The climate crisis accelerates. Anti-protest laws proliferate.
These developments are not unrelated.
You might have seen the new report by the World Meteorological Society, the one warning about humanity entering what UN secretary general António Guterres calls ‘“uncharted territory of destruction”. As emissions exceed pre-pandemic levels, the planet is now as likely as not to face temperatures more than 1.5C above pre-industrial measurements (the limit the UN COP26 summit pledged to avert) within the next five years.
A separate study in Science speculates that key ecological tipping points (including ice sheet collapses and the disruption of a major north Atlantic ocean current) may have already been passed.
Why, despite all the warnings, does the world keep hurtling towards destruction?
Well, the environmental economist Aviel Verbruggen estimates that the fossil fuel industry generated profits of US$2.8bn each and every day for the last 50 years.
The stakes could not be higher for the planet and its people. But they’re also immense for the corporate polluters, with the biggest companies collectively projected to develop new oil and gas fields to the tune of US$932bn by the end of 2030 – and an eye-popping US$1.5tn by 2040.
That’s a lot of incentive to keep emitting, even before the Ukrainian war delivered a fresh bonanza. ExxonMobil recently announced a $17.85bn profit for the second quarter of 2022 (a figure nearly four times greater than it made a year ago); both Chevron and Shell have just shattered their own previous records.
As Verbruggen says, “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money.”
The incredible public subsidies for fossil fuels provide a striking illustration: in 2021, states globally used some $700bn of taxpayer money to prop up gas and oil.
As well as subsidising the polluters, governments are increasingly protecting them against activists.
For instance, this year, the UN’s conference of the parties (COP27) meets in Egypt, a country where President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi styles himself a champion of climate justice.
That’s all well and good – but Human Rights Watch says environmentalists in the country struggle to conduct research, let alone campaign, without fear of arrest.
In the United States, a few state legislatures in the mid 2010s began crafting statutes to impose jail terms on activists who interfered with refineries and oil pipelines. The laws drew on the post-9/11 national security code to classify fossil fuel infrastructure as vital to “security, national economic security, national public health or safety”.
In Europe, anti-environmental “lawfare” has also intensified, with climate campaigners in Germany facing huge bills for damages after blockading a coal power plant.
In Australia, where fossil fuel lobbyists exert tremendous influence over the major political parties, the trend has probably gone further than anywhere else.
Back in 2019, Queensland’s Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk posted on Twitter about “new laws to combat extremist protesters” after a series of high-profile Extinction Rebellion stunts. The resulting Summary Offences and Other Legislation Amendment Act means that activists possessing a “locking” device (anything by which they might secure themselves to a building or the pavement) face two years’ jail.
In Victoria, the ALP and the Liberals united to pass anti-protest laws legitimating huge fines and jail terms for environmental demonstrators.
Tasmania enacted similar restrictions around the same time; in New South Wales, the Liberals, with support from Labor, introduced two-year jail terms for “illegal protests” on public road, rail lines, tunnels, bridges and other facilities.
Collectively, the new measures mean that most of the major historical environmental campaigns, from the Franklin Dam protests to the Jabiluka blockade, would, if repeated today, expose activists to serious prison time.
In the past, campaigners could sometimes rely on the social power of trade unions for protection. Famously, the term “green” entered the political lexicon as an emblem of environmentalism after the NSW Builders Laborers Federation used “green bans” to protect remnant bushland and preserve the built environment. Today unions, too, confront unprecedented legislative restrictions, with the International Labour Organisation repeatedly warning that Australian laws breach international labour standards by effectively banning the right to strike.
All of which is to say that, as we face the most significant environmental crisis in human history, the strategies used by campaigners in the past are increasingly being criminalised.
None of this is an accident.
Our leaders might immediately close parliament for a fortnight to mourn the Queen, but they scoff at emergency action to avert environmental catastrophe.
The situation’s under control, they say: why, the climate wars have ended!
They don’t believe it themselves.
The repressive laws springing up everywhere show that governments anticipate a growing resistance to the fossil fuel regime – and they’re setting in place a framework to suppress it.
All over the world, corporations and the politicians who serve them are readying for intensified clashes between the few who benefit from climate change and the vast majority who suffer.
Environmentalists should do likewise.
