[rad-green] Australia's profit-driven apocalypse

*https://redflag.org.au/node/6987 <https://redflag.org.au/node/6987>Red
Flag          3 January 2020Australia's profit-driven apocalypseBy Jerome
Small*

Some firefighters report flames 150 metres high. Read that again, slowly.
Flames 150 metres high. Higher than a 40 storey building.

This is Australia’s new summer normal. Towering flames and terrified
humans, huddling on the beach in the dark night or the orange glow of day.
Shambolic, panicked, thousands forced to flee. Cities and towns shrouded
for days and weeks and now months in a smoke haze that ranges from
irritating, to toxic, to deadly. An area burnt that reportedly dwarfs the
land affected by both the Amazon and California fires.

Dozens are dead or missing. And it is still early days.

Melbourne’s Age newspaper reports on the evacuation of Corryong, in
Victoria’s northeast, on new year’s eve: “Anyone who wanted to join the
convoy needed enough fuel to make it to Tallangatta, about 85 kilometres
away, and write their names on a list. The list would be for the coroner if
it all went wrong.”

The flames cast a searing light over the priorities of Australia’s rulers.

We see firefighters making do with pathetic paper masks, while the
government gifts $12 billion every year to fossil fuel companies ($29
billion if you count indirect subsidies).

We see a military which can mobilise massive force to defend oil and empire
in the Middle East, and to capture refugees from those wars and deliver
them to an island prison – but is apparently incapable of moving a civilian
population to safety with anything approaching urgency.

We see a political and economic elite that can’t wrench itself away from
the industries that have created this disaster. Six of the 30 biggest
corporations on Australia’s stock exchange are mining or fossil fuel
companies – probably a world record. Coal is 15 percent of export revenues.
Australia’s ruling class is one of the most carbon-addicted sections of a
global elite that has always valued power and profit above our planet and
our lives.

We see the political expression of this economic interest: one wing of the
political establishment (the Liberals and Nationals) can’t admit that this
catastrophe is anything to do with climate change. The other wing of the
political establishment (Labor and some “dissident” Liberals) will tut tut
about climate change – while opening up vast new tracts of the country to
the fossil fuel and mining industries.

We see the Murdoch-owned media going into overdrive with lies about fuel
loads. The truth is that these fires are the predicatable – in fact, the
actually predicted – consequence of climate change. For more than a decade,
we’ve seen the cool wet weather fronts that once brought winter rain to
southern Australia slip south, just as the science predicted. There is no
guarantee that these rains will ever return with any regularity. Economist
Ross Garnaut, himself no radical, notes that the watershed of the country’s
greatest river system is heading for desertification and invites
comparisons with the collapse of previous civilisations.

We see communities left with no support. One of the few Aboriginal
communities to get any coverage in the media is Lake Tyers, in Gippsland,
where a small tank on a ute is the only firefighting equipment available to
the community. Meanwhile Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s new plane cost a
reported $250 million.

We see party after party at Kirribilli House while the country burns and
Sydney chokes. In the desperate search for someone who will shake his hand,
our fuckwit coal-fondling prime minister seeks refuge with the national
cricket team.

In other words: we see Australian capitalism in all its obscene,
coal-addicted glory.

Searching for words to describe the catastrophe, many survivors,
firefighters and observers find one: apocalypse. And clearly it is – for
the dead, for their loved ones, for the communities blasted by columns of
fire and turned into columns of smoke.

But this isn’t the end of days. It’s not even the end of summer. There is
plenty more of the country that will burn.

Anyone who listens to the radio would have for months heard farmers, small
town mayors, truck drivers and all sorts, testifying that vast tracts of
country down the east coast from Brisbane to Melbourne, dry for ten years,
has had no significant rainfall for three years and is tinder dry, waiting
to explode. Hopefully the meteorologists are right, that the late shift of
the monsoon up north might bring some rain down south, later in January.
Whether that will actually put the fires out, though, is anyone’s guess.
What the rest of this summer, and the summers to come might bring doesn’t
bear thought.

And this is before we hit the “tipping points” discussed by climate
scientists; before Labor and Liberal’s Adani mine unleashes its
profit-boosting load of poison into the atmosphere; before we hit the
“runaway” part of the “runaway climate change” that Australia’s corporate
elites profit so handsomely from fuelling; before Origin Energy’s fracking
in the Northern Territory turns a profit; before BHP announces another
world record profit on the back of its world-poisoning coal business.

Unlike the Biblical apocalypse, this seemingly unending fire season is no
act of God. The most powerful people on Earth, and in Australia, have made
choices that have led to this – specific choices in the interests of profit
and power. And they won’t stop just because of the fires – not while
there’s still profit to be made and political power to be held.

At a rally outside the International Mining and Resources Conference in
Melbourne in October, a Chilean activist put it well: “They don’t care if
people burn. They don’t care if the planet burns. They care only about
their power. They will be the lords of the ashes.”

No saviour from on high will deliver us. The only path forward is to build
a radical mass movement that can challenge and ultimately overthrow our
rulers’ creed, their real religion, their alpha and their omega: their
profits and their power.

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