Over the last years, as the slow motion catastrophe known as climate change gathered momentum, many have people consoled themselves by imagining a tipping point, a specific manifestation of the crisis so grotesque and so extreme as to force our leaders to respond.

The damage now evident throughout the Great Barrier Reef should dispel any illusion that such a point exists.

The reef’s a natural wonder: a complex miracle assembled over half a million years. As an instantly recognisable incarnation of the oceanic sublime, it provokes us to think about the less immediately photogenic aspects of our threatened marine ecosystems. We might struggle to imagine acidification or habitat destruction or coastal pollution but the bleaching of healthy coral makes palpable the less visible damage being done elsewhere.

It’s not unreasonable, then, to see the reef as a red line, to expect its degradation to provoke some kind of acknowledgement of the state of the planet.

Well, a few weeks ago the Greens’ Peter Whish-Wilson read to the Senate a widely-circulated tweet from reef specialist Professor Terry Hughes.

“I showed the results of aerial surveys of #bleaching on the #GreatBarrierReef to my students, And then we wept.”

Terry Hughes (@ProfTerryHughes)

I showed the results of aerial surveys of #bleaching on the #GreatBarrierReef to my students, And then we wept. pic.twitter.com/bry5cMmzdn

April 19, 2016

The chamber responded with loud derision, as if the grief of a climate scientist constituted some tremendous joke got up for their especial amusement. Amid the jeers and hoots, Liberal frontbencher minister Simon Birmingham mockingly suggested that Whish-Wilson needed a hanky.

The hilarity with which the senators responded to environmental disaster epitomised an administration whose leading members recently distinguished themselves by fondling lumps of coal during a debate in the lower chamber.

Yet the undergraduate antics of the conservatives, shameful as they are, pall in comparison to the Queensland Labor government’s decision to back the Adani corporation’s bid to open the $21.7bn Carmichael mine near Rockhampton, in one of the biggest coal extraction projects anywhere in the planet.

In March this year, 46 scientists co-authored a paper for the prestigious journal Nature in which they argued that only halting climate change would save the Great Barrier Reef.

Think about that – and then consider that, if the Carmichael mine goes ahead, it will unleash some 128m tons of carbon dioxide each year of its operation – the equivalent of a quarter of Australia’s total emissions from fuel combustion – even as the huge infrastructure constructed for the project (a terminal located within the reef heritage area) will, we’re told, make other mines suddenly viable, potentially opening a new era for coal mining in the sunshine state.

Despite the universally appalled response from environmentalists, the Queensland Labor government has declared the project “critical infrastructure” – and granted Adani unlimited water access for the next 60 years.

In the past, activists sometimes suggested that climate politics transcended the old divisions between left and right. Even the greediest tycoon lived on the same planet as the rest of us. On that basis, the argument went, they could be won over in the fight to preserve it.

In reality, the environment’s always been a class issue. Climate change will devastate the poor – and the rich and the powerful will barely notice.

Insulated by money, you can still treat nature as an inexhaustible resource to be endlessly abused, as per Donald Trump’s sons casually amusing themselves by slaughtering elephants and civets in Zimbabwe.

When Pauline Hanson splashed about off Great Keppel Island and then declared the Great Barrier Reef to be fine, the stunt hinted at a deeper truth. The politicians and tycoons with their stock options and property portfolios will still find pleasant locales for their holidays, no matter how degraded the oceans become. They have as little personal stake in combatting climate change as they do in fighting for housing affordability.

Much has been made of the declining prices fetched by coal, with some arguing that, as renewables become more affordable, the free market itself will drive a shift to clean energy. But what’s happening in Queensland shows that capitalism doesn’t work like that.

In the real world, the market isn’t akin to lemonade stands competing on street corners. As huge multinationals, the major polluters wield extensive power. The fossil fuel industry learned about climate change 40 years ago – and spent four decades preparing a political response.

As a result, coal exerts far more influence in the corridors of Canberra than, say, the tourism operators dependent on the reef.

Within the Liberal party, in particular, fossil fuels have become talismanic, as that parliamentary coal-stroking session exemplified.

If Islamic State (Isis) pledged to bomb the Great Barrier Reef, the Coalition would demand soldiers installed on every kilometre of the iconic coastline. But because the threat’s environmental, the conservatives see inaction almost as matter of principle.

In any case, the market necessarily operates within a system of competing national and regional governments. Witness Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s response to protesters heckling her in India about the Adani mine.

“All of you have jobs,” she said, “and there are regional Queenslanders that are fighting for jobs. Ten thousand regional jobs.”

The project might not be viable in the long term but, in the short term, it provides an economic boost to an impoverished region (even if the actual economic benefits have been overstated) – and for a politician that’s all that matters.

The same logic drives Turnbull’s defence of coal, a commodity Australia possesses in abundance. As Andrew Norton from the International Institute for Environment and Development notes, “climate change is a highly inconvenient truth for nationalism, as it is unsolvable at the national level and requires collective action between states and between different national and local communities.”

That’s why rightwing populism has become increasingly entwined with climate denialism, with, for instance, France’s far-right National Front denouncing international environmental talks as a “communist project”.

In the US, most of the Republican party now shares Trump’s scepticism about climate change (something he famously dubbed a hoax “created by and for the Chinese to make US manufacturing noncompetitive”).

In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s embraced denialism with the same fervour she adopted Islamophobia – and in both instances she’s dragged the right of the Liberal party with her.

In other words, you’d be naïve to expect any serious action on climate any time soon. That’s why the inconceivable seems now depressingly likely: one of the great wonders of the world slowly dying before our eyes.

As goes the reef, so goes the planet. The trajectory that Spaceship Earth’s currently traversing has been carefully plotted – and the course is set on disaster.

Yet the mounting resistance to Adani offers a glimmer of hope. Bob Brown’s described the struggle against the mine as potentially the Franklin River campaign for a new generation. It’s worth thinking about what that means.

Without the great social struggles of the past we would have lost most of the nation’s important ecological sites. As I’ve noted elsewhere, as late as the 1960s, the Queensland government saw the reef almost solely as a site for resource extraction, leasing over 20m hectares of it for oil extraction in 1967. At the time, Rhodes Airbridge, a professor of geology from Columbia University explained that the reef should be exploited “immediately and to the hilt”.

Likewise, the Liberal premier of Tasmania, Robin Grey, famously dismissed the Franklin River as “brown ditch, leech-ridden, unattractive to the majority of people”.

In a sense, then, protests did not so much save the Great Barrier Reef and the Franklin River as create them, as the campaigns taught Australians to value a country they’d never really seen before.

In the same way, a mass struggle against Adani might help us to think about global warming in a different way, to appreciate the reef as part of the global environment. If the nationalism of rightwing populism inevitably feeds climate scepticism, protest against fossil fuels pushes in the direction of internationalism, fostering a common interest across national borders against the corporations and politicians despoiling the planet.

We all know resistance to be necessary. We need the kind of campaign that makes it feel possible.