The big fossil fuel companies, from Santos to Woodside, are not necessary to the healthy functioning of our society. In fact, it’s the very opposite—they are the ones that got us into this mess and are holding us back from taking real action. Ending their social license is the first step in being able to see and think clearly about the intense and disruptive challenges ahead.

It’s not difficult to grasp the horrific conclusions that might be—and repeatedly have been drawn—from the populationist argument. If the masses truly threaten the well-being of the planet by their existence, would, say, the emergence of a new and deadly pandemic be such a problem? The more morally squeamish of the populationist crowd might not like to follow that train of thought to its ultimate destination but plenty of others will.

As we process the magnitude of these floods, while still trying to make sense of the black summer fires, it is clear that we are going to need significant resources to manage the ongoing, rolling crises that will define our lives in the decades to come. As these impacts become more and more frequent, we need to organise around the idea that those responsible for the climate crisis must pay for the mess they have made.

Dan Ilic from the podcast A Rational Fear made headlines over the past weeks for placing billboards attacking the Coalition’s climate policies. His ‘JokeKeeper’ campaign has received gushing praise from many commentators, with Jane Caro suggesting that Ilic be made Australian of the Year and comparing him to child sexual assault survivor Grace Tame. While […]

It’s often the very same forces that are making our wages stagnate and our work become increasingly insecure that are working to prevent us from taking serious action on climate change. It’s clear now this is a fight that will have to be waged by unions and their members.

It is one hundred seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock and Australia is waking up to a charred and flooded landscape. After our burning summer, how will things be different? As communities recover and rebuild, let there also be this reckoning: it is not just climate action this country needs, it is climate justice.

As I made the trip on that half-empty plane, I thought about how my interstate mobility – moving east for study, west for family, east for work – and that of many others like me, has always been underpinned by the knowledge that it’s possible to go home. Unlike the climate migrants of Kiribati or Honduras, I haven’t had to face the possibility that home might become unreachable or might cease to exist as I know it.

In the wake of Australia’s most devastating bushfire season and the governments continued inaction, the pressure is mounting for Australian universities to take initiative in the fight against climate change.

A just education system must serve the joint purposes of providing the skills needed for a radically different economy, and the knowledges needed to make possible, and to build, another world for us all.

The success of the climate movement is going to depend on its ability to connect with Aboriginal communities on one hand and the union movement on the other. Aboriginal leadership of the climate justice fight is vital not only because Aboriginal communities are the most marginalised in Australia, but because they have the values and the knowledge that the rest of the country needs to build a sustainable and fair society in this place.

XR is not a social movement that has grown organically out of a struggle. It is more a project to capture some of the energy of the popular response to climate change and use it to fuel a growing and self-sustaining movement. The people were already there: the huge numbers at the global climate strike are just one example of the fact that people are prepared to act on climate.

We live in a time in which the gulf between the powerful and the powerless has widened immensely, both because of the ongoing transfer of wealth to the political class and because of the general collapse of the organisations of the Left.

Processing the media and political response to this week’s Extinction Rebellion protests, you could be forgiven for concluding that many of our journalists and politicians have never heard of the American civil rights movement or Gandhi’s satyagraha, which inspired its methods of non-violent resistance.

Climate change presents a unique opportunity to remake society to be more just, more caring and less exploitative and greed-driven. It is in Indigenous knowledge systems that we will find the blueprint for building that society, and it is in the Indigenous struggle that we find the blueprint for dismantling the failing system imposed on us.

Letting go of the crude idea that we can win against climate change is not ‘giving up’ but an moment of important reckoning, realignment and reflection. What is it that we will have to grieve and let go of? What must we work as hard as possible to save? How are seemingly unrelated movements like refugee action groups, Aboriginal language revivals, queer community health projects, progressive literary journals, also and already forms of climate action?

Sam Wallman listens to the signs.