Climate Culture: February 2024

Welcome to ‘Climate Culture’, a new monthly column where I share what I’ve been reading, watching, or listening to that’s got me thinking about the climate crisis.

It’s all fair game: novels, songs, films, articles, speeches, podcasts, TikToks, and graffiti could all make their way into this monthly round-up. The material discussed doesn’t have to be new – it might be, or it might just be new to me, or something I’ve returned to.

Here are three things that held my attention this month:

‘Climate Activists for Palestine’ banner slogan, Palestinian solidarity march in Fremantle, Western Australia, 10 February 2024

I was proud of my friends who marched in Fremantle last weekend under the banner of ‘Climate Activists for Palestine’. If I weren’t 1600 kilometres away, I would have been right there alongside them.

The cautious NGOs supposedly leading the Australian climate movement have, for the most part, failed to respond adequately to genocide in Gaza. This has been covered well by other writers: In Overland in December, Alex Kelly wrote on the Australian climate movement’s notable lack of solidarity. Earlier this month, Alex McKinnon published a piece on former Climate Action Network Australia strategist Kavita Naidu, who says she resigned because the organisation was repressing speech on Palestine. On the issue of justice for Palestine, it’s been the grassroots activists, First Nations people and youth activists who’ve shown actual leadership, as per usual.

As well as the moral imperative, there are strategic reasons for climate activists to take a stand against the injustices inflicted upon the Palestinian people. To meet the historical moment, we need broad, populist movements that bring together the climate struggle with resistance to settler colonialism, militarism and crimes against humanity. (To complete the picture, add a focus on economic justice and obscene wealth inequality.) NGOs fret about alienating their supporters if they veer too far outside their narrowly-define 'environmentalist' lane, but a more encompassing movement has a wider appeal, if it focuses on how the rich and powerful benefit from various types of injustice.

The banner in Fremantle was inspired by a similar one carried by Just Stop Oil activists in London earlier in the month:

‘Reckless’, Australian Crawl cover, performed by Angie McMahon for Triple J’s Like A Version, 16 February 2024

Yesterday, the video of this cover/rewrite kept popping up in my DMs and my social media feeds. Before then, I’d known Angie McMahon as a name only. Given Triple J lost its charm for me more than a decade ago, I was surprised at how moved I was by the performance, as well as by a caption posted by McMahon: “rewrote this song for people everywhere affected by climate change while corporations burn our future away, and sang it with my whole gut for the people of Palestine”.

The lyrics to Australian Crawl’s original are subtle, bordering on cryptic. A couple of lines about Burke and Wills evoke the hubris of colonists, but the song is largely personal, rather than political. McMahon’s rewrite is much more direct and obvious, as good protest songs often are. ‘Reckless’ turns out able to carry different types of meaning well.

McMahon sings about climate, mentioning rising seas, natural disasters, and coal mines. She gives a few lines to the injustice I’ve spent most of the last few years campaigning on: “Woodside are burning up the Pilbara/Greenwashed public statements/They’re still turning up the heat”. It's gratifying that word of what's happening in Western Australia continues to reach broader and broader national audiences.

In Australian Crawl's original, the chorus seems inwardly directed, the singer chastising himself over a dysfunctional romantic relationship: “She don’t like that kind of behaviour/So throw down your guns/Don’t be so reckless”. In McMahon’s version, those same words are directed outward, as a message to the powerful about their dysfunctional relationship with mother nature.

That chorus becomes more literal the second time round, after McMahon has sung about Australia’s complicity in atrocities: “We’re still contributing to war crimes/While we’re drilling money/And years out of the ground”. She might have found just about the only way to bring truth-telling on Palestine to the ABC. I wonder if it will become culture war fodder.

Towards the end, McMahon interpolates a line from Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush’, using it as a refrain: “Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s”. None of McMahon’s band look like they were alive in the 1970s (neither was I), making it more poignant: The degraded nature of the 70s was more diverse and abundant than anything they (or I) have ever known. (These days, Young sings it as “Look at mother nature on the run in the 21^st century”.)

‘Drill, baby, drill’, political slogan used by US Presidential Election candidate Donald Trump during 2023 and 2024

Based on my badly MAGA-pilled TikTok feed, it seems Donald Trump’s main policy promise this time round, the ‘Build the wall’ of 2024, is that America is going to ramp up the exploitation of oil from day one. On winning the Republican primary in Iowa, he promised to “drill, baby, drill, right away,” even before he got to mentioning plans to seal up the border. He presents it as an economic measure that will bring down the cost of living. According to Trump, “stupid fools” ended his oil-friendly energy policies and sent petrol prices skyrocketing. Never mind that the president can't really do much to increase oil production or impact fuel prices in the short term, that there’s been more oil dug up under Biden, or that the industry didn’t do too well during the first Trump presidency. And of course, never mind that dependence on fossil fuels is making the few rich at the expense of the many and creating cost-of-living crises. Globally, trillions are wasted on fossil fuel subsidies. Some of that could go towards helping those in need. Some of it could go towards supporting renewable developments, which can provide safer, cheaper and more secure energy.

Trump has done what politicians and fossil fuel companies regularly do. He’s presented the solution as the cause. Because he’s Trump, he’s done it especially brazenly, and especially well. The tactic fosters delay and lets big companies get away with making more short-term profits from climate danger. It’s what Woodside does every time it says gas is a necessary transition fuel, and it’s what Western Australian Premier Roger Cook has done by claiming increasing gas production and emissions in WA will actually help the global energy transition.

It seems team Trump really does have plans to stage an assault on the environment and expand fossil fuel production. They ‘drill, baby, drill’, and we ‘burn, baby, burn’.