Climate Denial's Racist Roots

June 22, 2022 6:38 AM

Writer Mary Annaïse Heglar shows how white supremacy is the throughline between the gun crisis and the climate crisis in The Frontline.
posted by bile and syntax (30 comments total)

In my experience, there are four kinds of Deniers:

The first type are those who think that they and their descendants will escape the worst of it, that climate change will mostly affect other people. Sadly, to some extent they are right. (It's sad because if they were factually rather than morally wrong they could be corrected more easily). This is the kind of people she's writing about and I agree their numbers are growing which is indeed very worrying.

We can also include large parts of the Russian state here. The impact of climate change is hard to predict and I think they are acting very foolishly but there is absolutely a powerful faction within Russia who views the melting of arctic ice and increase in summer temperatures (likely increasing agricultural yields in large parts of Russia and in Ukraine...) as a positive. There is of course a well documented link between US and Euro right wing culture warriors and Putin as symbol of masculine white virility, never mind that old school race theorists didn't think much of Slavs either, it seems that necessity has whitened them.

I think we got a little preview of this kind of nasty national self interest in the pandemic. I think it's probably broader than just white supremacy, although I understand why that is a potent lens for an American writer to use to investigate it. During the early months of the pandemic we saw straight-up lunatic behaviour from supposed advocates of rules based international orders. State national guards and federal agents hiding supplies from each other in the US, EU member states (allegedly) using their intelligence organisations to intercept each others supplies, the profoundly unedifying spectacle of fighting over relatively abundant vaccine supplies between the world's richest nations while the poorest got table scraps. It was disgusting. If this is how we behave over a virus that, though I intend to not get it, is not even that lethal, how are these same people and structures going to behave when under grinding, chronic climate induced stress?

The second are the cultural signifier bunch. These people will believe any old shit as long as it aligns with a bundle of culturally important symbols. If climate change is what "the Libs" believe, then we must roll-coal to own them. I don't really know what to think of this bizarre nonsense but I do think that for quite a few of not-otherwise super informed but hyper politicised people, this really plays a role. Of course, there's a big racial element here in the case of US politics.

The third are the cognitively dissident. I actually think this is the largest group and the easiest to reach. These people have internalised that fighting climate change means making choices that are deeply unappealing to them and therefore they "believe" that it isn't real. Stories of how cheap EVs are getting, how the cheapest electricity in the history of electricity is now solar PV are really important to winning these people over. That's because once they're told that the majority of the work can be done for a few hundred dollars per person per year, they suddenly "believe" since it no longer conflicts with their desire not to substantially change their lives. I'm not sure just how much of a disruption to our current lives actually changing enough to avoid climate change will incur (and I'm an IPCC reviewer and it's kind of my job to know) but I am pretty confident that it's a lot less than many of the cognitively dissident believe. (also more than the more pollyannaish think though)

The fourth are the genuinely incorrect. These fall into two subtypes - the merely completely uninformed, often can be explained as being in the second and third categories and the kooks. The latter are interesting intellectually and genuinely believe that their iconoclastic sunspot theory or whatever is correct but are ultimately irrelevant due to their tiny numbers. They are used by people in the first category as useful idiots to sow doubt but that is their only role.

(Paid shills are usually in the first category and often in the second as well but being a shill is an action rather than a reason for belief so I haven't included them in a separate category)

When I see articles pointing out the likely wildly disparate effects of climate change on the poorest places and groups of people, there is a part of me that thinks, "shut up, don't tell anyone that". That's because the potential audience is either:

a) From powerful nations and communities and motivated to do more to avoid climate change by this knowledge - but the kind of people motivated by this knowledge were already highly motivated to avoid climate change and don't need additional inspiration.

b) From less powerful nations and communities and motivated to do more to avoid climate change by this knowledge - but if they're not from hegemonic power states, it's not clear what the knowledge will help them to actually do

c) From powerful nations and communities and bad people (or at least highly self interested) who use this an excuse not to do anything since it won't affect them.

I'm sort of of kidding, I don't really think we should stop telling the truth about this but there is a little bit of me that see any writing like this and thinks "Tell them that climate change will kill NASCAR, that it will be bad for their college's endowments, that it will decrease their house value or reduce the value of their options, make whatever up so that these people get and stay motivated." I guess in the end it's better to be truthful.
posted by atrazine at 7:46 AM on June 22, 2022 [44 favorites]

Thanks for posting this! Mary Annaïse Heglar is also a great follow on twitter.
posted by PikeMatchbox at 8:08 AM on June 22, 2022

how are these same people and structures going to behave when under grinding, chronic climate induced stress?

What happened in Syria after its climate-change induced drought and subsequent food shortages may suggest outcomes. I have a suspicion that Russian elites know this is coming for them on some level, as well, which is why they are going all in on invading Ukraine. Bread riots usually include changes in (or at least existential threats to) leadership.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:02 AM on June 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

The second are the cultural signifier bunch. These people will believe any old shit as long as it aligns with a bundle of culturally important symbols. If climate change is what "the Libs" believe, then we must roll-coal to own them. I don't really know what to think of this bizarre nonsense but I do think that for quite a few of not-otherwise super informed but hyper politicised people, this really plays a role. Of course, there's a big racial element here in the case of US politics.
atrazine

I think this group is actually the largest, and much, much more important than liberals seem to understand. It's the source of frustration of providing endless scientific findings and logical arguments that seem to have no effect. It's because you're not fighting against "deniers", you're fighting against "fuck the libs". This has always been true but was really driven home under Trump, who took all sorts of positions that were explicitly the opposite of traditional US conservative positions but were instantly embraced and defended by the base.

The left seems really bad at understanding this. They continue to point out conservative hypocrisy, not understanding that this just delights the right because it makes libs mad.

"Tell them that climate change will kill NASCAR, that it will be bad for their college's endowments, that it will decrease their house value or reduce the value of their options, make whatever up so that these people get and stay motivated."

This is the only approach that will actually work, and the left is also really bad at understanding this. All these passionate, earnest articles and discussion about how climate change is destroying the planet, hurting the poor, is racist, etc. which conservatives do not and will not ever give a shit about and probably actively harms any chance of persuading them. If they're selfish assholes, then appeal to selfish assholes. Hold your nose if you need to, but do whatever it takes to win people over if it achieves the desired results.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:29 AM on June 22, 2022 [25 favorites]

It's beyond obvious that when resources are scarce, powerful countries do better than the less powerful. And this obviously will have a racial skew, given the makeups of groups and nations, and who's in a developing country, and who's in the "developed" ones.

But the article's thesis isn't helpful or instructive, as far as problem-solving goes. Correlation != causation, and besides it's mostly a US-centric piece, despite the reference to Russia. atrazine has provided a more realistic analysis of climate denial.

I once had some faith that there would be a gradual rejection of outright climate denial, and that this shift would further spur the technical work necessary to transition away from the worst of the offending fuels and practices, and that we'd somehow muddle through.

And that rejection of climate denial has been happening (...I guess some just got tired of others laughing at them for being soooo stupid)... but among other things (eg a pandemic and its aftermath), we're now mired in a European land war, with all the existential threats to humanity that that carries... things a bit more immediate than climate change, like nuclear war, famines, economic meltdown... the world has voluntarily brought on existential challenges that push climate out of the top o' the charts.

So I no longer have much faith that we'll proactively halt or beat back climate change. And, in fact, it's already here. But we're busy with other stuff atm, sorry.
posted by Artful Codger at 10:14 AM on June 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

Good list atrazine - you are on-point today!
I think you missed one though, which is how to fight climate change has changed over the past few decades, and well-meaning liberals are not necessarily up-to-date, nor are laws, so why should the average public be?

Cases in point:

California Environmental Quality Act law used to block student housing in Berkley CA.

Minneota 2040 planned blocked by lack of environmental review.

So a re-write of environmental law needs to occur to minimize things like water use, land destruction outside of existing city limits (emphasize saving the country side), auto use, more modern water-retention on-site (or less) and so-on. This might make some sites worse, but a real plan recognizes that.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:19 AM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

The first type are those who think that they and their descendants will escape the worst of it, that climate change will mostly affect other people. Sadly, to some extent they are right. (It's sad because if they were factually rather than morally wrong they could be corrected more easily). This is the kind of people she's writing about and I agree their numbers are growing which is indeed very worrying.

I could be wrong, but I don't think anybody will escape this mess, of course the more you have the more you'll be able to navigate those events in comfort, but at some point, parts of the planet where we grow a lot of produce will become too chaotic to live in with too many extreme weather events for reliable agriculture and some things will just disappear from our lives, other will become unaffordable to most, and I can't predict how that unfolds socially but I don't think it's pretty.


Probably the obscenely rich will be able to throw enough money at some people to grow what they desire though.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 10:23 AM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

as mentioned above, I think Syria is a great sort of microcosm example. Climate crisis driven drought causes demographic shifts that add pressure to a precarious political/economic situation and all hell breaks loose. this has devasting and ongoing local effects but also impacts neighboring regions (refugee influx etc.)

now imagine this on a global scale. food shortages, water wars, fires. there is only so long a very small percentage of the population can use their wealth to buffer themselves from the paroxysms of the rest of the world. yeah "I don't think it's pretty" indeed :(
posted by supermedusa at 10:41 AM on June 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

But the article's thesis isn't helpful or instructive, as far as problem-solving goes. Correlation != causation, [...] atrazine has provided a more realistic analysis of climate denial.

agree.

I find atrazine's four group breakdown helpful:

- those who accept climate change but figure they'll avoid the worst of it, so why bother?

- those who "believe" whatever they figure will piss off their opponents most,

- those who just don't want to make big, inconvenient changes in their lives so gravitate to whatever info is telling them they don't have to,

- those who have "done their own research" but obviously don't know how to properly do research as they've arrived at scientifically incorrect conclusions.

And what I think connects all four beyond the denial part is that, one way or another, the only way to reconcile them is via some form of successful communication/conversation. But the elephant in the room is that way too many of us just don't trust each other. Any uncertainty we may feel when trying connect tends to amplify quickly into outright refusal to even try. They are the enemy. They want to steal our freedom and eat our babies yadda-yadda-yadda.

I don't see how Mary Annaïse Heglar's reductively manichaen thesis helps matters at all in this regard.
posted by philip-random at 11:06 AM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Not surprisingly, I think William Gibson is probably right in his vision of the future found in his two most recent books (The Peripheral and Agency). Part of it is set in the early 22nd century when the world has emerged from an apocalyptic period known as "the Jackpot", the mass of interrelated environmental, social, political, and other problems that have been building since at least the 19th century and came to a head in the mid-21st century. 80% of the population died off during it, and the society that emerged is now openly ruled by the superrich (they are colloquially called "the klept" by what regular people remain) via AI-assisted state power.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:15 AM on June 22, 2022 [7 favorites]

It is kind of interesting that state and local environmental quality laws were often (but not always ~ there are 50 states and umpteen jurisdictions worldwide) originally written and used to protect the homes and land of upper-middle class whites has now been rewritten as 'racist' towards minorities. They were often drafted by Malthusian eugenicists and zero-population growthers. The environmental laws were racist to begin with. I think it just shows that laws can support both bad and good intentions, and writing them equitably is really hard.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:46 AM on June 22, 2022

Heglar's post reminds me of another thinker (and good Twitter follow) who is currently working on how best to understand the inherent linkages of climate change and the history of white supremacy: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. This recently published interview with him does a good job of laying out the interconnections he sees.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 12:15 PM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think this group is actually the largest, and much, much more important than liberals seem to understand. It's the source of frustration of providing endless scientific findings and logical arguments that seem to have no effect. It's because you're not fighting against "deniers", you're fighting against "fuck the libs". This has always been true but was really driven home under Trump, who took all sorts of positions that were explicitly the opposite of traditional US conservative positions but were instantly embraced and defended by the base.

I think that is very US specific. I agree with Artful Codger that this is a very US centric piece in general, and of course the link to gun control is very US specific but I think that's fine. She's an American writing for an American audience after all.

In particular, in the UK we don't see this culture war split on climate change at all despite transparent and unsuccessful attempts by Certain Malign Influences to create one. The UK has made, in relative terms, good progress on emissions reduction under a series of Conservative governments and the only people opposed to this are a small and isolated group of backbench freaks.

In Germany also I haven't seen this.

In France it's complicated, it's not a right-wing thing necessarily but opposition to certain measures to reduce emissions is definitely anti-elitist. I haven't seen any evidence that gilets jaunes are climate change deniers though, they just didn't care for the way the fuel tax was imposed on them.

The Netherlands has a fringe right wing party or two who have gotten quite frankly weirder and weirder during the Pandemic. One in particular, started off a few years ago branding¹ themselves as a sort of thinking-man's very-right-wing party and have gotten straight up bizarre recently, having now split into a party of sane right wingers and a rump lunatic party. Anyway there is a sort of counter-elite rather than anti-elite element there but their focus is more on not liking the cost of mitigation measures rather than straight up denialism. There is a farmer's party who are very unhappy about restrictions on their activities for environmental reasons but that is driven by nitrate deposition not CO2.

(1) They weren't and aren't, obvs.
posted by atrazine at 1:19 PM on June 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

> They continue to point out conservative hypocrisy, not understanding that this just delights the right because it makes libs mad.

"Consistency is the hobgoblin of liberal minds."
posted by pwnguin at 1:32 PM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm no great thinker, but it seems pretty obvious to me that right-wing reactions to climate change are basically just ethnic colonialism. It's just an extension of "we'll pay those people over there a dollar a day to manufacture our goods "

Not sure what the plan is for when all "those people" are on fire or under water, but I expect to be dead or in a prison camp by the time that determination is made.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 6:43 PM on June 22, 2022

Nonsense to the nth degree.
posted by Ideefixe at 7:07 PM on June 22, 2022

Man, delete me or whatever, but I'm just really confused how anyone could NOT view climate policy without considering colonialist white supremacist attitudes. This shit has been going on what, 400-infinity years?! Look at the world wide rise of right wing nationalism. Look at all the extreme immigration policies, the increasing restrictions of the autonomy of women and minorities.

Maybe there is a world wide conspiracy, and its nature is racist and nativist... And it always was and always has been.

I don't know how you fight that, stakes being as high as they are, and everyone being terrified

I don't mean to suggest we shouldn't fight forever, but it's ridiculous to suggest that these policies are new. These were always their policies! If the world's ending who's going to argue? The entire history of humanity is one of oppression. It's somehow going to change as a result of an existential crisis? Nah.

And with that, I bid you good night, dear internet. Take care of yourselves.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 7:50 PM on June 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

... I'm just really confused how anyone could NOT view climate policy without considering colonialist white supremacist attitudes.

... Occam's Razor?

There are MANY reasons why we are currently pursuing consumption and profit over sustainability and ecology, which has led to this climate mess. And most of them are orthogonal to racism or "colonialist white supremacist attitudes".

The solutions to the problem of climate change will be economic and technical. It would be swell if we could wedge in an end to racism too, but let's not lose focus.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:08 PM on June 22, 2022

Any system that requires, encourages or allows "me and mine benefit, those people suffer, even if the net effect is more suffering" type solutions is suicidal at scale with modern technology. We have a system that incentivizes destroying $10 of ground water to make $2 of fossil fuel for $0.20 cents profit. Inherent in all pollution based technologies is the idea that there is some place and some people who can be f*cled over.

Technology, Inequality, Survival choose 2.

Racism, othering, exploitation is exaclty how we got into the climate pollution mess, and the habitat deatruction mess and the PFAs and on and on. if you think you can keep a system where some peoples lives are worth less than others, and not have that system shit into your drinking water, your air, your food, you medicine, you are either very privledged or very ignorant.

As long as much of the population and world is an acceptable sacrifice zone, then they will get sacrificed and changing a light bulb won't solve it.

The pyschopathic greed and violence that was a successful historical strategy for some local polities is the doom of a global technological empire.

I find Heglar persuasive.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 10:38 PM on June 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

...From the data on his devices, Angell calculated that the underground water table in Madera County, one of the most over-tapped in the West, had dropped an astounding 60 feet over late spring and summer. So many agricultural pumps were dipping their bowls into the same depleted resource that the aquifer was collapsing, a descent he had never witnessed. “I’m 62 years old. I’ve been doing this more than half my life, and I’ve never seen this. Not even close,” he said. “This is all brand new, and it’s shaken everything I believe in.”

When he took a closer look at the well’s steel casing, he could see six hairline fractures that started at the 280-foot level and ended at the 900-foot level. But what he encountered between those two depths confirmed a phenomenon sometimes found in clay soils but rarely in sandy loams such as this. The casing had been bent by a profound force; the steel was rippled like a crushed soda can. That force, he knew, was the downward pull of subsidence. As a consequence of too much water being sucked out of the aquifer, the earth itself was sinking, first by inches and then by feet, shearing off pumps, eating away at ditches, canals, and aqueduct, stealing gravity from California’s one-of-a-kind water-delivery system that counted on gravity to flow.

He finally got the well to work, but the output, 350 gallons a minute, was not even half of what it should have been. It might draw water for another year or two, but he couldn’t guarantee more. That’s how fast the aquifer was petering out. “Drought on top of drought. Climate change on top of drought. And our response is always the same,” Angell said. “Plant more almonds and pistachios. Plant more housing tracts on farmland. But the river isn’t the same. The aquifer isn’t the same.”

The Well Fixer's Warning
posted by y2karl at 10:40 PM on June 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

Artful Codger "It would be swell if we could wedge in an end to racism too, but let's not lose focus."

Based on the impressive decades long failure of the economic and technical environmental advocates to bend the curve on climate, is now really the time you want to narrow the coalition and alienate the most reliable green voters (in US context). After all, keeping everything run by and for wealthy white people isn't exaclty working for climate, healthcare, gun control, transportation efficiency, criminal justice, the housing crisis.

Comfortable environmentalists have failed because they only wanted to work on their own pet projects (often literally their own pets). We saved the whales so they could asphixiate in sour oceans. Ok... thats enough ranting from me.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 10:47 PM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Comfortable environmentalists have failed because they only wanted to work on their own pet projects (often literally their own pets). We saved the whales so they could asphixiate in sour oceans. Ok... thats enough ranting from me.

Right. It's not even a rant. Environmentalism is easily co-opted for nefarious gains and makes for easy whataboutism. Wind turbines kill birds? The death of millions of birds for each turbine is ok, but 4 rare frogs killed in a pond is too much? How many birds do a coal plant kill? You have to look at a chart to figure that out, but 'how many birds does a wind turbine kill' is a google auto-fill in.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:24 AM on June 23, 2022

I feel Heglar is very much on to something, though she doesn't quite land the argument. Maybe it needs to be a deeper study? I agree it is US-centric but that doesn't make it bad. I've been thinking for a long while about some differences between US and European political culture, specifically regarding the different approaches to climate change, where the EU is pretty clear that climate change is real and a huge challenge, across party lines. And I have this spidey sense that racism is a significant part of that difference.
There is probably exactly as much vile racism in Europe as in the US, it's not that. But it plays a different, less integrated, role in politics. For instance most hard right racists in EU still want universal healthcare and good public schools and will pay taxes to get them. I wish I could be more clear, but I can't yet.
posted by mumimor at 2:41 AM on June 24, 2022

mumimor, I understand what you mean and I think the simple explanation is this: as non-settler states, the majority of European states are their indigenous populations. So if you support "Universal X" in, say, Denmark, about 90% of the people who are getting that are of Danish descent, another 5% of other EU descent or citizenship, and only very few others.

The US, as a settler state with its history of slavery on its own soil, is a lot less white so for a white nationalist, a universal benefit goes to "them" much more often than they would like. Of course in their own minds, the proportion of such benefits "taken" by the other are always much higher than in reality anyway.

In my view, European racist politics is much more about preventing additional immigration of "them" and about claiming mindshare among "us" since in most countries nativists have what they would consider a racial super-majority. In the US, despite the manic focus on reducing immigration, it isn't now and never has been the case that the dominant white racial group is an unassailable super majority so racists focus instead on preventing the creation of universal benefits and excluding others from political power through violence and legal skulduggery.

The hardest and clearest attempts at racially motivated disenfranchisement of non-white people in the US are in places where historically dominant white groups are in the minority or have only a small majority - in places where everyone is white, even white nationalists don't care about excluding minorities from political power because on a purely proportional basis they are unlikely to have much.

I don't want to say that ethnically diverse populations make it more difficult to have universal benefits because I don't believe that at all but I think that any population which has fracture planes of oppression running through it can make it hard to maintain that kind of solidarity since the oppressor will not grant solidarity to their victims.

In my own mind the way through is civic nationalism or other non nation-state based concepts of unity but I think we do have to be honest about the fact that most countries in Europe are, in practice, ethno-states even where they very explicitly reject that formulation. I'm thinking in particular of France which is simultaneously the home of civic nationalism and, in practice, a state where admittance to that civic nationalism is not really open to all of its citizens. The traditional socialist answer to this "question of nationalities" is one of universal brotherhood between workers, at least until the fourth international and the split between Trotskyists who continued to believe this and the Stalinists / Comintern who advocated Socialism in One Country.

Not that the Third International / Comintern gave up on socialism everywhere, they just believed that achieving it in one country was possible and that doing so would inevitably lead to other countries eventually joining in.

In a way, this is a recapitulation of that. Can we have "Net Zero in One Country" and work outwards or do approaches need to be fully global from the outset?
posted by atrazine at 5:15 AM on June 24, 2022

atrazine, I was indeed thinking along those lines (which as you well know is difficult to write about without becoming Francis Fukuyama), but there is also an aspect of the foundational stories of most American countries (so not just the US) that is directly about subjugation of other people that I think is part of it too. It's a related thought but not the same.

I am old enough that the weekly Sunday matiné at the cinema regularly featured Westerns that heroized white men committing genocide. One thing is seeing them in a shabby old theatre in Copenhagen, and perhaps another when you are actually in America and either a descendent of those men or of their victims. And in that, there might be a parallel to the role of Soviet mythology in Russia today...
posted by mumimor at 8:08 AM on June 24, 2022

Here's why I believe that this racializing of climate change denial is not instructive: simply put, I don't think you can show in a meaningful way that all other things being equal, race or ethnicity will correlate well with whether they're deniers or not.

I believe there's far better correlation with economic status. In other words, those most likely to be indifferent or to deny climate change are those who think they have the most to lose (opportunity, wealth, status, toys) if meaningful action to save the climate is ever undertaken.

Look also at our terminology: developed countries, developing countries. What is "developed"? Among other things, it's a country with a relatively affluent population, with disposable income, who consume more per-capita than those in less-developed countries.

You can feel warm about images of diverse peoples holding up hand-drawn images of a smiling planet, but at the end of the day, just about every population wants to have the advantages and opportunities of those around them who seem to be doing better.

And that is the problem. What most people, everywhere, currently aspire to, is a lifestyle that is unsustainable.

(I'm speaking globally; the deeply polarized US is unique)
posted by Artful Codger at 10:51 AM on June 24, 2022

I liked TFA. I'm not sure "root" is the word rather than "inexorably linked inputs and outputs," but it's a solid thesis. So much of politics is "this won'tr affect my family" that I can't even.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:12 PM on June 24, 2022

I don't have any stats or cross tabs to offer in arguing a tighter correlation or (gasp) causation on socioeconomic class as opposed to race for the climate denial. Is the average denier wealthier and thus self-interested compared to the general populace of the US, Indoubt it, but offer no proof. Is the general denier wealthy compared to the world? Surely


But where does that wealth inequality come from? Bootstraps and Merit? A stolen continent, stolen labor, a rigged system of privledges and oppression? Random?

I am used to "its not race, its class". Because "its not race its X" is how race gets erased from all the things that are race. We don't need climate deniers to have oil stocks in their portfolio to explain their denialism: someone they trust on their team told them several times climate change is bullshit. What team do the climate deniers think they are on? Team white christian hetereosexual man of the house, free market its-not-welfare-if- I-get it. And who donthe deniers think is perpetrating this hoax: team nerds and bleeding hearts and cities and miniorities and socialists.

Class is in addition to and influenced by race not a substitute for it. Hence why class analysis alone wont solve the climate crisis.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 1:40 AM on June 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

> What team do the climate deniers think they are on? Team white christian hetereosexual man of the house, free market its-not-welfare-if- I-get it. And who donthe deniers think is perpetrating this hoax: team nerds and bleeding hearts and cities and miniorities and socialists.

So US-centric.

> Class is in addition to and influenced by race not a substitute for it. Hence why class analysis alone wont solve the climate crisis.

The climate crisis is a set of economic and technical problems, with one root cause: the inability or unwillingness to recognize the consequences of overconsumption. There's nothing very useful about making denial just one more thing to chalk up to white hegemony. It gets us no closer to understanding or to solutions.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:21 AM on June 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Denialism is highest in US and then rest of anglosphere.

As stated in many comments above, yes, this is a US centric article. I am not claiming Saudi Arabia's climate policy is based on US style racism and political trends.

fossil fuels will continue to be used by militaries and profit seekers so long as the performance characteristics make them advantageous.

Climate change is a pollution problem, an externalities problem, a problem of concentrated benefits and costs being distributed more heavily on the already poor and marginal both within and between countries.

Thank you Artful Codger for your engagement.

Either way its a hot future, see you on the baricades.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 11:11 AM on June 25, 2022 [1 favorite]