The climate crisis is hitting the planet’s working classes the hardest and they know it
where, for instance, western Sydney gets an astonishing 8-10 degrees hotter during heatwaves than the eastern parts of the city. It’s not just a question of temperatures, either. We know the carbon getting pumped into the atmosphere means more fires and more flooding – and we know who will bear the brunt of the entirely predictable disasters that will ensue. Researchers looking at the 2019-2020 bushfires say that “the most socio-economically disadvantaged communities bore a disproportionately higher hazard exposure in the Black Summer than relatively advantaged communities.” Likewise, the floods of 2022 most affected poorer households, who were more likely to live in riskier areas and less likely to be covered by insurance. To put it another way, if you’re not fighting global warming, you don’t care about the working class, irrespective of how often you take to Sky News to rage rhetorically against “woke elites”. Given what’s at stake for ordinary people, we might wonder why environmentalism hasn’t been unequivocally linked to the battlers to the extent where green might be proclaimed the new red. Part of the answer lies with how so many of the climate “solutions” espoused by mainstream politicians come straight out of the neoliberal toolkit. Decades of philosophical dominance by rightwing economists means, ever since the 1990s, the default response to global warming has centred on market mechanisms akin to those that, for everyone outside the political class, turned “reform” into a dirty word. When policymakers enthuse about emissions trading systems and other free market nostrums, to many ordinary people they sound just like the brainiacs who “reformed” public utilities, industrial relations, welfare and education into the ground. The Labor party’s long association with neoliberalism equally espoused by the Liberals helps explain the continuing drift of rusted-on voters away from both major parties. But a recognition of that disenchantment doesn’t mean embracing fantasies about the Liberals somehow establishing themselves as the proletarian choice. It’s wrong, for instance, to see the election result as showing progressivism as “a politics of the rich” and conservatism “the politics of the struggling”. On the contrary, in his granular breakdown of voting trends, data scientist Shaun Ratcliff shows that, despite the success of the Teals, the Liberals remain very much the party of privilege. “[I[t is still mostly true,” he says, “that well-off and established voters are more likely to vote for the Coalition, and lower-income working-age Australians generally continued to vote for the left in 2022.” That shouldn’t come as any surprise. Working-class voters – in Australia and around the world – increasingly mistrust all established parties. But that doesn’t render them innately conservative. The cow tends not to vote for the butcher. Understandably, workers want reassurances that, in a low-carbon future, they won’t lose the social gains they’ve secured in the traditional polluting industries. But the generations of unionists who won relatively high wages in mining would turn in their graves at the suggestion that coal – a substance stained for a century and a half with the blood of those who extracted it – was innately good for the working class.
