Going back 15 years, people would get on my case for saying that man caused climate change/global warming was all a scam from Leftists to institute their authoritarian government. Yet, more and more, the Cult of Climastrology admits what this is all about. This piece is by Annie Yang and runs in a Duke University newspaper, a university founded on capitalism and not exactly cheap
This summer, like many summers in recent memory, was hot. July 2019 was the hottest month in recorded history. Greenland’s ice sheet lost 11 billion tons of ice in one day. Smoke from Amazon fires blotted out the sun in cities thousands of kilometers away. The ominous prognosis that we have only 12 years to prevent irreversible, catastrophic climate change, seems grim.
In the face of a phenomenon that promises to fundamentally change the planet and our relation to it and one another, many people respond understandably with anxiety. How can we go on with our lives like normal while the future is uncertain? When climate change is characterized as apocalypse, others feel overwhelmed and powerless to change anything. And perhaps most troubling, some believe that humans deserve extinction for what we’ve done to the environment (as though all of humanity shares equal blame for and equal consequences of climate change!).
Instead of succumbing to despair or condemning humanity to extinction, we must organize. We must move purposefully to bring about transformative environmental and climate justice. To do this, we must also have a clear-eyed understanding of the root causes of this environmental crisis.
Yes, climate change is driven by human activity—but not just any human activity. It is capitalism, working in tandem with white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and imperialism, that has threatened not just the environment but the lives of primarily Black, Brown, and Indigenous people all over the world.
But, see, this is totally about saving the Earth from having a fever!
And of course, the United States military is the biggest polluter on the planet. If we are going to get serious about addressing climate change at its root, we must also recognize that American militarism and imperial aggression have been not only the means for intervening in countries to install governments with capital-friendly, environmentally-destructive policies, but also a direct contributor to climate change.
She won’t take the next step in saying the military needs to be disbanded, of course.
All this points to the great urgency to get at the root of climate change if we want to enact transformative environmental justice. Solutions must be rooted in radical change—combating settler-colonialism that has displaced and killed Indigenous people and erased their cultures, combating capitalism which has fueled the destruction of the planet for profit, combating racism which positions Black, Brown, Indigenous people around the world as the communities most at risk to climate change. What we need is eco-socialism, rooted in an understanding of capitalism, racism, imperialism, and their intersections if we are to protect our homes and one another.
We are living in the crossroads of history. We either devolve into fascism as Western capitalist nations adapt to climate change by further extracting resources from over-exploited countries and closing their borders to people displaced by instability and environmental disasters facilitated by the West.
Good grief.
