How socialist groups survive when manufacturing disappears — and why they cannot adapt

This afternoon, walking past the SLV in a wide-ranging, although not lengthy, shopping trip, I saw something that was both extremely familiar and at the same time shocking.

This was the exceedingly familiar pro-Palestine messages:

1. “FREE, FREE, FREE PALESTINE”
2. “FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE”

but written in chalk on the ledges at the western exit from the SLV.

The resemblance of the writing to graffiti — although I was extremely familiar with the use of graffiti by anarchist groups at various universities around Melbourne — genuinely surprised me. I assumed that pro-Palestine groups would always use posters as a means of communication.

The unfortunate consequence was that I became obsessed with the familiar slogans at once, and could not do anything except switch between Trotskyist dogmatism and its antithesis in books like Robert Spencer’s The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle Eastern Peace Process. Both groups seemed to show the common mainstream arguments as completely wrong, and I have not read a rigorous refutation of the most controversial arguments of either by mainstream analysts.

Examples are the refusal to accept Jewish refugees and that

“Thus, by the 1920s, the Zionists had been marginalized on all sides. The majority of the world's Jews clearly showed their desire to emigrate to Western countries. And thousands of Jews who remained in Eastern Europe fought for a better life, winning solidarity from many of their Gentile brothers and sisters.”

as noted by Lance Selfa, the role of jihad in the conflict as noted by Spencer, and the “Jewish nakba” noted by Spencer but much more by Joan Peters.

However, a conversation today with my brother tonight about the graffiti said something that is really disturbing. This is that socialist organisations deprived by globalisation of what should be their financial and membership base — militant workers in labour-intensive manufacturing — have turned to anti-Zionist Muslim migrants. What my brother noted is that every single socialist parliamentary candidate joins pro-Palestine rallies wherever and whenever they are held. Yet, these rallies are tightly linked with Islamist groups who would outlaw any radically democratic secular party and execute its leaders. Worse still, they are ultimately linked with hyper-capitalist petromonarchies like Qaṭar, whom by all logic socialist groups.should.condemn much more strongly than Israel, given that the philosophy behind these pre-Enlightenment states is precisely the opposite of The Communist Manifesto. The worst thing is that this deep intetwining, which dates back at least to Lenin’s attempted alliance with Ibn Sa^cud, makes it.impossible for socialist groups to do anything to update a wordview minimally fifty-three years outdated.

Why the oil monarchies constitute capitalism’s inevitable “ endgame

The petromonarchies of the Persian Gulf are countries usually seen as strange, eccentric, unique, idiosyncratic or other similar words. Ever since I read Collins Gem: Basic Facts — Geography and various editions of The Guinness Book of Records I was aware they were extremely distinctive. Reading Gordon Robison’s 1996 Arab Gulf States gave me much more knowledge of these nations than could be garnered from either of previous book. Robison made these states seem more interesting than I had thought beforehand, although likely this is because I had not seen any reason to study them using the Grolier at Essendon Grammar Middle School.

The oil monarchies would always attract interest from me in subsequent years. Continuing alarm at Australia’s abysmal greenhouse gas emissions performance and the fact that Australia is fundamentally similar to the Gulf monarchies in being a high income resource-rich, low-latitude country, attracted attention at first. However, at this time I still assumed the petromonarchies as minor global players. Moreover, despite their reputation for extremely strict Islam — which Robison highlighted in his chapter on Saʽudi Arabia — I naïvely assumed the actual rulers of the petromonarchies were doing everything possible against al-Qaʽida. This belief was intensified by the one-eyed focus of Trotskyists upon Israel and the only slightly less one-eyed focus of the Right upon Iran, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It is true that in his early writings Robert Spencer would highlight the rigidity of Islam in Saʽudi Arabia, where non-Muslims cannot practice their religion at all, but by the middle 2010s Spencer was ignoring the Saʽudis.

When I read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, I wondered how writers like Hoppe viewed the petromonarchies. On the one hand, they clearly viewed monarchy as superior to democracy, yet they never so much as mentioned the Gulf States. I did, I must say, have the feeling that Hoppe and his ilk did admire these states, but out of fear that praising the Gulf States would either:

1. imply a sympathy to Islam that Hoppe obviously lacked, or
2. make for greater criticism from his Austrian School allies

The one thing that really made me slightly question the insignificance and plain strangeness of the oil monarchies was a small section of Chapter 9 of Kevin Williamson’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, where Williamson said that the Arab oil states were cases where the oil industry had taken over the state, as I knew the coal industry had in Australia. I knew from the obscene greenhouse gas emissions of Australia and the Gulf States how dangerous a country where the fossil fuel industry is the government had to be. Under this condition, the government makes its money from greenhouse gas emissions, with the result that it will be dogmatically opposed to emissions reductions no matter how urgent or costly for the rest of the world.

What I did know about the petromonarchies, with hindsight, ought to have been enough to question the practical ignorance of them by Israel-obsessed Left. Nevertheless, it was not until reading two articles — ‘McJihad’ by Timothy Mitchell and ‘Taxation, Non-Tax Revenue and Democracy’ by Wilson Prichard, Paola Salardi and Paul Segal — that I began to understand that absolute petromonarchies are not eccentric, strange societies who are purely products of Western imperialism but something far more dangerous and even sinister. Prichard, Salodi and Segal showed that, contrary to Hoppe’s impression of an extremely limited government under absolute monarchy, the Gulf petromonarchies actually have the world’s highest government revenue with absolutely no taxes on capital (a facet I was long aware of via The Guinness Book of Records).

What this made me realise was that:

1. the Gulf petromonarchies are in fact very wealthy states who earn their wealth exactly as anarcho-capitalist theory says “private states” must: by selling what they own [petroleum and natural gas]
2. petromonarchies are, as was noted as early as 1982 by William Powell in his Saudi Arabia and Its Royal Family, family businesses run more akin to (nonprofit) capitalist enterprises than to post-Communist Manifesto Western governments
3. petromonarchies constitute genuine imperialist powers who exploit the workers of many other countries with an abundance of labour.

The Levant and South Asia have become oppressed colonies of the petromonarchies: their primary source of private and even public revenue is remittances from the Gulf. So have, more recently, large portions of sub-Saharan Africa. The effects of this are profound. Because the Levantine and Asian workers are prohibited from organising collectively in any way whatsoever in their new home, they lose the ability to gain from globalisation that workers in labour-rich nations historically possessed. Petromonarchy aid also plays an important role keeping in place authoritarian rulers throughout the Arab world, and most likely also South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as noted by Killen Clarke in this year’s ‘The New Rentierism’. Global de-democratisation is very plausibly driven by petromonarchy power to a greater degree than even Clarke notes. As writers like Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page and Sheldon Wolin noted in the late 2000s and early 2010s, influence of mass preferences on government policy has totally disappeared, whereas decline of formal democratic institutions has been much smaller. Additionally, scholars note how inequality changed from decreasing to increasing at the precise time the 1973 oil crisis multiplied Gulf non-tax revenues (see here for a description of how the revenues multiplied).

Many academics have observed downward pressure on capital taxation, yet none discuss the possibility that the rise of the tax-free Gulf monarchies with vast rent revenues is what has pressured capital taxation downwards since 1973. The existence of states where wealth is totally untaxed and revenue is independent of high-tax states [older tax havens depended upon support from high-tax states] must make revenue generation via wealth taxation less feasible elsewhere. With their rigid bans on strikes and unions, the Gulf monarchies possess an absolute, uncompromised dictatorship of capital over labour, which creates pressure for policies more favourable to the extremely wealthy in the rest of the world. This lowering of taxes has created a vicious circle of debt in those states unable to gain large rent revenues, further increasing the geopolitical power of the petrostates, especially since the rulers invest heavily in lobbying for and gaining favourable policies from foreign governments. The most graphic illustration of this is the refusal of the US to target Saʽudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Although all but two of nineteen hijackers were from those nations and support for al-Qaʽida by Saʽudi princes suspected at the time and confirmed re all four of the wealthiest Gulf states since, weakening the petromonarchies was and is entirely unacceptable to the rich. It would lessen downward pressure on capital taxation and make it easier for the masses to demand higher rates thereof.

Ron Rogowski in his 1989 Commerce and Coalitions demonstrated that if a sector of society gains economically, it will want to translate its gains into politics. Because for almost two millennia (before 1900) gains of capital at the expense of labour always occurred during economic declines, Rogowski could not grasp what capital would do at the expense of labour under the economic situation prevailing since 1973 — one where capital gains at the expense of labour from globalisation. What we have seen capital do is eliminate the economic power of labour — absolutely essential for anything beyond nominal democracy — and in the past decade seek to transform the whole structure of politics to match a reality well established for three decades of a hegemony over labour. If social structure would match the observed economic hegemony of capital over labour as per Gilens, Page and Wolin, then:

1. workers would logically have zero rights vis-à-vis their bosses
2. academia and media would have zero freedom to oppose bosses’ absolute power
3. bosses would seek to justify their power in terms of natural law and religion
4. bosses would logically have absolute ownership of property
5. this property owned by bosses would be fully owned privately

These exact conditions describe the Gulf States:

1. as noted above, (almost entirely expatriate) workers have zero bargaining power vis-à-vis their (citizen) bosses
• contra Austrian School dogma, most expatriate workers in the Gulf lack the option to choose employment elsewhere — increasing global substitution of capital for labour severely limits options inside labour-rich nations
2. no independent media whatsoever exist
3. education is dictated by the requirements of the national and religious ideology of the royal families
4. ownership of property is restricted to citizens (bosses), with workers (noncitizens) completely excluded
5. as discussed earlier and presciently by Powell, the Gulf monarchies are private states completely owned by the royal families
• what is popularly called the “public sector” is not “public” at all, but is owned as family property
• the division of the Gulf economies are instead into:
1. a “state” or “nonprofit” sector directly owned by the state and employing primarily citizens
• this is conventionally called the “public” sector but given that the state is a family business, this is a misnomer
2. a “non-state”, for-profit sector in which extremely few citizens are employed except as bosses

These facts point towards the Gulf petromonarchies being the inevitable endgame of capitalism carried to the point wished by the global super-rich. Capitalists obviously would desire a society without taxes, unions, unrest from workers, or freedom to so much as argue for a system where bosses lack absolute power over workers. Being run as private corporations makes petromonarchies plainly much closer to a capitalist enterprise than even a nominally democratic parliamentary state could possibly be. It also means that the public has virtually no knowledge of how they operate: the archives of the Gulf States are almost entirely inaccessible and were never even analysed in Kian Byrne’s survey of Middle East archives. This secrecy, as has been discussed since Powell’s work on Saʽudi Arabia, is a large part of why almost nobody recognises why the purest form of capitalism would be necessarily a society akin to the tax-, union-, and strike-free oil monarchies, and without any freedom of speech or the press for the immense majority.

The desert city finally confirmed

Yet again, the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting heavy rainfall for Victoria without the smallest sign of it.

Although not quite as extreme as my previous prediction, the weather since I wrote a month ago is further proof of just how dire the situation is. The evidence from the past month-equivalent’s weather is, without question, that the situation is much worse than I thought last month.

Rainfall for the first sixteen days of October. What is amazing is how the driest areas are almost precisely those where climate models were expecting heavy rainfall! This is proof of the state of runaway climate change brought about by the inability to expropriate the oil sheikhs of the Gulf and coal barons of Australia. Under a just global economic system these super-polluters would have their wealth cut by ten to twelve orders of magnitude without the tiniest compensation!

Last evening, writing on Wikipedia, clouds were so dark I became really confident of some decent rain for the first time in many months.

Total rainfall so far this year, reflecting runaway climate change as a necessary result of failing to expropriate Australia’s coal barons and establish a genuine “boycott, divestment and sanctions” against the Gulf oil sheikhs that would weaken their geopolitical power 

However, as the night wore on with me extremely tired and unable to stay up, I went to bed, but the noisy blinds in my bedroom inhibited my sleep, which was extremely erratic. There were tiny traces of rain, but I was aware by the time I settled that there would not be any rainfall in Melbourne. This morning, I decided to get up earlier than I have in recent days, feeling I had had a reasonable sleep.

Later this morning, my undeniably incurable inability to react to the weather other than emotionally reared its ugly head. Pointing out that it is never going to rain again in Melbourne in a screaming voice, and hitting the kitchen bench with a clenched fist, constitute awful behaviours. Although I am frequently told I like it, I do not!. However, there is no possibility of:

1. it ever raining properly again in Melbourne to calm my anger, or
2. me developing a more measured response when it fails to rain
• I have frequently been told I simply “don’t want to” react in a measured way
• this is utter garbage
• the fact being that I simply cannot and never will be able to react to unfulfilled expectations of rain in a measured manner
• the fact is also that it is many orders of magnitude easier for others to get used to my screaming

The early afternoon saw an even more violent anger on my part about rain. Whilst my brother is willing to see it will rain less — and this has been observed — over the past month and a half it has rained probably one-sixth to one-eighth the amounts predicted when the Bureau of Meteorology made its spring forecast. It is almost definitive that, when above-average rainfall was confidently expected, Melbourne will record its driest spring this year. The city needs to receive more rain in less than half the time to equal the record low 67 millimetres from 1938. Given that predictions in August were for above-average rainfall, it is thus practically certain that Melbourne’s average annual rainfall from 2026 onwards will be substantially less than one-eighth of the historic average. Likely with increasing global warming it will be substantially less than such an already catastrophic decline. One-eighth is around 80 millimetres — corresponding to the record low Victoria annual rainfall of 75.9 millimetres. Given that we should expect less annual rainfall even than that, how low Melbourne’s annual rainfall will be from 2026 onwards is difficult to comprehend. Likely it will be substantially less than 50 millimetres — less than the record low annual rainfalls of Broken Hill or Tibooburra. With that, and similar declines in historically wetter areas, absent an extraordinary revival if class war by the workd's workers Victoria is faced with an ecological carastrophe whereby all native flora are left with unsuitable climates, and even nurseries and gardens cannot survive.

For capitalists, needless to say, a hot desert city is the best of all possible worlds. The hot climate provides the lowest subsistence minimum to pay workers, while the abundant land gives them the advantage in the class war, so capitalists can lower taxes and pressure them downwards elsewhere. They can and do drive capital out of cooler or wetter regions more favourable for the immense majority, and indeed stop labour moving out.

Channelling anger into initial measures with the ultimate goal of expropriating the polluters and ensuring every confiscated cent pays for remedies and compensation at zero cost to the sufferers stands infinitely easier and more likely than the two possibilities noted three paragraphs above. It is also really gross to say that catastrophic climate change is not as bad as having me scream and scream until it rains — which will be never.

Were education not clouded by capitalist dogma and the hegemony of the parasitic super-rich in funding, the facts and solutions re climate change could be understood much more accurately at much less cost at a much younger age. That capitalism is the cause of climate change is undeniably demonstrated by such documents as:

• ‘Elon Musk’s electric planet-suicide vehicle: Automobiles, emissions and degrowth’
• Environment, Capitalism and Socialism (in 1990!)
• The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World
• The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism
• ‘Tropical Cyclone Alfred and the politics of “keeping politics out of it”’
• ‘Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe’

That genuine socialism — a society in which workers run production without bosses via instantly recallable workers’ councils and production is planned in the collective need — could potentially solve the climate catastrophe with an apparently miraculous rapidity is also virtually undeniable.

That the wealthy oil sheikhs and coal barons have an incomprehensible amount to lose is also undeniable. Indeed, the polluters who gain their wealth from runaway global warming would minimally need to be stripped of all bar one-billionth of their accumulated wealth to reduce that wealth to a level adequate to maintain a society in which mass interest groups actually have any influence upon government policy. Red Flag discussed this in their ‘The United States Is Not a Democracy’ from 2020. After the Kyōtō Protocol, BDS-type campaigns against the Gulf petromonarchies — globally the greatest per capita emitters yet permitted carte blanche emissions increases — were already overdue. However, the blindness of socialist groups obsessed with prewar conflicts with Zionism meant that only in 2015 did anyone even suggest BDS was deserved more by the oil monarchies than by Israel.

nth year when the desert city finally appears?

Today, despite recent forecasts that a negative IOD would lead to good rainfall over eastern Australia, Melbourne, at a mere 5.4 millimetres, is experiencing its driest September on record after another prediciton of rain overnight “high chance of showers” failed yet again to materialise. In fact, on present trends Melbourne is headed for its driest spring month on record, beating out October 1914 by 1.5 millimetres and November 1895 by 0.6 millimetres. Most likely, Melbourne, despite th forecast of Weatherzone, will see less rain still in October and November. Weatherzone, even said “rain” today but already the sky is clearing!

Despite this Weatherzone forces, no rain has fallen in Melbourne. This will almost certainly be Melbourne’s not merely driest September, but driest spring month and driest year ever — but much, much worse is to come

A fortnight ago, a prediction of 10 millimetres — possibly in fact 15 — of rainfall and heavy thunderstorms was followed up by just 0.6 millimetres of rainfall!

Rainfall for the first sixteen days of September 2025. Note the very dry conditions over the inland southeast, and wet conditions over a central band of NSW and southwestern Australia. Courtesy Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Despite the fact that quite good rainfall over the rapidly drying southwest of Australia has weakened my tendency towards violent temper outbursts over climate change and the three-decades overdue call for expropriation of the fossil fuel polluters to the final cent and immediate transfer of every last cent of their accumulated wealth to renewable energy and compensation for the costs of climate change, the contrast between BOM predictions and actual rainfall in Melbourne — and to a lesser extent the rest of Victoria and the settled parts of South Australia — is so great that something must be utterly wrong with their forecast modelling.

Total Victorian rainfall for the first sixteen days of September, 2025

What has been virtually continuous for most of August and the first half of September is a sustained block that has produced extreme rainfall over Sydney — 530 millimetres over 45 days — and good rainfall over the aridifying southwest of Western Australia. This is, it must be noted, utterly opposite to what Weatherzone is predicting in its analysis of the negative IOD. However, given that based on the late-2000s documentation of Diane J. Seidel, Fu Qiang, William J. Randel and Thomas J. Reichler it is known that the tropics have shifted at least six degrees poleward since 1964 — equivalent to Melbourne shifting to the latitude of Bourke or Coober Pedy— it is to be expected that higher-latitude anticyclonic systems would severely dry out southern Australia.

Given that with a normally wet negative IOD Victoria is experiencing record drought, it can be expected that when the IOD turns positive it will be far, far worse — if that be possible. Two years ago, Melbourne saw just 0.2 millimetres in the last three weeks of September. As we are seeing something equally dry under conditions predicted to be wet, it is virtually certain that — as I have been predicting for two decades and counting — Melbourne’s annual rainfall is headed for an extremely steep decline to levels comparable to historical totals in Australia’s driest deserts or probably even less. So far this year, Melbourne is 7 millimetres below its 1967 record low of 332 millimetres. It is virtually certain that Melbourne will not receive 7 millimetres for the rest of 2025, and will definitively exceedingly rarely — like one year out of twenty or thirty — receive 332 millimetres in a year again. Most years, Melbourne’s annual rainfall will be a tiny fraction of its former 1967 record low, and about what was received in northern South Australia back in 2019.

The extremely low annual rainfall for northern South Australia in 2019 is what will be received in most years from 2026 onwards. Since the late 2000s, it has been known that the tropical belt has shifted sufficiently to place Melbourne in the same zone as the driest areas on this map, and runaway global warming will from now on place Melbourne there without doubt

For the world’s rich capitalists, unfortunately, the hot desert is the best possible environment because it gives bosses the smallest possible subsistence wage to pay workers, as noted two decades ago by Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Desert states can also typically out-earn states in less ecologically fragile regions, and thus avoid having to rely upon taxes, creating downward pressure on capital taxation at a global scale.

Without mass international worker struggle to globally

1. expropriate the super-polluters
• socialists have long demonstrated that the only just rate of capital taxation is 100 percent and the only just profit rate zero, for justice demands that workers keep every single cent of what they produce as wages 
2. trailing the corporate polluters under “workers’ courts”
1. these would undoubtedly find them guilty of theft for their entire accumulated wealth and profits
2. the corporate polluters would then be locked up or executed 
3. the entire loot [profit] corporate polluters have stolen from workers, other poor people and the environment as profits would be returned to the people and completely redirected to achieving zero emissions in the absolute minimum possible time
3. completely abolishing profit and private ownership

nothing can be done to limit damage from climate change, let alone to limit its extent. This has long been documented by countless journals and magazines from Red Flag to Socialism Today to Liberation News to Organization Theory. 

The super-polluter social contrast

In my previous post, I noted how the US states of Wyoming and North Dakota rival the three super-rentier Gulf petromonarchies of Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as “super-polluters”. “Super-polluters” are political entities whose [extraction-based] greenhouse gas emissions per citizen are (roughly) at least 1½ orders of magnitude greater than the global average. Put plainly, citizens of super-polluters profit immensely from runaway global warming, via rents and/or job opportunities unavailable in states without these resources, and via not having to pay taxes.

What is strange when comparing the two sets of “super-polluters is that”:

1. both groups have a very restricted number of local “citizens”, which accounts for the super-polluter status, but
2. the Gulf petromonarchies have imported huge amounts of expatriate labour, but foreign labour is remarkably absent from the worst-polluting US states
• Wyoming and North Dakota have for many decades been amongst the bottom six US states in terms of proportion born outside the country, and this has not changed even with the oil boom and resultant glut that occurred in the 2010s.
• Moreover, Montana and West Virginia — two other very large polluters — are the very lowest two states by proportion born outside the US
• Alaska and New Mexico, two other great polluters (both among the most sui generis US states it should be emphasised), have larger proportions born overseas but these are still below to the US mean

In his landmark 2005 Sundown Towns, the late James Löwen noted that North Dakota — the second worst polluting state in the US today — was a sundown state for blacks during minimally the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Census data from 1970 suggest the only place in the state a black family might live remotely safely was the military town of Minot. The exclusion of blacks in the rural Northwest was in fact so complete as to make research virtually impossible. The same is true of Montana, and marginally less so Wyoming, as can be seen below:

Counties with no or very few black households in 1970 mapped. Taken from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1973/dec/population-volume-1.html. Note the huge area without black households in the Plains — and note that essentially all the rural Northwest was a sundown area for blacks.

The explanation can, I think, be found in the 2007 thesis ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’ by Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Although in a revised edition of the thesis that team says it is not likely that any society’s subsistence minimum can be lower than $PPP 300 [1990 US dollars] and that it is possible that in the most exploitative societies a proportion of the population could not afford the subsistence minimum, what is critical is how the team noted the likelihood of lower subsistence minima for tropical and subtropical climates compared to temperate zones. It is likely that in climates as cold as North Dakota’s, requiring extreme shelter, clothing and food, the subsistence minimum would be not merely greater than the $PPP 300 used in their second edition, but significantly greater than the $PPP 400 used by Angus Maddison in The World Economy: Historical Statistics. No society in so cold a climate is analysed and my earlier post aims to explain why finding one is naturally difficult if not impossible. Although the team implies that one needs to be cautious re differences in subsistence minima, it is logical and likely that the subsistence minimum in North Dakota, Wyoming or Montana would exceed $PPP 500 and could reach $PPP 600.

The fact that bosses in Wyoming, Montana or North Dakota must provide workers a substantially higher subsistence income than in the Persian Gulf undoubtedly affects ruling class thought. Whereas in the Persian Gulf the ruling class brings in vast numbers of domestic and other low-skill workers, in the above-mentioned US states this would be too expensive as they require so much protection from frigid weather. Hence, the ruling classes of these cold super-polluters desire to completely exclude undesirable people — most especially and emphatically blacks — to limit the numbers of the lower class they must sustain at the elevated minimum. This, paradoxically, substantially lowers prices for those able to live in these regions below those of many hotter climates. Fewer buyers means less competition, with the result that buyers become more able to exert downward price pressure. This can be seen in how, despite the almost certain high subsistence minima, one’s dollar goes further in North Dakota than in Florida or Arizona.

Purchasing power of $100 in US states compared (2024). The subsistence minimum theory of Milanovic, Williamson and Lindert (2007, 2008) would predict a steady decrease the cooler the climate; however, historic sundown laws and related factors distort this

The basic conclusion is that climate affects the social structure of super-polluting states greatly. Only when subsistence minima are sufficiently low will the wealthy use their wealth to invest in exploitative labour practices: otherwise they are more likely to simply exclude others from it.

Super-Republican and super-polluters

I have been familiar for several years with the existence of “super-polluter” petrostates whose per capita extraction-based greenhouse gas emissions are hundred of times the global average. Economically, these “super-polluter” ruling classes who sell the fossil fuels profit from runaway ecological distraction caused by unlimited fossil fuel usages to an extent orders of magnitude larger than the average global ruling class. The wealth of these ruling classes, allows them to dictate policy globally to a very high degree — most especially to prevent demands for ecological justice and even for anything except carte blanche to emit however much greenhouse gases their rulers can profit from. The super-polluters of the Persian Gulf — Kuwait, Qaṭar and the UAE — are well documented by emissions figures. They become especially egregious if we debit zero emissions to expatriates and measure emissions per citizen, a perspective implied correct by Arun Saldanha’s ‘A Date with Destiny: Racial Capitalism and the Beginnings of the Anthropocene’. By such a calculation, Qaṭar’s per-citizen emissions are 450 times(!) the global average, and those of Kuwait and the UAE around seventy times.

The question of whether other super-polluters exists at a more local level has interested me recently. The fifty states of the United States provide a unique opportunity to examine this possibility, because I have long known of statewide breakdowns of fossil fuel production for coal, oil and natural gas, which can be used to approximate state-by state cumulative and present extraction-based greenhouse gas emissions.

Whilst it was too difficult for me to print all the figures, I have shown for each US state details of:

1. percentage of cumulative US extraction-based emissions
2. percentage of global cumulative extraction-based emissions
3. percent of current US population
4. percent of current US emissions
5. percent or ratio to total US extraction-based emissions per capita
1. I have used percent where the ratio is less than one, and ratio if it is greater
6. percent or ratio to global extraction-based emissions per capita

It might be noted that there are small extraction-based emissions from other sources which I did not calculate for lack of time and unavailability of data. (Extraction-based emissions are not zero for polities producing no fossil fuels currently or cumulatively, which includes a third of US states). Nevertheless, this table should be a clue as to which US state ruling classes are the biggest profiteers from global warming.

I have also shaded “red wall” states in red and “blue wall” states in blue to see how much US political divides relate to actual greenhouse gas emissions.

US Extraction-Based Emissions by State:

State	Percentage of US cumulative emissions	Percentage of global cumulative emissions	Percent of US population (2020s)	Percent of Present US emissions	Percent of or ratio to US per capita emissions	Percent of or ratio to global per capita emissions
Alabama	1.65%	0.36%	1.52%	0.63%	41.526%	1.356784592
Alaska	2.29%	0.50%	0.22%	1.63%	7.463	24.38419474
Arizona	0.31%	0.07%	2.23%	0.00%	0.012%	0.04%
Arkansas	0.46%	0.10%	0.91%	0.47%	51.978%	1.698253119
California	3.59%	0.78%	11.62%	1.08%	9.294%	30.36%
Colorado	2.02%	0.44%	1.76%	3.67%	2.089	6.824671159
Connecticut			1.08%
Delaware			0.31%
Florida	0.08%	0.02%	6.89%	0.01%	0.149%	0.49%
Georgia	0.01%	0.00%	3.29%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
Hawaii			0.43%
Idaho	0.05%	0.01%	0.59%	0.00%	0.269%	0.88%
Illinois	4.83%	1.05%	3.74%	1.88%	50.252%	1.641858174
Indiana	1.95%	0.42%	2.04%	1.13%	55.179%	1.802853651
Iowa	0.00%	0.00%	0.96%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
Kansas	1.30%	0.28%	0.88%	0.37%	42.098%	1.375445865
Kentucky	6.69%	1.45%	1.35%	1.45%	1.071	3.500860065
Louisiana	5.64%	1.22%	1.35%	3.66%	2.700	8.821153759
Maine			0.41%
Maryland	0.29%	0.06%	1.85%	0.06%	3.498%	11.43%
Massachusetts			2.10%
Michigan	0.27%	0.06%	2.99%	0.11%	3.540%	11.57%
Minnesota			1.71%
Mississippi	0.44%	0.10%	0.87%	0.29%	16.721%	54.63%
Missouri	0.04%	0.01%	1.84%	0.00%	0.220%	0.72%
Montana	1.56%	0.34%	0.34%	1.54%	4.607	15.05241983
Nebraska	0.06%	0.01%	0.59%	0.01%	2.153%	7.03%
Nevada	0.01%	0.00%	0.96%	0.00%	0.184%	0.60%
New Hampshire			0.42%
New Jersey			2.80%
New Mexico	2.70%	0.59%	0.63%	7.13%	11.355	37.10152528
New York	0.02%	0.01%	5.85%	0.01%	0.194%	0.63%
North Carolina			3.25%
North Dakota	1.72%	0.37%	0.23%	5.23%	22.297	72.84921958
Ohio	3.05%	0.66%	3.50%	2.52%	72.055%	2.35423961
Oklahoma	3.52%	0.76%	1.21%	3.69%	3.057	9.987822025
Oregon	0.00%	0.00%	1.26%	0.20%	15.952%	52.12%
Pennsylvania	12.84%	2.78%	3.85%	9.41%	2.441	7.974852848
Rhode Island			0.33%
South Carolina			1.61%
South Dakota	0.01%	0.00%	0.27%	0.01%	2.777%	9.07%
Tennessee	0.46%	0.10%	2.13%	0.00%	0.219%	0.71%
Texas	16.23%	3.52%	9.22%	24.74%	2.683	8.767608641
Utah	1.15%	0.25%	1.03%	1.10%	1.070	3.495456591
Vermont			0.19%
Virginia	1.82%	0.40%	2.60%	0.61%	23.374%	76.37%
Washington	0.07%	0.02%	2.34%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
West Virginia	10.05%	2.18%	0.52%	6.81%	13.060	42.66954766
Wisconsin			1.76%
Wyoming	10.11%	2.19%	0.17%	13.47%	77.804	254.2074428
Federal offshore	2.71%	0.59%		7.08%

The table above shows a remarkable concentration of US greenhouse gas emissions, and a major political divide:

• Four states account for fifty percent of cumulative US greenhouse gas emissions
• Five states account for 61 percent of current US greenhouse gas emissions
• “Red Wall” states have 22 percent of the US population but produce 64 percent of emissions
• “Blue Wall” states have 34 percent of the population but produce only 9 percent of emissions
• as noted earlier, this figure is an understatement, but even so the “blue wall” states undoubtedly produce low emissions relative to population — lower than the global average

There is definite evidence of “super-polluter” states in Wyoming and perhaps North Dakota, West Virginia and New Mexico. Wyoming is a definite super-polluter, with per capita emissions 250 times the global average, half that of Qaṭar. It is the least populous US state yet the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter and third-largest cumulative emitter! North Dakota has per capita emissions comparable to Kuwait or the UAE, and West Virginia and New Mexico about half that. Excluding New Mexico, these have constituted Trump’s three best states in all his presidential campaigns, which is extremely telling. New Mexico is a complicated and very much sui generis state, which Trump did not win in any of his three campaigns and did not even trend Republican in 2024. It has a countercultural mountain culture akin to Colorado or New England in its highest lands, politically detached from the pollution-producing northwest and Plains regions. In the other three the political influence of fossil fuels is as hegemonic as in the Gulf oil monarchies, and this is also likely to be true in Texas and Oklahoma. Even more than with the Gulf states globally, the tax-free or low-tax policies of super-polluting US states limit the range of policies possible elsewhere in the country, as business relocation is easier.