Australia is a state functionally captured by foreign owned big businesses like fossil fuel corporations and global finance asset managers.

Despite escalating climate disasters and massive public outcry for change, successive Australian governments have and will continue to relentlessly expands fossil fuel extraction. This is not an accident.

Australia is structurally embedded into the global extractive arteries that fuel the US Empire. This is an essential, unbreakable rule of Australia’s political economy.

Australia operates as a sub-imperial power, sometimes known as “Quarry Australia“.

Fossil fuel corporations are so powerful they can entirely ignore their lack of a social license. The top fossil fuel corporations like Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and Shell have market capitalisation that approach the entire GDP of Australia.

Our structural role in the global economy is to act as a quarry for the US empire and the global imperial core, providing cheap energy and raw materials. The companies that dig our iron ore and pump our gas are the some of the largest in Australia and the world, and are all almost entirely US and UK owned — 86 percent foreign owned in fact. This is why the Commonwealth Government consistently subordinates national interests and public opinion to foreign US imperial demands.

This is one reason why the foreign-owned companies do not need social license. They will get their minerals and gas no matter what due to our subordinate position with the USA.

To provide cover for this extraction, the industry uses “data-washing”. They hire top consultancies like EY, Bain, KPMG, and McKinsey to produce modelling that gives a veneer of objective analysis for the continued, endless extraction of fossil fuels. Consultancies like McKinsey provide the “scientific” veneer to make irrational destruction of our biosphere seem like a logical necessity.

These reports give comfort to a government public service that acts as the handmaidens of capital. The reports artificially inflate the economic benefits of gas and ignore climate costs. This gives public servants and politicians the justifications they need to support industry interests over community and public interest.

To justify expanding gas and coal extraction, the fossil fuel companies use fake solutions like carbon capture and storage and blue hydrogen. These technologies are designed to to lock in existing fossil fuel infrastructure and neutralise political pressure, all while siphoning billions in public subsidies.

Fossil fuel companies know they operate without social license. The public does not support fossil fuel companies. For example polling showing that 60 percent of Australians agree fossil fuel sponsorships are the exact same as cigarette advertising. The vast majority of people in Australia want to transition off coal and gas. An industry with social license would not need to create misinformation campaigns.

People know the fossil fuel industry is polluting our environment, making our air toxic, poisoning our water, and destroying our planet. The excessive power of fossil fuel companies allows them to disregard and ignore the lack of social consent.

When corporations ignore social license, the state steps in. Corporate authoritarianism is a form of neoliberal austerity — democracy is curtailed to enable profits. To protect corporations and the fossil fuel industry from democratic resistance, governments pass anti-protest laws, criminalise dissent, and subvert Native Title.

This anti-democratic tendency is inherent in neoliberalism. It is justified, maintained and pushed through networks of political influence that intertwine with media, corporations, the public service, civil society, politics and finance. For example, there are more than 100 individual lobbyists working on federal fossil fuel contracts in Canberra. Combined with massive political donations and a revolving door where senior public servants, journalists and politicians step directly into corporate boardrooms.

The Australian state is completely captured by fossil fuel interests — in many cases the people within it are willing, active partners.

We will never achieve a genuine transition to clean energy until we break this deeply entrenched corporate power. People seeking to challenge the power of fossil fuels need to recognise that merely focusing on social license and public opinion to shift political decision-making won’t work and hasn’t worked.

Our state is the “executive committee” of capital, our financial and political institutions are too embedded into the global fossil fuel system.

Social license itself is a liberal fiction used to hide the reality of “primitive accumulation” and ecological destruction. Social license is not a genuine democratic process of consent. It is a tool of modern neoliberal capitalism to perpetuate a fundamentally extractive social and economic system that violently extracts from people and the environment.

Fossil fuel companies don’t need social license because social license is a voluntary agreement between a massive corporation and local communities. It treats unequal parties as equal, and ignores the immense power difference between multinational corporations like BHP or Chevron and local communities.

When liberal elites try to focus on gaining a “social license”, it enables companies to continue to violently (either physical violence or economic violence) acquire resources like land and minerals, while appearing consensual and responsible. It hides the structural violence that is the basis for the expropriation.

Social license is an ideological cover-up. It creates a “cordon sanitaire” for governments, public servants, politicians and civil society — a no-go zone where democratic input is structurally excluded to ensure the stability of global energy supply chains.

At the risk of being viewed as doomerist, I certainly don’t think activists and campaigners should ignore public opinion. Who you vote for matters. Protests matter. Although Australia is enmeshed in the US imperial system, this is not permanent — as we saw with the shift of Australia’s enmeshment out from the British Empire to the US. Ultimately, people power — especially powerful, active unions — can and has won major concessions from foreign corporate power, imperialism and neoliberalism.

However, focusing on social license is a dead end.