Sadly, this kind of linking behavior by Warmists, this kind of hijacking, doesn’t even earn a “WTF!!!!?” anymore. It’s expected, hence the facepalms
Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate
What would governments do if black and brown lives counted as much as white lives?
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What does #BlackLivesMatter, and the unshakable moral principle that it represents, have to do with climate change? Everything. Because we can be quite sure that if wealthy white Americans had been the ones left without food and water for days in a giant sports stadium after Hurricane Katrina, even George W. Bush would have gotten serious about climate change. Similarly, if Australia were at risk of disappearing, and not large parts of Bangladesh, Prime Minister Tony Abbott would be a lot less likely to publicly celebrate the burning of coal as “good for humanity,†as he did on the occasion of the opening of a vast new coal mine. And if my own city of Toronto were being battered, year after year, by historic typhoons demanding mass evacuations, and not Tacloban in the Philippines, we can also be sure that Canada would not have made building tar sands pipelines the centerpiece of its foreign policy.
It’s everything, folks! Everything! But, wait, it gets even better, if that’s possible!
The reality of an economic order built on white supremacy is the whispered subtext of our entire response to the climate crisis, and it badly needs to be dragged into the light. I recently had occasion to meet a leading Belgian meteorologist who makes a point of speaking about climate change in her weather reports. But, she told me, her viewers remain unmoved. “People here think that with global warming, the weather in Brussels will be more like Bordeaux—and they are happy about that.†On one level, that’s understandable, particularly as temperatures drop in northern countries. But global warming won’t just make Brussels more like Bordeaux, it will make Haiti more like Hades. And it’s not possible to be cheerful about the former without, at the very least, being actively indifferent to the latter.
So, if you don’t believe in Hotcoldwetdry, and refuse to do something about, particularly forcibly taking citizen money in 1st World Nations and redistributing it to 3rd world shitholes developing nations, you’re a white supremacist. If you refuse to see economies transformed and capitalism done away with, you’re a white supremacist.
Hmmm. Klein seems to be calling Warmists racists and white supremacists because of the way in which the 1st World Warmists have refused to hook up the developing nations, which are mostly comprised of Blacks, Browns, and small island folks with Asian backgrounds. She goes on to link storms and energy, shootings and dilapidated conditions to “climate change” and racism. You really have to read the whole thing, well worth it
Taken together, the picture is clear. Thinly veiled notions of racial superiority have informed every aspect of the non-response to climate change so far. Racism is what has made it possible to systematically look away from the climate threat for more than two decades. It is also what has allowed the worst health impacts of digging up, processing and burning fossil fuels—from cancer clusters to asthma—to be systematically dumped on indigenous communities and on the neighborhoods where people of colour live, work and play. The South Bronx, to cite just one example, has notoriously high asthma rates—and according to one study, a staggering 21.8 percent of children living in New York City public housing have asthma, three times higher than the rate for private housing. The choking of those children is not as immediately lethal as the kind of choking that stole Eric Garner’s life, but it is very real nonetheless.
The interesting part is that most, if not all, of this all occurs in deep Liberal areas. Cities are not hotbeds of Conservatism. Nor are the yearly IPCC Conference on the Parties taxpayer funded working vacations, nor other “climate change” meetings. The conditions in the cities are solely the responsibility of Leftists, along with certain States and most European nations.
If we refuse to speak frankly about the intersection of race and climate change, we can be sure that racism will continue to inform how the governments of industrialized countries respond to this existential crisis. It will manifest in the continued refusal to provide serious climate financing to poor countries so they can protect themselves from heavy weather. It will manifest in the fortressing of wealthy continents as they attempt to lock out the growing numbers of people whose homes will become unlivable.
Which, again, is interesting, since Warmists are the ones who call for all sorts of different population control methods in areas like Africa, ranging from birth control to abortions to, from the really hardcore Warmists, sterilization and actual population reduction.
At the same time, the clarion call that Black Lives Matter deserves to transform how we approach a great many crises in our societies, from school systems that systematically fail African-American kids, to a healthcare system that too often discards black lives. It must also jolt us out of our climate inaction.
I wonder how all the folks pushing #BlackLivesMatter feel about their movement, such as it is with riots, looting, arson, blocking ambulances, etc, being hijacked?
Read: Warmist Naomi Klein Links #BlackLivesMatter To “Climate Change” »
