En Passant

Government condemnation of a massive protest by students over climate change has shown us where the real intelligence lies, I write in Independent Australia.

The NEG was a hot topic during Question Time on Tuesday, with the coal dinosaurs ignoring climate change for promises of cheap, reliable energy, writes John Passant in Independent Australia.

In Independent Australia on Tuesday I discussed the absurdity of the Turnbull Government’s claims that the SA blackouts were caused by renewables. Click here to get to the link to the full article, in which I raise privatisation and climate change as the real culprits of the blackout. SA blackout: The ‘renewables and Labor did it’ tale

A host of conservative politicians, including PM Turnbull, have opportunistically used the South Australian power outage to cast doubt on renewable energy, writes John Passant in Independent Australia.

Bloomberg in 2015    

The fact that capitalism in Australia and elsewhere is built on fossil fuel use means it will take a revolution to achieve a totally renewable energy society. Why? Because only a democratic working class revolution can put people before profit.

See the Great Barrier Reef before we kill it. Kiss goodbye to the snowfields. Find some way to cool down all day every day or move somewhere a bit cool, like Tasmania. Take out flood and fire insurance. Stock up on water purifiers. Don’t buy homes too close to the coast. Definitely don’t buy a farm. If you are indigenous or poor or both, you are completely stuffed. Well, maybe not you but your grandkids for sure.

When Maurice Newman displays his irrationality on climate change he is being perfectly rational. Capitalism is an irrational system which appears rational to those of us living in the madhouse. If we think only within its boundaries then what Newman says make sense from the point of view of capital even though it is complete and utter madness.

It is time to think outside the box of rational irrationality that capitalism has trapped us in. It is time for system change not climate change.

The invisibility of labour as the key in the production and exchange processes is an important part of the ideology of capitalism. Tony Abbott’s rants about invisible gases are just a small part of that cloak of invisibility around our labour that is one structure of capitalism that he seeks to defend and protect.