Can you guess what the answer is from Eric Holthaus, a high poobah in the Cult of Climastrology?
The Climate Crisis Is Racist. The Answer Is Anti-Racism.
I’m writing this from St Paul, Minnesota. Our neighbouring city, Minneapolis, is descending into riots this evening. I can hear the fireworks and tear gas grenades being fired at protestors five miles away. They are outraged at the police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd. Floyd was killed by a white police officer who knelt on his neck for at least seven minutes while he was handcuffed and face down on the ground. Floyd repeatedly said, “I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe.†The same rainstorm that is falling on the burning buildings across the river is falling on the garden I planted with my preschoolers earlier today.
The CoC loves taking advantage of every event that happens, as we’ve seen time and again. They then try to subsume those events and make them more about ‘climate change’ then about the actual event, making the actual even less important.
The outrage in Minneapolis right now is primarily about inequality. Since the early days of this city, it has been divided along racial lines, beginning with the expulsion and extermination of the Anishinaabe people, whose land we still occupy. A hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, banks and city officials maintained a racist system of redlining, and created entire neighbourhoods where housing and businesses could not apply for loans and where poverty persists today. Schools in Minnesota, where Minneapolis is the largest city, have among the worst achievement gaps for kids of colour in the entire country.
Eric does understand that Minneapolis is a city run by his buddies in the Democratic Party, the party of ‘climate change’, right? Right?
Climate change is racist because the system that caused it is racist. No, rainstorms don’t care about skin colour, but worsening weather worldwide aggravates the divisions in society that already exist because it hits people of colour living in poverty the hardest. Simply put: the reason the world hasn’t been fighting climate change as hard as it should is because powerful people don’t want to stop exploiting people of colour. The urgency of climate change is also an urgency for racial justice.
Now that is a scorching hot take. Eric spends lots of time trying to prove this, forgetting it happens in areas that tend to be run by ‘climate change’ believing Democrats
Climate change is a symptom of the same unequal system. It is the denial of the right to exist on an enormous, planetary scale. It is a consequence of the same system run by people who think of Africa as a resource for imperialist expansion, not a continent filled with millions of families who deserve health and safety and happiness just like everyone does. It’s what happens when the lives of marginalised people and non-human species are viewed as expendable. That expendability, and the continuation of this system, is a choice. Nothing about it is inevitable or necessary, yet those in power choose to continue it every single day.
Eric’s plan?
The answer to all of this obviously isn’t easy, but the approach must include anti-racism at its core. Anti-racism, actively working to replace the current system with something that repairs past harms and redistributes power meaningfully in favour of people of colour is what is required of everyone in the climate emergency, especially those of us who benefit the most from how things are right now. We cannot fight climate change without being anti-racist.
Huh. Not much of a plan.
