Pirate's Cove

Funny, the Warmists didn’t complain when Osama Bin Laden was yammering about his worry about ‘climate change’. Or how Islamic extremist groups are trying to co-opt the Hotcoldwetdry movement. Or how extremist nations like Iran are pushing ‘climate change’. Nope, a tiny few “far right” extremist groups (who like government authoritarianism) are joining in

White Supremacy Goes Green

As an environmental journalist, I’ve been covering the frightening acceleration of climate change for more than a decade. As a person who believes in the tenets of liberal democracy, I’ve watched the rise of white-supremacist, anti-immigrant and nationalistic ideologies with similar dread over the past few years.

But I always thought of those two trends — looming ecological dangers and the gathering strength of the far right — as unrelated, parallel crises in a turbulent time. Only recently have I begun to understand that they are deeply interconnected, an ugly pairing of forces drawing power from each other.

From France to Washington to New Zealand, angry voices on the hard right — nationalists, populists and others beyond conventional conservatism — are picking up old environmental tropes and adapting them to a moment charged with fears for the future. In doing so, they are giving potent new framing to a set of issues more typically associated with the left. Often, they emphasize what they see as the deep ties between a nation’s land and its people to exclude those they believe do not belong. Some twist scientific terms such as “invasive species” — foreign plants or animals that spread unchecked in a new ecosystem — to target immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. And here’s what really frightens me: This dynamic is likely to intensify as climate change creates new stresses that could pit nations and groups against one another.

Beth Gardner is able to offer up just two examples

The neo-Nazi group Northwest Front, which advocates expelling people of color from the Pacific Northwest, appropriated a flag designed by a left-wing activist, reframing it with the slogan “The sky is the blue, and the land is the green. The white is for the people in between.” In Slovakia, far-right activists invoking the centrality of forests to national identity accuse members of the Roma ethnic minority of damaging them with excessive firewood gathering, Balsa Lubarda, a Central European University doctoral candidate studying the radical right, told me.

But, of course, ‘climate change’ is not about ‘climate change’, it’s about every Statist goal

President Trump tapped into this rhetoric in December. Responding to a question about the climate during a visit to London, he added a point about pollution in the ocean. “Certain countries are dumping unlimited loads of things in it,” he said. “They tend to float toward the United States.” He did not specify particular countries, but the comment echoed plastic producers’ contention that much oceanic garbage comes from a handful of Asian nations that lack effective waste management. When I listened to Mr. Trump, I realized that what he said was freighted with something more than a corporate effort to pass the buck. He was casting plastic pollution as a threat that foreigners were visiting upon the United States.

Hmm, so, Trump talks about ocean pollution, and she has a problem with this, because it’s really about stopping illegal aliens.

Some radicals are drawn to apocalyptic climate scenarios, seeing openings for authoritarianism or a complete societal breakdown. “They want to accelerate it,” said Blair Taylor, program director at the Institute for Social Ecology, a left-wing educational center, who has studied such groups. “So after the downfall they can set up their fascist ethno-states, they can be the Übermensch.” Violent actors are grabbing hold of such ideas. The killers accused of massacring Muslims and Mexican immigrants last year in New Zealand and Texas posted online manifestoes weaving white supremacy with environmental rhetoric.

There are really too many hot-takes in this opinion piece, you really have to read it from start to finish. But, I thank her for the handy dandy graphic which I will use for years to come.

Read: White Supremacy Has Gone Green Or Something »