“Can anything be done?”
“So much can be done,” I say. “But everything would have to be different.”

— Joy Williams, “The Country”

Royce Kurmelovs’ Slick: Australia’s Toxic Relationship with Big Oil (UQP, 2024) builds a picture of the influence of oil money in Australian politics that combines the naïve frustration and despairing sense of being cornered evoked by Williams’ dialogue. He presents oil companies as unstoppable, nefarious forces in politics, spread like an oil spill through the corridors of power, leaking everywhere and yet evasively secret. They do shady “backroom” deals on the public stages of industry conferences, bamboozling climate activists with their utterly predictable and financially logical tactics. Like journalists, their public relations arms weave intrigue that compels political narratives. Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this.

This review measures the magnitude of my frustration with this genre. To this end, I have accumulated some components to fill the gaps of this book and collected them in appendices. As one writer observes in reviewing a book, “there’s no reason why anyone would care what I think, yet I’m asking for readers’ attention. Having a handle on a subject just seems like part of the job.” The appendices make clear not only where there are gaps, but how far a political position changes the framework of what is necessary and legible to a narrative.

We begin measuring the increasingly starless firmament against our fate, with CO₂ level rise corelated to historical events [Appendix #1]. Kurmelovs’ unusual, medieval-inspired historical periodisation exemplifies the liberal progressive’s conception of time as an agent of political change [Appendix #2], though it is one that has been corroded by timescales so long as to suggest the fatalism of geological eras. In order to balance this tendency, the style of journalism threads personal stories with national affairs to ground the narrative [Appendices #3, #4, #5, #6]. The journalist positions himself as a knowledgeable witness to what we ordinary folk cannot possibly know [Appendix #7]. Fortunately, activists (also sometimes acting on imperfect knowledge) light flares to signal where our attention should fall [Appendix #8]. Activism has its counterpart in the public relations of the oil industry [Appendix #9], which has concealed and obfuscated the industry’s own knowledge of climate change. The only reason “the science” [Appendix #10] has not been assimilated at a political level must be attributed to the bullshit and propaganda of the industry [Appendix #11].

As Adam Tooze remarks on the influence of fossil fuel industries on industrial climate policy in the US, “this sounds terribly conspiratorial; [but] it’s all completely out in the clear, everyone fully understands this game.” The conspiratorial framing concocted by Kurmelovs becomes its own mystification. Like Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (2024), a clear-sighted analysis of right-wing climate politics and assessment of political economy not only explains the dynamics of climate politics, but also indicates contradictions and fault lines in capitalism that inform political strategy. The emphasis on activism and information in Slick is worryingly detached from a political position.

This industry, Kurmelovs’ analysis proposes, has “captured” the state [Appendix #12], an otherwise benevolent body of neutral evidence-based policy making. Similarly, those villainous oil corporations are never connected to the broader network of corporates, like banks, private (and public) wealth funds, property, pastoral agriculture and beyond [Appendix #13]. Real contradictions in the capitalist political economy are reduced to the hypocrisy or inconsistency of elite pronouncements [Appendix #14], with no hint of the distinctive role oil plays in disciplining labour, as Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011) proposes. There is almost no mention of the role oil and gas play as input commodities in a broader economy [Appendix #15]. Historical changes in the political economy of oil like the epochal OPEC-driven price shocks of the 1970s are entirely absent [Appendix #16]. The momentous stand of the Yungngora and their allies at Noonkanbah in 1980 is acknowledged [Appendix #17] but folded into a trajectory that favours litigation [Appendix #18], trusting the courts to reimpose the status quo of stable, uncorrupted governance [Appendix #19].

Let us be clear. The Australian oil industry is a parochial arm of the US oil industry — which in turn shapes that country’s global imperial ventures and underwrites US dollar hegemony. We cannot conceive of the Australian oil industry as anything but a subsidiary to its US counterpart, just as Australia’s geopolitical fortunes have been consistently subordinate to US imperial aims. These intersect in the constant meddling in the Middle East, where Gulf states still produce the bulk of global oil, with catastrophic results for local people and climate politics.

The dominance of the export market in shaping Australian oil and, especially gas production demonstrates how fundamentally it is tied to global market and resource use, including development agendas in Asia. An account of the Australian oil industry that substantively ignores these facts cannot be taken seriously as a reckoning, both descriptively and politically.

A version of the basic thesis of Kurmelovs’ Slick is stated elsewhere with clarity and precision by the Platform Collective, a UK-based advocacy group, in a 2016 essay called “Power to the People”. They write,

Decisions about energy are made behind closed doors in corporation headquarters, at parliamentary bars and during $2,000-a-ticket conferences that lock us all into decades of fossil-fuel use. Individuals and wealth flow through the revolving doors between the state, oil and finance. To entrench themselves further, oil companies actively set about influencing and shaping our values and politics, placing themselves at the heart of both the establishment and our cultural consciousness — for example, through their sponsorship of cultural institutions — all with the intention of making the needed urgent transition to a low-carbon economy seem impractical or impossible.

This should be the starting point, rather than the conclusion of an analysis.

If we need to know more, it is where in this process we might intervene as organised political collectives. The Platform Collective has clear politics, arguing for resisting the framing of the debate but also proposing re-municipalisation and community control of energy infrastructure and resources. Instead of top-down, market-driven policies that focus on supply-side interventions to de-risk private investment in centralised renewable energy installations, they argue for energy justice over energy security and energy democracy over a one-sized fits all solution. With little to offer beyond “hold them accountable”, Kurmelovs’ journalistic accumulation of “evidence” strays aimlessly over the surface of a political economy. The book, he suggests, is “about Australia, where oil and gas companies have come to dominate everything,” before swerving into anecdotes-cum-news reports about the Lismore floods. The following appendices dissect the trajectory of Slick, and offer an alternative framework for understanding oil politics in Australia.

Appendix #1: Our fate is in the sky

The smiling of auguries is amplified to society’s sardonic laughter at itself, gloating over the direct material exploitation of souls. Occultism is the reflex-action to the subjectification of all meaning, the complement of reification.

— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Auguries no longer smile, but frown in the air, waiting for tipping points and international climate conferences to raise themselves to world historical significance. Adorno warns that in seeing our fate written in the sky (whether it is the stars, or the atmospheric chemical composition) the bourgeois subject “would like to make the world resemble its own decay.” That is to say, given the loss of stable political coordinates for bourgeois liberals, they look to the universe for signs less that they will prevail and more that they will be right about the end.

Kurmelovs has a tendency to map people’s births onto the levels of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. A resident of Lismore was born in a year 20.61 billion tonnes were emitted, while Violet CoCo — one of Kurmelovs’ heroic individuals — was born four years later when 22.76 billion tonnes were deposited in the atmosphere. What is the significance of these figures, and their association with the birth of his informants? The brute figures tell us very little. They change in kind when Barry Jones was born, a former chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association. We learn that between his birth in 1946 and 1996 — the year he took over — the quantity of CO₂ Australia produced grew tenfold each year.

The different framing makes Jones’ mere life seem somehow responsible for the rise, while Kate and CoCo arrive innocently into a world burning fossil fuels at a rate higher than ever. Kurmelovs consistently assigns the burning of fossil fuels to that homogeneous entity called “humanity” — despite the long-standing insistence of climate justice advocates that “humanity”, as opposed to its class-defined subsets, plays no such role.

In his indispensable Carbon Democracy (2011), Timothy Mitchell warns that we should not simply replace the “idealist schemes of the democracy experts with a materialist account.” It is vital that the ground meet the sky. In Slick, the sky floats off, joined by an Olympian echelon of elite oil men who choose what happens there. We can only sit on the ground and gaze up in wonder, or outrage.

Appendix #2: Vicissitudes of history

When no one remembers the past, those writing policy for the future can’t know they are fighting the same old battles, the same way. Every confrontation becomes an ambush.

— Royce Kurmelovs, Slick

At any given moment one could grasp a more accurate, more meaningful view of history by replacing a single, static image with a stereoscopic one, bringing an analytically or politically relevant “past” or layer or “constellation” into view that enhances our initial glance, that creates a three-dimensional portrait of the present.

— Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth

Remembering the past is a crucial step in organising political consciousness, in apprehending our conjuncture. News journalism contributes to forgetting the past by perpetually recycling the same narratives of crisis and scandal, turning every event in an ambush.

Kurmelovs aims to repair this short-sightedness in two ways: a periodisation he claims to derive from the medieval chronicle, moving from “early” to “middle”, “high” and “late”. (The association between oil politics and medieval temporality suggests Kurmelovs cannot think of fossil fuel production as anything but past, or at least waning like the inexorable carbon count he sets up in the sky.)

The other attempt is to provide “a little context.” This spins him back into the so-called deep past, when it “took 252 million years for the planet’s oilfields to form [a]cross timescales impossible for the human imagination to grasp… No-one is sure just how much oil humanity has consumed throughout two centuries of organised extraction.” The gaping void between 252 million years and the past two centuries bypasses the very invention of the concept of an oilfield, as if reservoirs of energy sat waiting an avaricious lumpen-anthropos rather than being the object of political and economic production, as Timothy Mitchell insists.

For Kurmelovs, the story of oil in Australia culminates in his own reporting cycle, roughly between 2022 and 2024, years of many “insurance catastrophes.” Kurmelovs lurches between events with the grace of someone rifling through a disorganised filing cabinet in the hopes of unearthing that “gotcha” moment. He visits industry conferences that have long since receded in policy history, and attends COP28 in Dubai as a bookend (because you have to stop somewhere, just like the negotiated compromises balancing the right to keep producing and burning fossil fuels, and the need to announce what appears to be some progress towards cooperative international action). Kurmelovs writes, “At this point in human history, it was hard not to conclude that the oil and gas industry was taking the piss,” and he navigates its history as if it will all end in unseriousness. They are “taking the piss” because Kurmelovs seems unable to imagine why they would not have assimilated to his politics, whatever they may be.

Appendix #3: The politics of journalism

The journalist’s “lack of convictions” … is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.

— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Perhaps it is in the nature of accounts of climate politics that they are as repetitive as the news cycle. They are as riddled with dramatic cliches as climate politics is riddled with empty and unfulfilled promises. The journalist hangs their hopes both on cliches and the promises of leaders. As Mark Bould writes The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021), news presenters have an “uncritical, platitudinous, sentimental, hyperbolic-yet-bored fascination with crisis.” To live in the political news cycle is to live without politics.

Appendix #4: Psychology displaces class politics

The concept of denial is generally considered the domain of psychology. But the information individuals find disturbing, and the mechanisms they employ to protect themselves from such information, may also be analyzed within the context of both social interaction and the broader political economy.

— Kari Marie Norgaard, “Climate Denial”

The journalistic method relies on portraits and personalities, casting early oil explorers in Australia as “rugged individualists and anti-authoritarians” carrying the colonial frontier into the twentieth century. Their progeny are current employees of oil companies, all too ordinary, and yet for Kurmelovs wielding malignant power over the future. Kurmelovs cannot imagine how people can work in the industry, and asks “why aren’t more people quitting oil companies?” Before briefly considering the obvious, “it’s a living” (albeit without any context in the labour market under capitalism), Kurmelovs turns to psychology, squeezing contradictions of political economy down to the ponderable dimensions of the psyche. “How do they keep going, knowing that they are helping to create a frightening future for themselves and their children?” The answer must reside in “the human brain.”

Importing a brace of theories, including some imported from criminological studies of “juvenile delinquency [that] could just as well be applied to fossil fuel workers trying to justify their ongoing work” to banal folk psychology of “cognitive dissonance,” Kurmelovs searches for the climate progressive’s equivalent of the carbon footprint: the reduction of politics to personal responsibility. Kurmelovs’ fascination with fossil fuel workers has zoological tones, as if their “unique group” was comprised of specimens. Kurmelovs’ acknowledgment that from “the lowliest roughneck to the highest executive, they are subject to the same pressures as everyone else in the wider community” entails an egregious class-blindness.

Kurmelovs wants to take fossil fuel workers (as a homogeneous whole) as representative of a wider denial or inaction, writing that, if the corporations had a “credible plan”, it would be reasonable to stay. We passively await action, monitoring and responding only to our psychological sanctity. Meanwhile our (mandated) savings — whatever they may be — slosh around in markets that capitalise fossil fuel investments, weapons manufacturers, real estate speculation and the entire bouquet of ills that makes up capitalism.

Appendix #5: Stories can take you anywhere

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

— Joan Didion, The White Album

Journalists flatter themselves with Didion’s truism, and indeed, you can save yourself a lot of hard thinking by telling stories. Stories connect us, ground us, incite our imagination, shape our identities. Political analysis and organising, by contrast, tend to be boring, slow, impersonal and challenge our self-conception. Kurmelovs promises a book about politics, and delivers a sequence of “stories” that solidify the reader’s sense of righteous anger and bolster progressive common sense. And in which anecdote replaces analysis.

Kurmelovs finds ‘story” in unlikely places. A footnote of a forgotten PhD Appendix “either amounted to little more than interesting historical detail or a shocking tale of corruption.” A chapter in a public report that mentioned climate change may or may not have been removed. “If true, these were shocking allegations.” As though policy documents determined political history, as though the public reads them and were denied crucial information, as though the legislative agenda weren’t a fait accompli by the time the government commissions its report. No, “someone, it seemed, deliberately suppressed or concealed information about climate change to protect the coal industry.” Here is the smoking gun, or rather the absence of one.  The absence of something, in a sense, is far more powerful to fuel speculation and excite the imagination than the presence of decades of lobbying and policy documents. The missing chapter reads as industrial sabotage.

The “story” fizzles. The missing “chapter” was a draft written by a scientist asked to consult on the final report and sent to the department but excluded. We do not know why, though anyone who has submitted to a public report may sympathise (see Appendix #18). Kurmelovs admits to purveying “circumstantial evidence,” despite his attempt to build a quasi-legal case against fossil fuel companies. His “shocking revelation” amounts to the fact that the quoted memories of a minor Liberal party staffer were not 100 per cent accurate. As such, it will shock only the most credulous reader who sustains interest in this miniscule drama.

Appendix #6: Enlarging the frame

For the foreseeable future — indeed, as long as there are human societies on Earth —there will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged. If climate change represents a form of apocalypse, it is not universal, but uneven and combined.

— Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The geology of mankind?”, 2014

The book is “about Australia, where oil and gas companies have come to dominate everything.” It takes Kurmelovs more than fifty pages to get to “the first thing to understand” about this situation. It takes Kurmelovs turning Australian oil companies into an “industry” affected only incidentally by global markets. The national frame is the political journalist’s arena, walled and guarded by the sense of impossibility that the disaster response to the Northern River floods should be on par with “developing countries.” Conferences take place in “postcard Australia.”

Yet Australia is “late to the game” of oil, and its major oil companies operate as barely concealed subsidiaries of American majors, participating in global markets fundamentally shaped by Gulf oil production and the political economy they construct. Nationalising its history performs a service to the industry, vindicating its claim to belong in the national economy, linking it to the resources boom, investing out-sized power in its associations and players.

Against the industry, Kurmelovs frames a knowing coalition who “recognised the problem and wanted to do something” (do what is never really explained), yet had been diverted: “Humanity had already spent a decade debating whether it was actually happening…” Humanity is blessed to have as delegates none other than journalists, those “standing outside the media centre… come to demand that those representatives acting on behalf of all humanity in 2023 do the obvious and inevitable — to finally agree on a pathway forward for meaningful action.” There is no jolt, no adaption to a different frame of reference as we shift from small stories to the scale of “humanity”.

Appendix #7: We are not them

Like a fairy tale, this book contains heroes and villains, dangers and triumphs, tests and judgments.

— Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, 2011

The divide is not, as many still argue, between those who accept and those who reject the overwhelming evidence of climate science. It is about those who stand to gain…

Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth, 2024

There are three types of people in the Manichean world of Australia’s oil industry. There are the “climate villains.” There are people like Kate who “didn’t really understand the significance of what she was looking at.” And there are people like Kurmelovs and NSW Greens MLC Sue Higginson, who “had been paying attention.” Thus Kurmelovs becomes a Charon for a divided world, ferrying knowledge across a divide without really belonging to either class. The journalist’s professional neutrality, I suppose, protects them, but also requires that they speak to the enemy, descend to the underworld and return like Aeneas to report that Hades is not so nice.

Only, in this instance, Hades is conferences of peak bodies, accessible to almost anyone for a fee. The premise of insider insight is that secret knowledge is transmitted at these conferences, a reality unknown to the reader. Kurmelovs asserts that at one such conference

fingers were pointed at oil and gas producers, accusing them of lobbying against climate change ­— but always from a distance. No-one bothered to speak to them directly to ask what they thought about the accusation.

Kurmelovs seems unaware of the existence of the mainstream business press, from the pages of The Australian to the Australian Financial Review and internationally in the Financial Times and The Economist. These outlets, staffed by journalists like Kurmelovs, not only speak to the industry — they are frequently mouthpieces for it. They speak to oil and gas companies constantly. Kurmelovs’ claim is absurd to the point of bafflement. What does he mean? It only makes sense in the context of his assumption that “us” and “them” are so far divided that the reader cannot have glimpsed the pages of the business press.

The reader and the ordinary person they stand in for are implicitly ignorant, in the dark about the political economy of climate change. They are also implicitly millennial, like Kate and CoCo, born in a time of rising carbon emission alongside rising awareness of global warming. They are the people whose innocence could have been saved by early decisive action and who feel most entitled to outrage at what was known. Yet knowledge and politics are not so clear-cut.

As Kurmelovs shifts from anecdotal reporting to scientific journalism, he acknowledges that “from a strictly scientific perspective, the precise role climate change played in the 2022 floods across the Northern rivers is difficult to determine.” Our certainty about the link is motivated by a political position we are best to avow rather than conceal behind the constant deference to a scientific consensus that is never quite adequate for opponents. To save us thinking and formulating judgments, Kurmelovs wishes for “a single, authoritative, quick-reference report from the nation’s peak scientific body,” since after all “the human brain craves certainty.” While the fossil fuel sector is quite happy to exploit the gap between knowledge and politics, the liberal progressive cannot assert their political position with sufficient conviction to make the leap. They want knowledge to do all the work.

Appendix #8: Obligatory note of hope

You are not some disinterested bystander / Exert yourself.

— Epictetus in Jenny Offill, Weather

As long as you have breath in your body, you will have work to do.

— Mary Annaïse Heglar in Rebecca Solnit, “What Can I Do about the Climate Emergency?”, Not Too Late

Slick is structured according to the developing formula of climate journalism, which requires an obligatory note of hope. Offill has developed a website devoted to it called obligatorynoteofhope.com, which could also operate as a satire on the genre, filled with Stoic truisms and mindfulness-esque tips like “observe the weather”. Solnit’s essay contains advice that in another context reads as a threat, reminding us that “A lot of what we can do individually now will become inevitable in the future” and that “even if you are leading an exemplary life, your money could be financing climate destruction.” Our responsibility is endless, and the figure of the activist amorphously represents the confrontation of that responsibility most fully.

Kurmelovs obligatory note of hope is provided by Violet CoCo, an activist more renowned for the scale, drama and weight of legal repression that followed her actions than for the aims they sought to promulgate. Beyond the generic goal of raising awareness and spreading “concern“, reflection on the actual demands of their actions is scarce. Astra Taylor warns that the term activist is “suspiciously devoid of content.” Kurmelovs attends closely to CoCo’s trajectory from a Liberal-voting, working-class family through a lucrative advertising job to climate activism. She tells Kurmelovs: “the people in the climate movement don’t realise how illiterate on the issue the general public is.” The journalist joins the activist on the campaign of identifying the “villains”, those “slick, super-sophisticated lobbyists, with all the money and power” at the APPEA. Most people, and some activists, they charge, “didn’t really get it.” (These claims cut across Kurmelovs’ assumption that the activists and journalists acted and spoke on behalf of “humanity”.)

For the generic figure of the “activist”, disruption is its own justification. Reporting on figures like CoCo evinces a disinterest in the specific cause and demands, and a fascination with the personal story, the trials of imprisonment, the bravery of facing commuter and talk-back ire. Everyone agrees, something must be done. Activism is doing, and must therefore be good when aligned with the right issue. Actions like painting “Woodside” on Frederick McCubbin’s Down on His Luck (1889) held by the Art Gallery of Western Australia attract what Max Vickery calls a “carnival of reaction” yet very little of it is located, he argues, within a “broader politics” and so remains “doomed to [a] kind of flatness.”

The reporting in Slick devotes most space to discussing the crackdown on protests, using CoCo as an exemplar. The actions are avowed by participants as “political theatre”, and their opponents in courts and right-wing media make redolent use of theatrical tactics like conjuring an imaginary ambulance that was obstructed by the protest. Kurmelovs is lured simultaneously by the flare that CoCo lit on Sydney Harbour Bridge, and by the ambulance of emergency that obstructs a broader analysis of the climate movements tactics, strategy and demands.

Appendix #9: Image is all

Let’s think about our future, Australia could be grand.
Mining is the future, so you must take a stand.

If you want Australia strong and free then, you will understand.

They’re the backbone . . . of the country now.

— Australian Mining Industries Council, 1979

The public relations of the oil industry are their counterpart to the “activist”. With a constant sense of aggrieved embattlement, the industry not only poured resources into bolstering its image and softening politicians to its cause — they also adopted the tobacco industry’s “merchants of doubt” strategies. These are well-known (they even have a memorable mnemonic — “the five Ds: deflection, delay, division, despair and doomism”). For Kurmelovs, they involve “wizard-like” abilities, and “a finely honed mechanism” to influence the legislative process. Facing increasing environmentalist concern, the Australian industry picked up tactics from the American experts, organising systematically through forums like the Atlas Network, free market think-tanks that ironically became defenders of the fossil fuel industry against competition.

Kurmelovs never acknowledges that the game of public relations involves the media more than anything else. Yet journalism, as the Walkley Prize’s origin in the racist oil baron William Walkley’s sponsorship attests, is an industry unto itself, what Julianna Schultz calls the “handmaiden” to mining, agriculture and banking as the “four economic foundation stones” of Australian political economy. Yet it rates mention only when reporting on industry talking points, scientific findings or national politics, not as an entity in itself. Speaking to a private education provider who received funding from companies like Santos, Kurmelovs sounds like a caricature of elitist contempt, proposing that they were “speaking two different languages”, and that

he needed a dose of the humanities and social science. He was not a bad-faith actor, nor was he an idiot. It just seemed like this was the first time anyone had actually asked him how his ethics applied in the real world.

Appendix #10: Now we know

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

— Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor, 1935

It has become fashionable to back-date climate science into the nineteenth century, with Eunice Foot, an American women’s rights activist and amateur scientist, taking the honours with her 1856 description of the “effects of the sun’s rays… in carbonic acid gas.”

Soon after, Irish physicist John Tyndall presented research into infrared absorption in various gasses. As Tad Delay’s more detailed account in The Future of Denial (2024) suggests, Engels read Tyndall’s book and “notified Marx.” In 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius predicted that burning coal would produce a greenhouse effect, which Kurmelovs describes as “a fringe idea at the time.” The steady, haphazard work of scientific research is portrayed in this potted history as if it progressed teleologically towards the present, towards what we know. This ahistorical approach takes the production of knowledge out of context in order to lay it at the feet of the present as evidence.

Marc Augé observes in his reflection The Future (2014) that this conception of science presumes

a principled reference, arbitrarily postulated, to the whole… an intellectual fait accompli placing the unknown in the domain of the known through recourse to notions such as prophecy, annunciation or revelation.

He argues that science “works from established knowledge, but never considers it definitive given that advances in the way it interprets reality may cause it to reconsider at any time.” The production of scientific knowledge actively re-shapes the object under study, and is itself shaped by politics. The progressive desire for the history of science to be a vindication of current science fixes knowledge in the present without regard for how it might re-shape our conception of reality. Understanding the past requires understanding the different conception of knowledge and its objects. In the case of climate science, as Timothy Mitchell argues, debates

create political uncertainty not so much because they reach the limits of technical and scientific knowledge, but because of the way they breach this conventional distinction between society and nature. They cannot be settled by experts alone, because they involve questions not only about the nature of the world — the arena traditionally monopolised by scientific and technical expertise — but also about the nature of the collective.

Kurmelovs writes as if the task the oil industry set itself was to deny “the science”. But, as Naomi Klein suggests, politics comes first, specifically the politics required to sustain a system of capital accumulation. Like Klein, Ajay Singh Chaudhary commends the realism of right-wing climate politics, which recognised perhaps before the mainstream left that comprehensive action on climate change would require addressing capitalism directly. Chaudhary writes in The Exhausted of the Earth,

the science does not have a single politics. Right-wing climate realism encompasses a plausible and thoroughly realistic — in terms of power and in terms of ecology — set of positions.

Kurmelovs wants a date-stamp on the industry’s knowledge of their contribution to climate change, speculating on various pieces of circumstantial evidence that such and such a CEO must have been aware. Public and company-sponsored reports circulated from as early as the 1960s. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1970s that the mechanics of climate change were ‘settled,” and diffused slowly through the scientific community. Australia “lags,” and the scientific story bears little relation to Kurmelovs’ national account.

Climate progressives often assume that the weight of facts will shunt politics towards “action,” an ill-defined goal that implicitly endorses the status quo with a few modifications. Kari Norgaard points out that laying the blame on both journalistic bias and climate sceptics, misinformation and corporate influence assume that politics follows facts. She asks what else may be “the limiting factor behind greater interest, concern, or political participation.” Holly Jean Buck adds that attempts at “anti-disinformation” are “a cheap hack,” an “attention-grabbing fix” that divides a knowing elite from those upon whom truth must be imposed, rather than won over to a political strategy that serves their genuine interests.

Appendix #11: Pulling the wool

… heating isn’t happening. Or it is, but it’s no big deal. Or it’s happening, but mitigation would be worse.

— Tad Delay, The Future of Denial

In his adaption of Freud’s joke about the man who returns a damaged kettle, Delay points out that

the merchants of doubt pioneered a menu of tactics: edit selectively, cherry-pick data, blame the sun, fret over costs, personally attack climatologists, and most of all, downplay catastrophes as manageable.

To this menu, Kurmelovs adds “bullshit,” as defined by Harry Frankfurt. Bullshit, Frankfurt argues, doesn’t reject or oppose truth so much as ignore it. This addition ultimately fails to pay off as Kurmelovs describes oil tactics in conventional terms as “a tasting plate of different kinds of misinformation,” like taking information out of context.

Bullshit belongs in the realm of epistemology as a technical distinction, not — as Hannah Arendt’s discussion of lying does — in the realm of politics. For Kurmelovs, the smear tactics of oil companies makes them ‘schoolyard bullies.” Except, unlike bullies, they are not revenging their emotional fragility on others but actively and deliberately re-shaping a political world in their image.

What is important is not the attitude of oil companies towards knowledge but their political position. When the industry positions itself “at the frontline of the decarbonisation challenge,” they are judged “technically correct but, divorced from context.” But correct has nothing to do with it. Oil companies are thoroughly ideological, positioning themselves as vital to economies, nations and consumers. Oil replaced coal as a “cleaner” burning fuel, natural gas promises the same. It’s less trickery than ideology, like the industry-funded influencer campaign #cookingwithgas. While Aaron Regunberg argues that this is an example of the corporate dissemination of “disinformation”, he describes the campaign as composed of “messages of culturally hegemonic common sense.” It is not information but the encoding of a particular relationship to resources, the economy, consumption and ultimately nature that is transmitted and transformed.

Holly Buck contends that political organisers should avoid the disinformation framing, and focus on the explicitly political work of building support for climate action through industrial policy. The transition from oil and gas companies to “energy suppliers” and the discussion about energy “security” indicates the successful framing of political reality. This framing effectively defines the scope of political possibilities; it demands political rather than informational contest. Energy and climate resilience have become part of a development narrative enabling state violence and profiteering. These are more than what Chris Featherman calls “word rustling”, they “bear the fuller ideological power” of political imaginaries that require challenge not on the terrain of information but on the field of politics.

Appendix #12: States were never neutral

People shrugged and blamed the government.

— M Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1947

The concept of state capture, according to Kurmelovs, refers to “a situation in which large corporations and business interest act as hackers, tinkering with institutional programming to generate their preferred outcome.” It is hardly a revelation that regulatory, government and corporate personnel are interchangeable ­— it’s called the ruling class. There have been, as Kurmelovs identifies, periods in which Labor governments were more hostile to private oil companies, and in favour of a state-owned oil company. The proposal is treated as an artefact of the past, and no context for public energy utilities or state-controlled economic management offered. Instead, oil is a private commodity from the beginning.

State capture only comes to fruition for Kurmelovs by the time of the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocols. Here,

a small group of business leaders were busy working to make sure the interests of coal and gas companies were hardwired into any future decisions about the direction of the Australian economy.

The unsurprising role of right-wing think tanks like the IPA in shaping conservative governments “shows” the “extent to which industry — fossil fuel producers in particular — were able to influence processes to shape certain outcomes.” They are what Marian Wilkinson called the “carbon club.” Kurmelovs’ book could have been an opportunity to investigate claims of state capture like those aired in relation to pressure exerted by the then-Premier McGowan on the WA Environmental Protection Authority to withdraw guidelines outlining carbon credit purchases for new and expanding fossil fuel projects. The link between McGowan and the fossil fuel interests is left to conjecture and circumstantial speculation. It is never considered that governments have reasons (however suspect) to engage with the fossil fuel industry. It is always a tale of the corruption of a neutral, benevolent institution.

As Olùfẹ́mi O Taíwò argues, this implicit but uncritical analysis of the state leads to

the ubiquity of calls for climate justice that are addressed to “policymakers”—which is to say, state managers and those in their social orbit. What’s missing from this picture is the fact that states themselves, beyond corrupt individual politicians, have institutional interests in maintaining both private and state-owned fossil fuel capacity and consumption. As Fred Block argued decades ago, any serious analysis of the state must account for the structural constraints that prevent state politicians from acting against the interests of the capitalist class.

Block deepens the analysis by calling attention to the already “ideological role of the state” in maintaining and legitimising a social order conducive to capitalism, while appearing neutral in the class war. The obvious contradictions in state rule requires a more sophisticated conception of the state, he argues. The Keating government, Kurmelovs describes, struggled with “the Australian paradox” whereby the nation is both a user and exporter of fossil fuels, benefiting from them economically, and yet will be significantly affected by global warming. This is only part of the “paradox” that also sees social wealth siphoned into private hands, nature transformed into a commodity and colonial capitalists continue to plunder Indigenous land. Block argues that the state does not simply manage capitalist interests, but also mediates and occasionally decides between them. The state regulates the society in “the general interests of capital” but must be able to “take actions against the particular interests of capitalists” in moments of crisis or to assure legitimacy.

What Kurmelovs describes as “state capture”, from this perspective, is in fact something more like the privatisation of legitimacy, with a group of consciously embattled capitalists taking upon themselves in a concerted fashion the task of maintaining “what is necessary to reproduce the social order in changing circumstances,” as Block writes. While state managers are concerned with “the reproduction of the social order because their continued power rests on the maintenance of political and economic order,” private corporations are concerned to privatise and accumulate whatever necessary power they can in order to maintain the economic order at the expense of the social order. As Nancy Fraser’s “cannibal capital” phrase suggests, capitalism undermines its own conditions of existence.

Appendix #13: Corporation as racketeer

They use their productive apparatuses as others hold to their guns.

— Max Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations”

Kurmelovs wishes, at times, to bring the immoral actions of capitalists under the aegis of corruption and illegality. He points to the use of the “RICO” (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations) act in Puerto Rico’s case against Exxon in 2022. Kurmelovs and the litigants sought to portray oil companies’ actions in terms of lying and misrepresentation in order to sue them for negligence. The wish seeks to exclude a subsection of capitalist corporations from the ordinary functioning of our society. Those bad, corrupt organisations play havoc with our complacency because they viscerally demonstrate the universal indifference of capitalist forms of value to human life.

Horkheimer, theorising the decay of collective forms into fascism in the 1940s, developed the racket as a distinctive corporate formation, that ‘serves only to differentiate and concretise the idea of the ruling class.” He sought to demonstrate the moral immiseration of “the highest capitalistic bodies” in their fight for “as great a share as possible of the surplus value.” Crucially, he identified that the establishment of “a good strategic position” in the political economy is “particularly the case in periods in which the mode of production to which its leaders stick so tenaciously has become obsolete.” The cutthroat monopolisation of production and distribution of an essential commodity like energy occurs as the relations of production are challenged.

Appendix #14: There are real contradictions

Crisis forcibly makes capital and state confront their own basic contradictions which are subsequently displaced to the political and ideological spheres (twice removed from direct production and circulation)…

— James O’Connor, “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism”

It is impossible to write about climate change and capitalism without confronting basic contradictions in capitalism. O’Connor insists that these contradictions are not merely economic but political, turning the sphere of ideology into a site of potential transformation of the relations of production. He writes:

Implied in a systematic program of politically regulated social environment are kinds of planning which protect capital against its worst excesses, yet which may or may not be congruent with capital’s needs in particular conjunctures.

Kurmelovs approaches this in an asymptotic manner, gesturing at without naming the contradictions. “Governments couldn’t have it both ways,” he writes. Oil workers have “devoted their lives to an industry that posed an existential threat to humanity and had to end, but their salaries depended on it continuing to exist.” Free market think tanks begin defending patrimonial wealth and family dynasties, propping up monopolies against market competition. We need more tools than outrage at hypocrisy not only to understand but to intervene.

Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy suggests that even the basic contradiction between capital and labour is central to the political economy of oil. Kurmelovs class-blind conception of the oil industry and its workers, as well as general aversion to discussing labour as a factor in production, cannot conceptualise this contradiction or its role in shaping the relationship between the industry and the state. He focuses on oil money, not oil itself, nor the processes that produce oil as a commodity. Mitchell demonstrates how oil enabled states to marginalise organised labour and organise the political and social order on the basis of cheap energy.

The attempt to fight oil and other fossil fuel interests exclusively via legislative parliamentary politics has foundered may times, as evidenced by the Emissions Trading Scheme, or more recently the environmental protection laws that have been steadily compromised and stripped down in favour of business-friendly concessions. Slick fails to breach the divide between economics and politics that leaves the sphere of the market off-limits to political intervention and encourages the view that an environmental protection agency should not “be making decisions on economy-shaping projects on solely environmental grounds, without considering wider economic benefits.” In fact, fossil fuel companies hold the nation to ransom not in spite of political attempts to curtail their influence but through their means of political influence — through their role in the political economy.

Appendix #15: The political economy is contested

But the mood of investors looks pretty clear: green is nice, but returns are what really matter.

— Chanticleer column, Australian Financial Review, August 2024

In a capitalist economy, the level of economic activity is largely determined by the private investment decisions of capitalists. This means that capitalists, in their collective role as investors, have a veto over state policies in that their failure to invest at adequate levels can create major political problems for the state managers. This discourages state managers from taking actions that might seriously decrease the rate of investment.

— Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule”

It is symptomatic of the simplified picture of political economy that governs political journalism that the economy and “politics” are treated as separate entities, naturalising the former according to “laws” like “the iron will of the stock market” and the “relentless pressure to grow,” and isolating the latter to preserve its status as the motor of gently progressive change. Business decisions take place in corporate backrooms, and shareholder meetings are arcane affairs to rubber-stamp boardroom policy. The economy is like a network of forces acting on individuals and corporations alike in a mechanical manner to determine incentives. “Once up and running, an oil company simply has to drill.”

Yet oil, like gas, coal and almost any other commodity has to be produced (which involves labour, and involves various processes and products from crude oil to condensate, LPG and unconventional liquid petroleum) and is involved in intricate relations determined not simply by supply and demand but by price fluctuation, global market dynamics, financial speculation, corporate strategy, and — especially in the energy sector — state management. Oil is renowned for being hoarded in reserves to preserve prices. No oil company “simply has to drill.” Moreover, it is not oil companies that drill, but workers. Oil and gas have been developed under specifically union-averse conditions.

Mining companies are lining up to pressure the government to manage labour, minimising the power of workers to extract higher wages and its own capacity to demand tax. BHP wants a “comprehensive competitiveness agenda,” which really means a protection racket to socialise the risk and cost of its destructive business. The business press lines up behind such corporations to threaten “the potential for greater union penetration” which would “be followed by a return to the times of frequent industrial disputes” and disrupt “operations that support tens of thousands of well-paid jobs at mining sites without union-approved deals.” This campaign is concerted, including falsely claiming that energy workers on strike are a threat to customer safety. Against the background of the backlash against unions, investors are disciplining companies that go too far in divesting from fossil fuels. This includes giant super funds, such as HESTA, which in April rejected Woodside’s climate action plan. There is scant mention of such manoeuvres in Slick. It is acknowledged with a vague generalisation about corporations who “happily mortgaged the collective future of humanity in the name of shareholder value and multimillion-dollar bonuses.”

Appendix #16: Oil shock, absorbed

The measuring of oil is organised in a way that creates an important margin of uncertainty. Despite efforts to produce a similar uncertainty in the measurement of the atmosphere, the production of accuracy has been harder to dismantle.

— Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy

It is impossible to tell the story of oil politics without reference to the oil price shocks of the early 1970s. The crisis directly affected the regulation and composition of capital, with oil taking centre stage. The Saudi-led embargo led to a bilateral agreement (technically on economic and military collaboration) and to the system of petrodollars that continues to significantly bolster US imperial power and its link to oil. Given the intimate relationship between the Australian oil industry and US oil companies (as well as the intimate geopolitical relationship), it is strange that it plays such a small role in Slick. Similarly, with Australia still a net importer of oil (albeit with significant exports), the global context is fundamental to understanding the national industry and its political power.

Since its peak in the 2008-2009, Australian oil production fell by 40 per cent, but its connection to the global market is indicated by the counter-trend surge in oil production in 2018 with high prices.

The absence of the most dramatic macroeconomic dynamics shaping oil production during and after the epochal oil shock of 1973-74 is a significant omission. It may be explained by the Australian government’s consistent shielding of consumers from major price rises. For example, when the oil price rose by 255 per cent in 73-74, Australian consumers only paid 22 per cent more. In the late 1970s, in response to the Iran-Iraq War and related supply shocks, US prices doubled while Australian prices rose by a third and partly due to “import parity pricing for Australian crude oil into refineries.” The only disruptions in the supply of oil in Australia, a government-commissioned consultant reports, were during industrial action such as in the late 1970s and early 2000s in South Australia, and in the late 1980s in NSW.

Broader political and economic shifts like neoliberalism hardly rate a mention beyond the “liberalisation of financial markets,” a story in which oil and the price shocks and subsequent inflation of the 1970s should play a fundamental role. Kurmelovs has tunnel vision on the narrowly-defined issue of climate science in the oil industry, and does not look up to consider other factors. Yet understanding oil as a commodity, as capital, as a product of labour and markets, as well as a geopolitical weapon, are essential for understanding climate politics.

Appendix #17: Oil is colonial

They are just getting whatever stone they can find, the rich stones in the ground. That’s the way white people keep Aborigines down all the time… It looks like there’s two laws, white man law and Aboriginal Law. The white man law is not believing in the Aboriginal Law. Same way, this Aboriginal Law is not believing in the white man’s side.

— Dickie Skinner, Yungngora leader

Premier Court of Western Australia now says that drilling has proceeded with the consent of the Aboriginal people. What a sham! What hypocrisy! Sir Charles [Court] I hesitate to call him Sir” — is now exposed, in my opinion as a vassal of mining companies rather than as the Premier of a sovereign State.

— Stewart West, MP, House of Representatives, 26 March 1980

There’s no flies at Noonkanbah but the scabs are on the way.

— Protest placard

In 1980, the Yungngora, whose land was partially returned in 1976 via the Aboriginal Land Fund, attempted to fight off the oil company AMAX, who, among almost five hundred extant resource exploration rights, had theirs granted only a week before the former brutally-exploitative pastoral station was handed over to the community. Their blockade, which attracted the support of trade unions and the Western Australian Museum, attempted to protect ceremonial areas and burial grounds from destructive drilling.

As Steve Hawke observes in his 1989 account Noonkanbah, the resulting

dispute was a parable of the nationwide dispossession of the first custodians of the land… The Noonkanbah people were certainly aware of this, and pointed out the parallels again and again.

As David Ritter argues, the stand at Noonkanbah was driven by a moment of land rights radicalism and the expansion of the anti-colonial struggle, while also becoming in hindsight a demonstration of the profound weakness of legal protection of land. This weakness, Tony Birch observes, is endemic to the relationship between mining companies and Indigenous communities in Australia, which marginalise and erode their self-determination and enforce lop-sided economic development.

After a heated dispute involving an attempted blockade, the unions black-listing the site and extensive pressure exerted by the conservative WA government to have the sites arbitrarily re-classified to evade the Aboriginal Heritage Act (a report prepared by Tracy Chaloner in 2004 notes that the minister for cultural affairs Bill Grayden had been a member of a mining syndicate between 1949 and 1965), the government broke through with police and scab labour to begin drilling the site. Against all the wishes, advice and consultation with the Yungngora people, the drilling went ahead — and found no oil. Kurmelovs identifies this moment as one in which the oil industry began to actively undermined land rights, delegitimising the claims of Indigenous communities, and suggesting they were driven by external agitators.

A Federal Liberal MP, Fred Vinney, responding to questioning from the Labor opposition in parliament, argued that the

problem now is again one of balancing interests — of balancing the interests of this community of people who still live a tribal lifestyle with regard to their cultural background and the interests of the community of Western Australia in ensuring that exploration for oil proceeds.

The fact that, as the Labor MPs noted, this balance involved paddy wagons and an ultimatum delivered to the Yungngora people to decide which of two sites would be destroyed, demonstrates — if we needed any further demonstration — that there is no balance, only ongoing conflict. Amendments to the Aboriginal Heritage Act in the wake of Juukan Gorge were eventually completely repealed on the basis of protecting (or “balancing”) corporate interests. Noonkanbah can be related as a moment of historic solidarity, whose defeat can at any moment inspire new political coalitions and possibilities, or it can be related as tragedy, as it so often is, inexorably doomed to be repeated.

Dene scholar Glen Coulthard insists in his Red Skin, White Masks (2014) that blockades are not merely attempts to obstruct ongoing settler colonialism by negation, they are also

an affirmative gesture of Indigenous resurgence insofar as they embody an enactment of Indigenous law and the obligations such laws place on Indigenous peoples to uphold the relations of reciprocity that shape our engagements with the human and nonhuman world.

Without obscuring the real losses at Noonkanbah, the blockade can also be narrated as the positive assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in a political gesture that received wide support.

Appendix #18: The limits of litigation

Together we can create a sustainable and clean energy future that elevates Djaara biocultural knowledge and connection to Country and through genuine partnerships with Djaara can heal people, Country and our climate.

— Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Corporation, quoted in Future Gas Strategy, Australian Government, 2024

However, DJAARA question the premise of the Strategy, namely that ongoing gas production and development has a legitimate role to play in the transition to renewable energy.

— Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Corporation, Submission to Future Gas Strategy, Australian Government, 2024

Kurmelovs, at times, frames Slick as a contribution to a legal case against oil companies. The obsessive focus on what they knew when is tied to the view that the companies can be pinned down for criminal negligence. Taking models from “They Knew” lawsuits in the United States, as well as a Dutch case brough by shareholders against Shell in 2021, Kurmelovs wishes to “hold them accountable” and deny oil companies a ‘social licence.” This negative agenda is grounded in an assumption that the “full accounting of events” is equivalent to moral and legal accountability. It is politics reduced to (legally-admissible) facts.

At the same time, Kurmelovs is painfully aware of the limits of litigation, noting that Australian law “does not currently recognise anything criminal in helping to generate the carbon dioxide that has contributed to the breakdown of climactic processes,” and pointing to the weakness of Native Title legislation to protect Indigenous communities from predatory capital. In 2022, the case against Santos brought by Dennis Tipakalippa of the Tiwi Island’s Munupi group and the Environmental Defenders Office in the Native Title Tribunal excluded consideration of the impact of climate change. The case centred on whether appropriate procedures had been followed to consult with “traditional owners,” and whether the gas project would impact their lands and waters.

Santos’ Barossa project, having been delayed but not prevented by a slew of cases (including human rights cases against the banks funding the operation), received approval in December 2023 and is projected to emit 380 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution over its twenty-five-year lifetime. Santos has turned to undermining the reputation of the Environmental Defenders Office speculating (through the loyal business press) about a “conspiracy” involving billionaire donors (and competitors). Having spent hundreds of millions developing the project, Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher promised to “put every effort into unmasking the ratbags responsible for so many costly delays on a $5.8 billion gas project he is lavishly incentivised to deliver.” Even the AFR cannot but point out that for Gallagher, “having no money undermines the legitimacy of your litigation, while having money undermines the validity of your voting preferences.”

In the case brought against the Environmental Defenders Office and its funders (including Sunrise, Jubilee Australia and the NT Environment Centre) the judge found “an inference that Indigenous instructions have been distorted and manipulated” by lawyers, but no fraud. The suggestion that Indigenous peoples are being manipulated by the climate litigation movement is extremely concerning. The weakness of environmental protection legislation and failure of government action may be emboldening litigants to employ whatever legal means they identify — including Native Title. The responses of experts like Lily O’Neill and David Mejia-Canales express fear about the effect on climate litigation. But the case brought against Santos was a Native Title claim, concerning the failure to consult and assess traditional owners, not an explicitly environmental case.

While it is obvious that the project constitutes environmental destruction on an enormous scale, the limits of climate litigation do not permit environmental organisations to instrumentally use Indigenous communities to achieve their aims. The problem is clearly a problem of both settler law, as well as a failure of environmental politics. As in the case of Noonkanbah, the court is ill-suited to recognise and address the concerns of First Nations peoples. The case brought by the Environmental Defenders Office employed a cultural mapping exercise that according to the judge demonstrated a “lack of integrity.” This suggests that the climate movement should focus its energy less on the courts and law and more on explicitly political efforts to curtail environmental damage.

Appendix #19: The longing for a return to normal

As if something else had been workable. As if the alternative had ever borne any fruit.

— Kate Aronoff, Jacobin, 2021

There is a revealing comment towards the end of Slick, when Kurmelovs describes the risk of climate change. Earlier, Kurmelovs describes the emergence of a concerted oil lobby in the 1970s, “a time when wealthy men were struggling to make their voice heard.” This suggests a glorious period exempt from class rule, a vision of a past less corrupted than our own. In his concluding reporting at COP28, Kurmelovs writes,

At this point in human history, every serious person recognised the danger. Global food systems depended on regular, dependable weather patterns. Cities had been built and optimised to function within a particular temperature band. As the world’s climate systems were breaking down, so too was the environmental niche which we inhabited as a species.

The key word in this passage is “optimised”. The present dispensation, for Kurmelovs, is “optimised.” All this is threatened by climate change. Kurmelovs longs to return to “regular, dependable” weather, and regular, dependable politics.

It is almost inconceivable to imagine that our cities are “optimised” for anything but wealth accumulation. A number of the arguments in Slick make sense only against the background of a lost order, an uncorrupted politics, a legal system working for outcomes we favour, an elite who rule, if not for the people, in a competent way. The liberal progressive technocratic dream that mutated into neoliberal managerialism continues to haunt us.

Image: Babette Plana

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