Pirate's Cove

I’m getting the feeling that this whole thing really isn’t about the climate or environment

Are white people bad for the environment?

Dear Umbra,

Are white people bad for the environment? Do white people have substantially higher carbon footprints than folks of color?

— Just Understanding Systemic Truths In Climate Emergency

Dear JUSTICE,

If you look at whose lives are most affected by the many harms of climate change, it’s clear that race matters. You can point to the disproportionate suffering experienced by the Black victims of Hurricane Katrina, the high proportion of Latino farmworkers who suffer from heatstroke or worse every year, or the number of Indigenous lands contaminated by fossil fuel infrastructure. Those examples are just in the United States, mind you, and not even a comprehensive list of wrongs! And the immediate question is: Since white people are relatively protected from climate change, does it imply that they are its main perpetrators?

The answer is complicated. White people are, of course, not a monolith. On one end of the spectrum you have your white mega-billionaires with spectacularly high carbon footprints both in terms of personal lifestyle and professional influence on consumption culture. At the other, you have the poor, white population of, say, parts of West Virginia, whose bodies and hometowns have been completely decimated by the fossil fuel industry. The gap between these two groups might lead an uncritical observer to exclaim, Aha! This proves race is just a proxy for class in this environmental equation!

In other words, whitey bad! Seriously, this a rather racist question to start with, one that would not be tolerated if it was something like “are black people bad for keeping crime low?” Or “are black people good for the environment because they live like it’s 1722 in Africa?”

The origins of global warming are “rooted in a racism of ‘I know better,’” said Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, a progressive think tank. That particular sense of entitlement is a key tenet of white supremacy. (snip)

The heart of your question, JUSTICE, is not whether every white person is bad for the planet. It’s about whether it’s possible to separate white people as individuals from the legacy that white-favoring systems have wrought on the world. And that is a very complicated prospect!

So, yeah, Umbra at hyper-climate cult outlet Grist is pretty much saying white people are bad. Here’s my question: what are you going to do about, race-baiter?

If I buy an electric vehicle, go vegan, put solar panels on my house, and compost, will I have done enough to make up for that legacy and amend the climate crisis? Quite clearly not. And furthermore, the only reason that I would be able to afford all the trappings of a so-called low-carbon lifestyle would be because of the generational wealth obtained through the oppression of others and the extraction of natural resources.

These people are just nuts. And, I’m getting the idea that Umbra, like most Warmists, hasn’t done a damned thing to reduce her own carbon footprint. And just nuts. Cultists.

In an article for Foreign Policy, Georgetown University philosophers Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò and Beba Cibralic write, “Climate reparations are better understood as a systemic approach to redistributing resources and changing policies and institutions that have perpetuated harm.” For example, the two call for reforming the current international refugee housing system, calling upon wealthy countries to house migrants rather than denying them entry or relegating them to camps. They also suggest industrialized nations substantially increase their contributions to a Green Climate Fund that would help poorer, more frontline countries mitigate and adapt to climate change.

These white climate cultists are actually rather racist, thinking that black and brown people in 3rd World nations cannot survive with a helping hand.

(that graphic is from an old, old article at Grist by Greenie Pig)