Clearing inconvenient protestors off the road to climate hell
Clearing inconvenient protestors off the road to climate hell
We look to government to draw battle lines to tackle this crisis but find that a bipartisan alliance is drawing battle lines against us instead.
Protestors took to demonstrating outside the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association conference in Adelaide on Thursday. The Extinction Rebellion protestors disrupted traffic, suspending themselves off the Morphett Street Bridge outside the Adelaide Convention Centre in a desperate effort to bring attention to the climate catastrophe, and challenge those who profit off the perpetuation of it, while another stanza of the climate catastrophe begins, as La Ninas brief reprieve rolls into the wrath of a six-year El Niño cycle.
The protests coincided with findings by a consensus driven scientific group that has been charting the rapid climate change that is exceeding expectations. There is now a 66% chance that global temperatures will pass the 1.5C global warming threshold between 2023-2027. The World Meteorological Organisation has stated that going past 1.5C would be “calamitous for the world”, ensuring that temperatures would then shift towards 3C, resulting in temperatures that would be unsustainable for life in large areas of this planet.
The day after the protests, just before lunch, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas had already rushed though changes to the law pertaining to someone who “intentionally or recklessly obstructs the free passage of a public place”. Previously the penalty sat at $750 fine with no jail, but after the rapid vote, protestors who did the same again now face an overpowered and brutal $50,000 fine and a possible jail term. The SA Labor government joined a bunch of the other Labor governments that have punched through Draconian anti-protest legislation inline with a consensus within the country’s major party apparatus -- setting in place a form of corporate protection by using the monopoly of violence to protect the mega-polluters who are destroying the environment.
While the human experiment lunges towards its demise propelled by the destructive perpetual growth-riddled aspirations of the insatiable pharaohs of global industry, the governments of sovereign nations states and territories, captured by their corporate overlords, have become bagmen and bodyguards for the titans of consumption, working in concert with constructed narratives sung by choirs of hive-minded corporate journalists. The spiralling Anthropocene spins over life on this earth like a fan slinging existential ejectamenta over the last traces of the idea that humans can live on this planet without destroying it.
On the descent towards extinction, with the glaring truth shining into our face, the public look at their ‘progressive’ Labor governments who hold state and federal political domination, and find in their leaders’ people who are willing to imprison demonstrators with bi-partisan anti-protest laws in an age of ineffective political leadership and insatiable corporate greed, when the need to publicly assemble and challenge these entities is needed more than ever. We get 116 new coal and gas projects and urea dumps from the alternative to ten years of a nightmare Coalition enterprise, record profits for the Twiggy’s and the Gina’s and the Clive’s, wading neck deep in the extinction trade, and this government can’t even propose a resources tax or a sovereign wealth fund to ensure this one way ticket to hell benefits the population in some vaguely meaningful way.
The precious homeostatic status quo that preserves interweaving biological feedback loops is being pushed through cracks of thawing tundra, hissing methane out of permafrost and burning swathes of vegetation across the planet. Extreme drought and wet bulb temperatures permanently augment ecosystems, Australians sit in the wake of bushfires that were seen from space and floods that wiped out entire communities, and due to the attitudes of our governments we now have 6.2L Dodge Rams setting record sales alongside 7.8L Ford Super Duty trucks and large V8 American SUVs. From fracking to offshore gas wells, our major party state and federal political representatives now openly spruik new gas as the way out of this mess, knowing that 75% of it is exported into lucrative overseas contracts by giants that don’t pay any tax, knowing it contributes wholesale to the death of the planet. But lock up the climate protestors, quick!
Science keeps getting it right. Who would have thought that the inductive scientific method is one of the greatest human achievements. We see it working in the science in the hypersonic ordinance flying around in a full-scale war in Europe, we ignore it in the silos currently on high alert with payloads that could cover the earth in dust. It chops up the stratified belts of Australian continental crust in the Pilbara with big mechanical wheels, but it also warns us that all the continued production and exploration of petroleum, or any other gas or coal field that our pound-for-pound-highest-exporter-of-fossil-fuel-championship-status seems hell-bent on continuing, will destroy life as we know it. Forever.
Examples of political violence throughout history meted out by oppressive structures of power demonstrate what penalising non-violent protest will achieve, and sometimes it doesn’t work out well for governments, especially the democratically elected ones who choose to change the norms that people expect in fair societies. For every ambulance or inconvenienced road user that is used as an excuse to justify another harsh restrictive law against the freedom of the public to assemble, another question is asked by many Australians considering where its government’s allegiances could be.
Inside the petro-expo, South Australia’s minister for energy and mining Tom Koutsantonis told the fossil fuel friendly crowd that the SA Government was “at your disposal”, he bluffed himself into telling the chuffed audience that net-zero could never be achieved without their industry. But the climate outside has shifted, and the public doesn’t necessarily equate a fossil fuel led road to net-zero as the kind of strategy that is going to cut it leading into another fire season.
When there is reluctance to fight climate change at the political level, dictated by the belligerence of the corporate level, there is apathy to combat it at the local level. With tonnes of soft plastics sitting in warehouses from failed corporate recycling programs, new coal and gas being approved as a basic service, and the average corporate-facing politician tempting the good will of their electorates, the public drop their heads, and so diminishes the practices that should be well-developed to cut emissions in granular and micro levels of human organised society. The brutal protest laws that are legislated before the morning birds stop singing are not an action that benefit the people of South Australia, nor the human race, they are laws that benefit the export ambitions of multinational fossil fuel giants who ignore the crisis for one last hit of endless wealth.
Six years of unprecedented heat kicks into the Australian population, and the green and lush vegetation of an Indian Ocean Dipole bakes into the unprecedented tinderbox of a terrifying heating period. More and more logical Australians will have their interest piqued by public protests like those outside the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association conference as they start to feel the effects of inadequate action on climate change, and more and more will be willing to pay the costs of doing whatever it takes to protect their families as their homes are removed by the climate scenarios that envelop them, and their lives are made unviable due to extreme weather.
The people of Australia voted Green, teal and independent in record numbers, repudiating the coalition at the ballot box, giving Labor a narrow majority with a warning. The climate crisis that has burned its way into the collective experience of millions of Australians, the floods that make sections of the country unlivable, the knowledge in every Australian that things are going to get worse, all these shared concerns and public anxieties never go away. The science is correct, the endlessness of corporate fossil fuel extraction is the single greatest threat to our existence, and protesting it is becoming our only as it looks to kill us all. And just as El Niño looks to burn this joint for the next 6 years, as we look to government to draw battle lines to tackle this crisis, we find that a bipartisan alliance is drawing battle lines against us instead.