FIGHTING THE FOSSIL ECONOMY C H A R L I E TAY L O R
On 16 November 2021, two Australian activists from Blockade Australia climbed on top of one of the stacker-reclaimer machines at Port Newcastle, the largest coal port in the world, and brought the entire plant to a halt. A video claimed that the action was directed against the extent of global fossil capital, which is "ceaselessly causing a climate crisis" and "pushing us ever closer to the point of social collapse".(1)
Port Newcastle has become a telling case study in the rhetoric and lack of concrete change in climate policy by Australian politicians. As recently as 2017, the Port's Chairman had told the media that the "long-term outlook for coal is a threat to the Port" as people around the world increasingly move away from coal-fired power generation. This reaction was in direct contrast to the fact that the government at the time was subsidising the development of an entire new coal mining area in Queensland by the Adani Group, which led to a massive increase in port traffic (2).
Now, in 2021, the response to the protest was not much different. Matt Kean, Treasurer and Energy Minister for New South Wales, a critic of the Australian government's energy policy, made it clear: "There are hundreds of ways to make our views known and advocate for change, but risking the lives of rail workers is definitely not one of them" (3) . As a result, the government looked for legal loopholes to punish activists harshly instead of working on solutions. At what point does continued inaction lead to ever more daring protests and shutdowns? As James Butler writes, "Where are all the eco-terrorists?"(4).
Exaggerations followed by blatant inaction have become such a cyclical process in the climate movement since the 1990s that one could despair of it. Much of the current disquiet can be summed up by Greta Thunberg's call for politicians to "blah blah blah". But while many politicians across the political spectrum are calling for pathways to "carbon freedom", "climate equality" and "climate justice", concrete infrastructure overhauls and a radical dismantling of the fossil fuel economy seem so far off the radar as to be almost outdated statements.
If anything, the fossil economy has been moving at an unprecedented pace since the international climate summits began. Barrack Obama's appearance at COP26 seemed more than a farce, as his presidency oversaw the most extensive expansion of gas fracking in the United States and unprecedented fossil fuel extraction, empathetically warning leaders that "time is really running out" (5). The scale and nature of the increased expansion of the fossil fuel economy is all too clear. In 2018 alone, more than two-thirds of all capital invested in energy projects went into oil, gas and coal, in addition to investments in extraction, fuel combustion and power generation facilities. In the process, big energy companies are increasingly using their power within states to stop opposition to their expansion.
Steven Donziger, an environmental lawyer, is just one of the prominent victims. In 2011, he sued Chevron in the Ecuadorian courts and obtained the repayment of $9.5 billion in damages because Chevron had dumped 16 billion gallons of oil into indigenous peoples' land in the Ecuadorian Amazon (6). Chevron has fallen far short of paying, which would
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