most carcinogenic chemicals ever discovered, 3-nitrobenzanthrone and 1,8-dinitropyrene. They cause inflammation, oxidative stress, immunosuppression, and mutagenicity in cells. The ultrafine particulate matter is small enough to be absorbed through the lungs into the blood, which delivers it to our organs, including the brain.
The urgent necessity of measures that will improve air quality is evidenced by a shocking litany of health issues caused by air pollution impacting the inner west. According to Social Health Atlas data from 2019, the City of Maribyrnong has a 26 percent higher risk of premature mortality from respiratory diseases, a 41 percent higher risk of heart disease and a 40 percent higher risk of stroke compared to the national average. It has the highest rate of stroke of anywhere in Victoria, despite having a relatively young population and low smoking and obesity rates. 
Children are among the most vulnerable to the harmful effects of air pollution. A 2020 report by the state government revealed that childhood asthma rates are higher in Melbourne’s west than anywhere else in the state, and hospital admission rates for respiratory illness among children in Maribyrnong are 70 percent higher than the Victorian average. In May 2023, the Maribyrnong City Council voted unanimously to declare an official health emergency. 
Rally speakers highlighted the ongoing neglect of the western suburbs by state governments, which allow greedy capitalists to treat the area as a toxic dumping ground, leaving residents to deal with the consequences. The area sees frequent factory fires that blanket surrounding suburbs in toxic smoke, including the chemical factory fire in Derrimut last year which took four days to extinguish. Brooklyn, a suburb further west, is Melbourne’s most polluted.
The prioritisation of profit over people is doing immeasurable damage to human health. Residents of Melbourne’s west have been neglected for decades and deserve better. 
To show your support for this campaign, <a href="https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-west-gate-tunnel-vent-stacks-from-poisoning-us">sign the MTAG petition</a> to demand the installation of filtration systems on the West Gate Tunnel ventilation stacks.

Ella Sjodin

Pollution is killing people in Melbourne’s west

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

Connor Knight

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

Los Angeles is an icon of global capitalism. Home to 18 million people and some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world, this sprawling city is a mecca of production and exchange. As the seat of the American entertainment industry, it is unsurpassed in its cultural influence. 
Yet for more than a week now, large parts of the City of Dreams have been transformed by out-of-control wildfires into a nightmarish inferno. That predictable and preventable fires have overwhelmed the second largest city in the United States is an indictment of the system that Los Angeles has come to symbolise.
The worst of the many fires burning around the city is the Palisades fire, which has so far consumed nearly 24,000 acres [9,700 ha], including most of the coastal Pacific Palisades neighbourhood with a population of more than 23,000. The Eaton fire has consumed almost 15,000 acres, including much of the neighbourhood of Altadena. In total, fires have burned through approximately 40,000 acres in the Los Angeles area—an area larger than the entire city of San Francisco. One Pacific Palisades resident who was forced to evacuate and witness the fires consume her neighbourhood <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ag/podcast/la-fires-it-was-like-watching-the-end-of-the-world/id1715473158?i=1000683863231">told</a>
the BBC, “It was like watching the end of the world”.
More than 170,000 people living near the Palisades and Eaton fires currently remain under evacuation orders or warnings. Many have been forced to make the heartbreaking decision to flee their homes as embers surrounded them, with some becoming trapped in their vehicles. Twenty-seven deaths have been confirmed, but many more victims are likely to be discovered among the smouldering ruins. What’s more, many millions have been exposed to the toxic smoke, which blankets the city, with health consequences that will be felt for years to come.
Images and videos shared widely on social media show whole neighbourhoods and city blocks burned to the ground. Tens of thousands of people are now returning to the burned-out ruins of what was once home to their entire lives. One Altadena <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000009916693/los-angeles-residents-burnt-homes-fires-.html">resident</a>
told the New York Times, “The flames have consumed all our dreams of years here. Everything has turned to ashes”.
This unfolding catastrophe is not merely a “natural” disaster. It has been driven in large part by the irrationalism of an economic and political system that subordinates all social needs to the logic of profits and capital accumulation. The wildfires illustrate the inability of capitalism to plan properly for and deal with the realities of the environment on which it depends: from climate change to urban planning to basic fire and water management.
Climate change—driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels that are integral to the global capitalist system—intensified the inferno. LA already has a uniquely fire-prone geography, with powerful winds that fuel wildfires flowing out of the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah toward the southern California coast. These Santa Ana winds push dry desert air over the mountains and accelerate as they blow into canyons and valleys. Los Angeles County and much of southern California have been in climate change-induced drought conditions, having recorded no significant rainfall for eight months. Longer dry seasons in southern California have not only aggravated the fire danger but also reduced available water supplies and complicated efforts to develop countermeasures. One recent study found that human-caused climate change resulted in a 320 percent increase in burned areas in California from 1996 to 2021. 
Capitalist urban development has transformed LA’s unique geography into the wildfire capital of the world. In his seminal essay <a href="https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/">“The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”</a>, American Marxist Mike Davis argued that the wealthy, and the political establishment that serves them, are to blame for these increasingly disastrous fires.
In what can only be described as the opposite of rational urban planning, property developers and wealthy homeowners have fought for their “right” to expand into the scenic but fire-prone foothills of Los Angeles, along the coastlines of Malibu, with the expectation that the government will protect their investments. The southern Californian fire policy of “total fire suppression”, intended to protect these houses, in fact means that there is more fuel to burn when fires do start, which they inevitably do. “At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea”, writes Davis. “A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.” The current wildfires are the latest episode in what Davis calls fire “holocausts” that regularly (and, with climate change, more frequently) wipe out whole sections of LA.
In the aftermath of each fire, government resources have been swiftly mobilised to rebuild the fire-damaged homes of the wealthy, while fires in Los Angeles’ downtown slum tenements received comparatively little support or attention. “Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills?”, asks Davis. “Because of a perverse fact: after every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed ... Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, ‘still it burns.’” 
Local firefighting resources have been completely overwhelmed by the current inferno, handicapped by insufficient numbers and a lack of water pressure caused by high demand in fire hydrants. Firefighters have been mobilised from neighbouring states like Nevada, Oregon and Washington, as well as Mexico, to support local resources that have been depleted. An estimated one-third of those deployed to fight the inferno are hyper-exploited prison inmates who are paid as little as 16 to 74 cents per hour. As one inmate told Al Jazeera: “Sending us to fight fires was abusive. We preferred it to staying in prison”.
Adding to the problem are recent budget cuts for firefighting services imposed by Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. Last summer, Bass cut funding for the fire department by US$17.6 million, leaked documents revealing that Bass recently proposed an additional US$49 million in budget cuts. In December, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley prophetically <a href="https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/la-widlfires-budget-cuts-palisades-fire/3598438/">warned</a>
that “the [budget] reduction ... has severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires”. Whether $17.6 million extra would have made a tangible difference to the outcome of these fires is difficult to determine, but it indicates a governmental complacency about the threat that defies science and logic. 
Class inequalities also affected how fire resources were and are used, with the wealthy using scarce resources to protect their assets without regard for the wider firefighting effort. Meanwhile, LA’s poorer communities have been left defenceless against the fires, with many of the dead older and disabled people who were not able to leave their homes.
None but the wealthiest will be able to recover fully from the damages and displacement caused by the fires. Many will be added to the growing number of homeless, who numbered more than 75,000 last year in Los Angeles County. The problem is compounded by insurance companies’ decisions to cancel hundreds of homeowners’ policies in Pacific Palisades last summer. State Farm, one of the biggest in California and the US, cited the area as high-risk and unprofitable due to the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires brought on by climate change. 
Toxic smoke from the fires now blankets the entire region, exposing the 18 million people who live in the LA metropolitan area to the effects of inhaling carcinogenic particles. And it will be the poorest and most vulnerable who will suffer the worst effects, such as the tens of thousands of homeless people with no protection from the hazardous air as well as the many workers who can’t afford to stay home to avoid the smoke. People with underlying health issues, as well as older people and children, are particularly vulnerable. Carlos Gould, an environmental health scientist at the University of California San Diego, told the New York Times that the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/climate/wildfire-smoke-risks.html">levels of wildfire smoke</a> in LA could be raising daily mortality by 5 to 15 percent. 
Meanwhile, US media coverage of the fires has tended to avoid mentioning climate change as a factor in the disaster, at the same time as it repeats right-wing conspiracy theories peddled by President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters as they seek to capitalise on the crisis. These include the claim that diversity, equity and inclusiveness programs are behind the shortage of firefighters and that environmental protection programs are the root cause of the water shortages. In doing so, they deliberately divert attention from those responsible for this catastrophe: the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, property developers and wealthy homeowners that have transformed LA into a giant tinder box and the entire political establishment, which supports the rich whilst cutting the essential public services needed to manage and prevent such tragedies. Not surprising, given their policy of “drill, baby, drill” to increase domestic fossil fuel production. 
The LA wildfires have global implications. Capitalist-fuelled climate change is driving more intense and frequent extreme weather across the world that will result in increasingly devastating disasters such as the one unfolding in LA. This is particularly true for countries like Australia, with a climate conducive to bushfires and urban centres vastly under-resourced to deal with the threat. As urban development <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-fastest-population-growth-in-the-wests-wildland-urban-interface-is-in-areas-most-vulnerable-to-wildfires-173410">expands into </a>wild lands, the probability of fires and the property potentially exposed to fire increase, creating a feedback loop of escalating wildfire risk. 
It is not enough to say that climate change needs to be reversed. Even with drastic action now, the majority of the planet will still be living with the consequences of a rapidly warming planet. In the absence of planning and rational decision making, crises like the LA wildfires are going to become increasingly worse and more normalised.
Only a democratic and rationally planned society is capable of dealing with the threat posed by climate change and the social catastrophes that it will produce. Decisions should be made by the many millions who produce the wealth of society but don’t control it and therefore can’t use it to protect themselves from the worst effects of climate crisis. They are the same people who could reorganise wealth production to make it sustainable and geared towards meeting need, not simply accumulating wealth for the sake of it. 
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is home to 53 billionaires, whose combined wealth totals US$222 billion. The US$222 billion held by Los Angeles billionaires could cover the estimated US$150 billion in damage caused by the fires and provide immediate relief to those affected. 
A democratically and rationally planned society run by the working class could immediately abolish the fossil-fuel industry and direct resources toward building renewable energy and reversing the effects of climate change. Urban development could be rationally planned rather than subject to the whims of the wealthy without regard for the realities of the natural world. And rather than cutting and chronically underfunding essential public resources like firefighters, a society run by the working class would allocate the resources needed to prevent and respond to the threat of wildfires and other climate change-induced catastrophes.
Unless we fight for socialism—a democratic and rationally planned society run by the working class based on genuine human needs—the Los Angeles wildfires provide a window into our terrifying future.

Robert Narai

LA wildfires show the future of capitalism

Seven thousand people mobilised for the People’s Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port in Newcastle, organised by climate activist group Rising Tide over four days in November. Despite unprecedented efforts by the NSW government to stop the “protestival”, hundreds took to the water. The blockade had three demands: the immediate cancellation of all new fossil fuel projects, an end to all Newcastle coal exports and a 78 percent tax on fossil fuel exports to fund a just transition and pay for climate loss and damage. 
Newcastle is the biggest coal export port in the world, shipping around 150 million tonnes annually—equivalent to 15 percent of the world’s coal. Earlier in November, investigative journalist Peter Cronau <a>reported</a> that coal from Newcastle had arrived at Hadera port near Tel Aviv, likely to supply Israel’s largest power station. It’s hard to imagine a better place to blockade in the interests of humanity and the planet. 
Since its establishment in 2005, Rising Tide has organised thirteen actions to block the port’s shipping channel. Last year, 3,000 people blocked exports for 32 hours, and 109 people were arrested. 
This year, the NSW government significantly dialled up the repression. Police took Rising Tide to the Supreme Court to challenge the group’s application to hold a public assembly, which would have protected activists from prosecution for 30 hours. Justice Desmond Fagan took the side of the police and the coal industry, determining that the planned interruption to the busy port “goes far beyond what the people affected should be expected to tolerate”. 
Unsatisfied with this victory, the NSW Labor government went even further in its slavish defence of the coal industry. On 15 November, Rising Tide organisers received a letter from Transport for NSW detailing plans for an unprecedented four-day exclusion zone around Newcastle harbour, banning all unauthorised persons and vessels from the water. Anyone found to be in breach could face an on-the-spot fine of up to $1,100. 
Rising Tide encouraged supporters to join them on the water from 3pm, Thursday, 21 November, (two hours before the exclusion zone was due to kick in) for what could be the only opportunity to get onto the water. But at 4pm, while out paddling, we received news that the exclusion zone had been overturned in the Supreme Court. A huge cheer rippled across the water, while supporters on the beach blasted Queen’s “We Are the Champions”. The Minns government had tried to use the Marine Safety Act improperly to criminalise peaceful protest—but failed. 
As 21-year-old Rising Tide plaintiff Alexa Stuart told <a>the Guardian</a>, “The NSW government was attempting to criminalise peaceful protest, but the real criminals here are the coal and gas companies who are continuing to put profit above all else and burn my future and the futures of all young people”.
The following morning, I walked to Horseshoe Beach to discover that police had implemented their backup plan. A series of yellow buoys marked out the perimeter of the shipping lane. Unmarked matte black boats, manned by cops in black balaclavas, remained on constant patrol. They were accompanied by cops on jet skis, a twenty-metre-long patrol vessel, several drones, a helicopter and horses on land. From a speaker system on the shoreline, they barked threats of immediate arrest for anyone who dared to cross the buoys. 
On Friday, these bullying tactics were largely successful. On Saturday, a few brave individuals were arrested for crossing the buoys. But with most remaining in the state-sanctioned swimming pool, coal ships the size of skyscrapers continued to pass through, flanked by those balaclava-clad cops. Frustration swelled at the camp. 
Then on Sunday morning, our side pushed back. Hundreds of kayakers took the channel, forcing a coal boat to turn away and closing the port for four hours. Later in the day, when a ship was scheduled to come in, hundreds again occupied the channel. In an enormous display of force, police cleared the channel by making more than 100 arrests and herding others back behind the buoys. According to a <a>Rising Tide Instagram post</a>, at least 40 were charged under draconian NSW anti-protest laws, which threaten fines of up to $22,000 and up to two years in prison. The actions of police sent a clear message: the state is prepared to protect and serve coal above people at all costs.
Mass direct actions like The People’s Blockade are important. According to the World Meteorological Organisation, 2024 is on track to be the warmest year yet, surpassing 1.5° C above the pre-industrial average. But in the face of climate catastrophe, governments across the world are pressing down harder on the fossil fuel accelerator. Since coming to power, the Albanese government has approved 28 new coal and gas projects. Australia is the second-largest climate polluter in the world when emissions from fossil exports are included, according to a recent report from UNSW Australian Human Rights Institute. 
The outlook is no less grim at a global level. The UN’s latest annual climate summit, COP29, has once again offered nothing but a veneer of legitimacy over the failure of global elites to ensure a livable future for the planet. The scale and speed of the climate action we need will require more mass resistance to those who profit enormously from planetary destruction.

Turning the tide: the fight to blockade the world’s largest coal port

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

Understanding the net zero circus

The new climate denialism: Labor’s Net Zero Plan

Labor sacrifices Indigenous cultural sites, and the climate, for fossil fuel profits—again

Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe

How we saved the ANU environment collective

Pollution is killing people in Melbourne’s west

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

LA wildfires show the future of capitalism

Turning the tide: the fight to blockade the world’s largest coal port

COP 29 was the worst one yet

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