Toe to toe with fossil fuel induced global warming

Written by: Nick G. on 12 August 2025

(July 30 protest against global warming at Santos offices in Adelaide. - source NT News)

Last week I went for a short walk along Seacliff Beach, one part of the unbroken stretch of suburban Adelaide beaches just kilometres form the CBD.

Every step of the way was littered with the washed-up bodies of dead marine life.

Most were benthic (bottom-feeding) species including masses of flathead, blue-swimmer crabs, abalone (with its much sought-after flesh still attached), mussels, razor fish, sea slugs, snails and worms. There were lesser numbers of other species including trumpeters, toad fish, weedy whiting and red mullet.

And a dead swan.

Running parallel with the sea shore was a 50-metre width strip of brown murky water, part of the algal bloom which has turned much of Adelaide’s coastal waters to a marine graveyard.

The algal bloom first came to notice in March. Warmer waters and an absence of sea water disturbance during SA’s prolonged drought led to an explosion in the population of the toxic Karenia mikimotoi algae. We have reported several times on this (see here and here).

In the immediate sense, nothing can be done until the bloom dissipates through natural means.

However, the SA algal bloom is a symptom of a sick ocean system that extends well beyond SA. On the day of my walk, news came through of a massive clean-up by volunteers of the beaches of Algiers where another algae native to the Pacific Ocean, Rugulopteryx okamurae, has found its way into the Mediterranean. While the beach clean-up was underway on the southern side of the Mediterranean, on the northern side France and Greece were engulfed in massive wildfires that had caused loss of life.

The rise in global warming, brought on by carbon emissions from the use of fossil fuels, continues to endanger Australian coral reefs.

The Great Barrier Reef has suffered mass bleaching in 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and now 2025. In the latest event, the Reef has suffered some of the most widespread coral loss ever seen and scientists warn that we’re approaching a moment where the coral may no longer be able to recover.

For the first time Ningaloo Reef on the opposite side of the continent suffered a bleaching event simultaneous with that of the Great Barrier Reef. Once again, the word “unprecedented” has been used.

Politicians ignore it at our peril.

Labor continues to wave through new coal and gas projects. The Nationals want to abandon net zero entirely. And the Liberals offer nothing. Australia remains the second-largest global exporter of fossil fuels.

Global warming is a part of capitalism’s destructive war on nature.

Capital must continue to accumulate by recreating its own value over and over again. In the process it exploits, ruins and diminishes the only two sources of that surplus value, human labour power and nature. The first can be kept alive and recreated at minimal cost to capital but the second can only be degraded and destroyed.

Biodiversity matters to the working class. Capitalism is the enemy of biodiversity and of workers.

We must shutdown fossil fuel extraction, use and export.

We can only do that in an anti-imperialist independent and socialist Australia.