Governments (and their corporate owners) have no safety net plans for our climate permacrisis

Australians are walking a tightrope. Imagine a long line of us traversing a chasm. Some of us – not many – have a safety harness that means the risk inherent in falling becomes minor. The rest of us are walking, whether we know it or not, with the risk of plummeting to the rocky terrain below and smashing our skulls. This is a climate story.

Where once a dependable safety net existed, since the 1980s, the harness gang has been gradually cutting the ropes that keep it in place. This is a neo-feudal story.

Punters Politics released a must-watch video last week that exposed the scam inherent in the debate about “national debt.” Governments are not households and debt there is different. 

That said, there is good debt that invests in the country and bad debt that robs the country to enrich the transnational tycoon class. The Coalition under Howard and Costello turned a boom of foreign demand for our mined resources into a massive long-term burden by pouring that bonus away in substantial tax cuts for the rich. The neoliberal IMF described their government as one of extraordinary “fiscal profligacy.” 

Diesel subsidies for mining or catastrophic outlays for nuclear subs are positioned as good debt. Private sector contracts to torment people fleeing hellish regimes can run to billions without troubling the budget hawks. (Labor is committed to a further $2.5 billion to send refugees to a country, Nauru, where we will be placing climate refugees before long.) Filling potholes or supporting the hiring of more nurses so hospitals run better they categorise under illegitimate spending.

The long 20^th century has been a struggle between those who demanded a safety net for most and those who celebrated risk as heroic, with utter disdain for the bodycount. Less eugenicist leaders met the Great Depression of the 1930s with the New Deal and the Welfare State to prevent revolution. The new wannabe hereditary aristocracy and enablers have been staging a counterrevolution ever since.

In 2008, Western leaders tackled the financial crisis (caused by the loosening of regulations on bankers imposed after the Great Depression) by using public funds to bail out the financial sector gamblers and con men who were wrecking the lives of the populace. At least six million Americans lost their homes as Epstein’s friends advised Obama that the right way to fix the bankers’ catastrophe was to let the people suffer the loss.

In the UK, the Labour government used the people’s money to bail out the bankers as well as some stimulus spending. The Tory governments that followed fostered a brutal policy of Austerity. Now British children are, on average, shorter than their parents’ generation because of malnutrition. (Australia’s Labor government chose not Austerity but instead to “support demand.” Australia suffered much less than our peers and in 2011 Euromoney, a finance and banking magazine, awarded Wayne Swan the “finance minister of the year,” or, as it was chirped in the headlines, named him “World’s Best Treasurer.”)

Now we need to be aware of Climate Austerity. Bloomberg published estimates that spending on climate disasters in the USA is approaching $1 trillion per year. The plutocrat-serving reckoning that we have been fed for decades has dictated that we can’t afford to speed transition to cheap and clean energy sources. The same people demand we not only continue with but also subsidise the dirty and deadly fossil fuel option. (Literally deadly: after only a few years of limits on cars in London, children’s lungs are already showing signs of growing healthily instead of being “stunted.” Air pollution causes roughly 1.5 million deaths a year in India.)

And soon neoliberal-reckoning governments will claim the public can’t afford to pay for disaster management. Already, Australians express shock to journalists at how little support their community receives from the government when their town is devastated by flood or fire. That stands to become much worse as the governments of the near-future will inevitably declare there is not enough money to tackle the rolling demands of the permacrisis age we are entering.

The neoliberal “solution” is private sector insurance. America is illustrating the enshittification of that product, which was only ever available to those with disposable income in any case. In America, Black people were denied or charged extra for the insurance upon which a mortgage depends. Now they are charged extra based on the rotten logic of poor “credit ratings,” even if they live in relatively climate-stable regions. Many thousands more Americans are unable to afford the sky-rocketing cost if they live in a danger zone, if insurers agree to serve them at all. A Brisbane homeowner was quoted $70,000 a year to insure. Thousands more have their insurance cancelled as trouble looms. Those Australians who can afford insurance will notice that each year, more threats are carved out of coverage.

Insurance, because of these ruthless calculations, is scoring “record profits” in the US, and investing those funds in sectors like fossil fuel.

Increasingly, home insurance will serve the affluent classes for when the bath floods. The mega rich don’t need it, as this discussion at The Dig explains.

As fires and storms and floods devastate our regions’ homes, rebuilding will take more material and tradespeople we don’t have, pushing up the prices. We will demand governments meet the shortfall of emergency shelter, rebuilding costs and supporting communities repeatedly devastated by climate-intensified catastrophes. Remember many of the people living in danger zones are there precisely because housing in, for example, flood plains is cheaper: they can’t afford to move. Government will claim it does not have the money to meet the ever-rising demand.

Already in Australia, all levels of governance are failing us on climate preparation. Apparently emergency cooling rooms (to prevent your organ failure in extended heatwaves of the sort that killed 7000 in France alone this summer) will be the responsibility of suburban councils that have no money and are often led by ill-informed or partisan councillors.

Cookers and Apocalypse-chasing Pentecostals are working their way into levels of government. Together with TradCath extremists, they’re entwined with the fake populism of One Nation. The huge fossil fuel donors, and the disinformation networks they fund in the US, launched anti-health measure propaganda during Covid, sick of the limits on their ability to exploit menial workers and disgusted by the drop in petrol-consumption as people stayed home. 

That disinformation tsunami galvanised a support base for this rejection of science. It has allowed the Trump posse’s work to destroy the US’s crucial research and data structure. (Which also deprives Australian weather forecasters of critical data.) 

We’re seeing what is possible for Australia with far-right governments in these US models. The US federal government is trying to privatise the massive research data providers on which so many functions depend: crippling climate and weather information is at the forefront of a fossil fuel-owned regime. The work cannot be done at this small scale but privatising and pay-walling weather and climate projections can be a profitable enterprise.

Trump’s people are limiting aid supplied to electorally-hostile states. They have (temporarily?) abandoned their efforts to end the federal emergency management structure. Florida, peak MAGA, has spent its $1.4 billion disaster funds on private sector contracts for deporting low-wage labour as “illegals.” Florida is allowing sketchy insurers to provide dodgy cover and instituting reforms to block suing insurers who fail to pay.

Right-wing plutocrat-owned One Nation could push such measures with a weakened LNP in a broad Right minority government. Those parties are all fossil fuel owned in practice. Coalition or Labor, Cheek Media just showed we have the highest climate protester arrest rate in the world! 

Australia needs – at the very least – a minority Labor government that is freed from the shackles of corporate ownership and held accountable by actually progressive parties and independents. They must publish the climate risk report they have long kept hidden to prevent panic.

The fossil fuel sector that has used a massive architecture of influence to sabotage debate on climate science as “a leftist religion” and “socialism by stealth” must be forced to pay into a substantial disaster fund, so that all levels of government can begin addressing the preventative and reparative work that we will need.

Food prices will likely face inflation this Australian summer from a northern hemisphere smashed by crop-shrivelling heat-waves. The Hormuz blockade on diesel and fertiliser, along with floods in Asia and other threats to production will mean global shortages and famine in precarious regions. The demand for government mitigation of the inflationary pressure on our household budgets has already begun. 

Without a fossil-fuel disaster fund, our governments will have you living in long-term displacement camps. Perhaps even tent cities, when too many are made homeless at once.

Our governments are ramping up suppression of protest instead of tackling the very real threat to Australians’ welfare. As we all step further over the abyss that the fossil fuel sector has carved under life’s tightrope walk, the safety net and harnesses cannot only be for the few.

Only you can tell politicians that the plutocrats’ high risk political economy is not for us. We must demand real action.