Figures and previews from the forthcoming IPCC AR6 (due out in July) are starting to come out. They're not looking great. Limiting warming to 2 degrees C or less is now virtually impossible, as even the most optimistic net carbon zero projections put us at 2.1 degrees of warming by 2100. More realistic target is now in the 2.5-3.5 degrees of warming range, which is likely to be extremely bad for a lot of people.
The authors of the IPCC report suggest that only an "immediate and radical transformation" of the global economy and governance would allow us to avoid the worst of the oncoming climate catastrophe. This kind of language is a marked difference from earlier IPCC reports, and reflects a growing sense of urgency and impending doom within the climatology community broadly.
Yes, absolutely. I'm teaching an introductory course on climate change to mostly Zoomers this year, and I've spent a lot of time talking to and warning them about this. We very much need to be on guard for responses of this type (and language that starts to normalize thinking about climate change this way), because it's definitely coming, and when it starts it's going to ramp up very, very quickly. Making sure people are widely aware of what eco-fascism looks like, and making sure they're aware that it's going to come wrapped in what looks like environmentalist and "green" language is a super important part of climate change praxis.
I would love to read some of your teaching points o eco-fascism, or if you have any specific authors/texts on this I can try to compile some theory for others to read here, and afar. Thank you for bringing awareness to this.
:rosa-salute:
There's a ton to say here, but I think the right thread to emphasize is that the environmental movement in general has some seriously racist and classist historical roots. In particular, a lot of the early environmental movements were deeply wrapped up with the popularity of eugenics in the 19th and early 20th centuries, both of which were tremendously influenced by Thomas Malthus' 1798 work "An Essay on the Principle of Population," which argued that the main cause of human suffering and poverty (both historically and at the time he was writing) was an increase in population--especially non-productive members of the population--beyond the carrying capacity of the environment. This, Malthus argued, would inevitably result in famine, mass deaths, and tons of human misery in general.
This "Malthusian trap" idea was very popular with 19th and early 20th century progressives, and was often interpreted to mean that the poor, people in underdeveloped areas, and really anyone that was seen as "non-productive" in the standard capitalist sense ought to be (at the very least) sterilized for their own good. Margaret Sanger, a very prominent early women's rights advocate and birth control pioneer in the 1920s, was very much motivated by this kind of concern:
“If the millions of dollars which are now expended in the care and maintenance of those who in all kindness should never have been brought into this world were converted to a system of bonuses to unfit parents, paying them to refrain from further parenthood, and continuing to pay them while they controlled their procreative faculties, this would not only be a profitable investment, but the salvation of American civilization [...] I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.”
Contemporary ecofascism is usually traced to Mussolini and Hitler's shared idea of "living space" and "returning to the land" in their various regimes, especially Mussolini's 1921 article "Fascism and The Land." Quoting from this piece from Columbia University:
By 1930, Mussolini’s “land improvement” campaign announced that they were “witnessing a return to 'Mother Earth'” with more productive agricultural land for the empire. Mussolini reclaimed the land of the former Roman Empire by invading countries in Europe and Africa, executing political adversaries and murdering hundreds of thousands of people. In Germany, Hitler was influenced by Mussolini’s fascism to justify an innate connection between a superior Aryan race and the purest of land. As a result, 400,000 people with disabilities and minorities were sterilized before World War II, and as many as 17 million people were killed in the name of eugenics by the end of the war.
After World War II, open endorsement of eugenics got a lot less popular in liberal democratic circles (I wonder why!), but the "Malthusian trap" myth persisted for much longer, and continued to motivate a lot of foreign policy in the NATO world. In 1958, Eisenhower told his national security council that the best way the United States could help underdeveloped countries was to check their population growth, and promoted the idea that the distribution of contraceptives was the most effective way to fight poverty (and thus communism). This resulted in all sorts of terrible shit happening, including the marketing and shipment of birth control devices that were extraordinarily dangerous to women and banned in the United States being shipped off to developing nations to help fight the Malthusian scourge. Garret Hardin , the economist responsible for the "tragedy of the commons" idea, openly advocated against sending food aid to developing nations for what look like pretty explicitly fashy reasons. Quoting from the previously linked piece:
Concerned that ethnic solidarity would lead minorities in the United States to liberalize immigration policy, Hardin argued that “[t]he double question Who benefits? Who pays? suggests that a restriction of the usual democratic franchise would be appropriate and just in this case.” Moreover, he regularly insisted that to prevent catastrophe, American culture would have to adopt radically new values, especially regarding reproductive freedoms. In 1963, Hardin began publicly advocating for women’s reproductive rights. With the 1968 publication of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” however, he began calling for the United States to reject the UN Declaration of Human Rights, explicitly arguing that the government should adopt coercive measures to prevent women (especially, as he argued elsewhere, non-white women) from reproducing. According to Hardin, certain racial groups have “adopt[ed] overbreeding as a policy to secure [their] own aggrandizement,” and because of this, he argued, “the freedom to breed is intolerable.”
The emergence of COVID in 2020 revitalized a lot of these tendencies in public discourse, which is why I think it's especially important to talk about this right now. Early on in the pandemic, what we might call "clean nature porn" emerged as a genre on social media, with pictures of clear skies, clean canals, and other environments returned to their "natural" state--ostensibly as a result of COVID-cased decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. While it's true that COVID did cause a modest decline (I think it's about 5%) of GHG emissions over 2020, this framing of the issue was the thin end of a wedge for ecofascists. The idea that "humanity is the virus" and that nature could recover if only enough people (and, presumably, the right people) died of COVID started to get repeated and amplified by various crypto-fascist personalities on the internet. This is really just a repackaging of the same old Malthusian idea that our most significant problem--the driver of poverty, starvation, misery, and environmental destruction--is a dearth of resources and a human population beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth. This is, to put it bluntly, totally fucking wrong. We have more than enough food to sustain the global population, and we have the technology that would be necessary to convert our global economic system into a carbon negative one. Our problem is not a lack of resources, but rather a lack of a system that equitably and fairly distributes those resources but instead prioritizes short-term economic gains over long-term sustainability and environmental responsibility.
It's this "humanity is the virus" narrative that I think is most concerning and most worth combatting (at least right now). Even well-meaning liberals can be taken in by this sort of argument, and it's no more sensible now than it was when Malthus was writing in 1798.
There's a ton more that could be said about any aspect of this, and I'm happy to go into more detail about particular points if people are interested, but that's the (not so) short version of the points that I think are important to make.
Thank you so much, just really grateful for this information. Very well composed, if you don't mind I am going to copy this into it's own post in !antifascism@hexbear.net
You're welcome! By all means, repost wherever you like.
I think blue Maga is only a short hop to Eco fascism. It's got all the appropriate money, fake goodwill, and chauvinism built right in.
Yep, I can do that. I've got a class to teach in..
fourthree minutes, but I'll say a little bit later today.Edit: here you go https://hexbear.net/post/98963/comment/1086817
Making sure people are widely aware of what eco-fascism looks like
well, what does it look like?
it looks like fascism, but this time the excuse is "we need to save the environment. this is for the greater good." instead of "we need to save the country and immigrants are destroying it."
See here: https://hexbear.net/post/98963/comment/1086817
I did a degree in Climate Science and as soon as i was done I had to stop looking at shit like this
It was putting me in such a bad state
Climate anxiety and depression is pretty major
I totally empathize. My PhD is in philosophy of science, but I ended up specializing in the foundations of complex systems theory, and wrote my dissertation on climate model building. After I graduated, I got a job in a climatology department doing that research full time; I lasted two years before I had to step away from that. It is incredibly depressing and mentally unhealthy in a lot of ways (on top of how academia generally is also both those things).
I still think it's super important to talk about and advocate for, and I'll teach undergrad classes in it, but I just can't spend all my time and energy researching it and participating in professional conferences about it. Doing that made me absolutely miserable. Basically everyone I know who works in the field is totally blackpilled about our prospects for solving this, and it's just generally really not a great environment to be in (no pun intended).
I got 2 semesters into it and I could already tell we were fucked and how wholly impossible it would be for liberalism to come anywhere close to solving it.
We're going to miss the bus for this just like the pandemic and the bourgeoisie emphatically do not care
Watching how the world has responded to COVID has made me much more pessimistic about our chances of solving the climate crisis. Both scientists and activists have long assumed that most people would come around to the right beliefs as soon as their own communities started being impacted, and as soon as people they knew and loved started dying in climate-related catastrophes. I think one of the lessons of COVID is that this is a very dangerous and wrong assumption; there are a substantial number of people out there who are so ideologically committed to a certain perspective that they'll be unwilling to change it (and may even double-down on it) even as their friends and family are dying. The fact that we couldn't get it together as a society enough to respond to COVID with even a minimal level of competence and responsibility bodes very badly for the climate crisis. COVID is a much simpler case, with clear, direct, short-term impacts that are very easy to understand causally: there's a virus, it comes out of your nose and mouth, you give it to someone else, and they get sick. The causal chain for climate change is far more complex and attenuated--it's basically impossible to trace any single death or event to any particular "transmission event" like you can with COVID. This was a global crisis on Very Easy mode, and we failed miserably.
Don't lose sight of the fact that a serious amount of money was spent to get this outcome. All those astroturfed anti-lockdown/anti-mask protests were paid for by dark money groups and then used by corporate media to manufacture consent for opening things back up, half assed measures, and the total abandonment of scientific rationale. If the left is to have any hope taking measures against what can be changed for humanity's future and palliative measures for what can't, it's going to require us to take pro-active measures to undermine the inevitable eco-fascist messaging bound to come out of relationships between corporate media, the government, and the wealthy.
Watching how the world has responded to COVID has made me much more pessimistic about our chances of solving the climate crisis. Both scientists and activists have long assumed that most people would come around to the right beliefs as soon as their own communities started being impacted, and as soon as people they knew and loved started dying in climate-related catastrophes. I think one of the lessons of COVID is that this is a very dangerous and wrong assumption
Partly because no one truly agitates and tells them that the deaths of their friends were brought about by the government. The media and the ruling class managed to turn getting covid into an "irresponsible" act, with covid as a result of parties and not jobs that refused to enact safety measures. But a lot of the people that have died throughout this entire pandemic have been service, warehouse workers, grocers, first responders, and old people.
The government has passed some measures protecting those companies . And those kind of lawsuits depend on the National Labor Relation Board. There's actually rumblings of the government merging all amazon-related suits into one, single investigation from the sheer quantity of them.
Some countries handled covid fairly decently: Taiwan, Iceland, New Zealand, Vietnam, China, Cuba. Now take smaller island polities off the list (they have an advantage in that they can much more easily control entry and are, geographically, much smaller in area) and you get two stand outs; China and Vietnam.
What do these two have in common? A belief in the common good and a country not run and organized around principles of profit but around principles of human need and well-being. You can get people to believe in the common good very easily, in my experience it's actually the default amongst non-PMC or small business tyrants, it takes a lot of wrong-education and propaganda to get people to shake off their inherent drive towards solidarity and protection of their communities. You can't get people to care and wear masks when their leaders, at first, tell them not to wear masks like Fauci did or like the Vox explainers did back in March and April. You can't direct a society of well-being if it's oriented around profit and the accumulation of capital. You can't catch the people that want to flout principles of communal protection and care (by not wearing a mask or going out when their sick) when policing is centered on protection of property or the continued marginalization of racial minorities. It's hard in countries where the healthcare system is under attack by austerity for multiple decades to manage a pandemic - I'm sure you don't need to be told but nurses and doctors and healthcare staff were already out of PPE before December 2019, they were already re-using masks and using trash bags as PPE because of chronic underfunding.
These systems seem invulnerable. But it's just a glamour. "All" it takes is a conscious working class that is organized and willing to be militant in its demands for control over the political-economy. It's a tall order, but it's the fate we've been handed by history. I think we can take this challenge and further I think we can win the struggle and reorganize our society around principles of health and communal care, so that if another pandemic comes around what were once called the countries of the West can handle it just as well as Vietnam and China have handled it today.
it shows that the economy is more important than any amount of human lives. i think things will stay relatively normal for a while (by plundering developing countries even harder than usual) until the ressource scarcity starts world war 3. (at least that's if nothing crazy happens until then)
Which is actually extremely puzzling, really. There's a huge amount of both modeling and empirical evidence showing that unchecked climate change is going to be far, far worse economically than aggressive decarbonization and mitigation. The gold standard metareview on this, the Stern Report from the London School of Economics, puts the difference as high as an order of magnitude: 2% global GDP expenditure to mitigate, and up to 20% global GDP loss annually in the worst case, long-tail scenarios. Even from a strictly economic standpoint, the damage that would be done by 10+% GDP loss annually is mind-blowing, especially given that those impacts will disproportionately hit the Global South.
Basically every economist on any side of the political spectrum agrees that it makes far more economic sense to act now and mitigate the damage. Economic arguments against climate mitigation are always smokescreens for other ideological commitments.
Maybe the powerful know that there is going to be world shattering change within the next half century or so and they are in full plunder mode just trying to eat every morsel they can before father time takes away their plate. It just seems like any dip in profit or growth is just completely out of the question for them, which is not the way that someone who feels stable in their political position/situation acts. If they all knew that they would be in similar positions of power for the next ~50 or so years then having the economy pause for 2 months while COVID gets dealt with wouldn't have mattered at all. Maybe that's why the CCP dealt with COVID so much better? They're kinda the only game in town so they know they have to sleep in the bed they make.
Yeah. I'm not a psychologist, but I think the inferences you're making about their collective psychological state are at least plausible. I suspect that the number of people in power who genuinely believe that climate science is bunk or unproven is, at this point, vanishingly small. The "we still don't know and the science isn't settled" narrative, as well as the "it would just cost too much to fix" narrative are just stop-gaps to gum up the machinery of change for as long as possible. They know change is coming one way or another, so they're trying to extract every last drop of profit from this system while they still can. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway did an excellent job tracing the history of this strategy in other areas (e.g. tobacco industry regulation) in their book Merchants of Doubt , which I can't recommend highly enough.
The authors of the IPCC report suggest that only an “immediate and radical transformation” of the global economy and governance would allow us to avoid the worst of the oncoming climate catastrophe. This kind of language is a marked difference from earlier IPCC reports, and reflects a growing sense of urgency and impending doom within the climatology community broadly.
:agony:
At least they are basically endorsing communist revolution, they really should just come out and say it the damn libs
We needed a climate Stalin 40 years ago. I pity the upcoming generations. I feel bad for my boys, probably one of the most painful things as a parent.
It's all I can think of when I interact with my friends' kids, I feel like we've failed them already
Who could have predicted this, except for literally anyone paying a modicum of attention?
Good thing that one of the biggest polluters is governed by Joe Biden, a man known for his radical and aggressive approaches to policy
spoiler
if you live in a country the US is bombing or if you are black
"See, the government won't be enough. Only the invisible hand of the market can save us now!"
Then again, literally anything affirms your beliefs if you're a zealot with no regard for other people.
I remember hearing, can't recall where, one market lib saying "even if it led to a bad outcome, we did the right thing by deregulating the markets." I think this was specifically about the bank bailouts in 2009 and the earlier repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999.
Obama type Libs, Cons, capitalists of every stripe in 2045, "Yes, we acknowledge human civilization and potentially even human life at all may no longer be possible. But we did the right thing by letting oil companies keep all the profits and refusing to take control or take any action beyond wagging a finger at consumers. This was just meant to be, without capitalism or without human civilization we had no true choice - we decided that civilization must end."
Literally every boomer I've talked to about climate change says they don't care because they'll be dead by the time it gets too bad. Followed by blank stares when I tell them their children won't be. That's when they start arguing that it's all natural cycles and it'll be fine.
It's maddening. Like fuck, I'm not asking for much! Why is it so hard for them to agree that this is a significant problem that we need to fix?
Kinda a wild shot in the dark but I would imagine it would be pretty tough to accept that your generations lifestyle and politics has inescapably doomed their children and grandchildren. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit though, maybe they just actually don't give a fuck that they burned the world down.
Maybe I’m giving them too much credit though, maybe they just actually don’t give a fuck that they burned the world down.
It's this one. Shout out to the cool boomers as I don't want to generalize an entire generation, but the prevailing mentality is that children are property. It's how you get the whole thing about how the schools are teaching the wrong thing and whatever the youth, i.e. anyone who isn't a boomer, is doing is bad, even outside moral panic.
To them, someone dying their hair blue is basically their car starting to rust.
Saying it now, but California is going to have a really bad fire season, again.
Extraordinarily dry conditions for the Sierra approaching Summer, “the lowest soil moisture on record in the Tahoe Basin since 2004.” Water resource and fire season implications look challenging ahead.
For the Sierra Nevada the lack of snow + extremely dry Fall has led to the lowest soil moisture on record in the Tahoe Basin since 2004. This will reduce spring runoff, exacerbate summer drought impacts, and heighten fire danger. Fingers crossed for soaking spring rains.
https://twitter.com/RobMayeda/status/1377709444285403138
I have a graph someone made from UC Berkeley climate department that shows within the last 15 years, the biggest and worse fires have all happened in recorded history. https://imgur.com/a/8tQf5vd it has two pics, one is a gif and the other shows the end result. This is one of the most compelling things I've seen someone make visually. The squares over the plotted points were used to show which year had the worst fires recorded.
It's not just California either. Pretty much the entire western US will have worse and worse fire seasons from now on. You don't hear about Idaho or Utah or Nevada as much because they're flyover states, but the wildfires and smoke are terrible every year here, especially with the population boom.
I have a graph someone made from UC Berkeley climate department that shows within the last 15 years, the biggest and worse fires have all happened in recorded history. https://imgur.com/a/8tQf5vd it has two pics, one is a gif and the other shows the end result. This is one of the most compelling things I’ve seen someone make visually. The squares over the plotted points were used to show which year had the worst fires recorded.
What's the source of this? I'd love to use it.
Hey thanks for asking, here is the source plotted by Dr. Robert Rohde, Lead Scientist for Berkeley Earth https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1061932205327429632?s=20
So what I have learned is that you just can't get across the people that think "the earth goes through phases, it's natural, and there's nothing we can do to stop it."
I've just accepted that things are going to turn to shit because we live in hell
Looking at that graph projection really drives home how crazy it is that capitalism demands infinite growth and everyone acts like it's a force of nature and not a human-made construct
Do you have a source for this, so I can shove it in libs' faces?
Yes. This particular figure comes from an Australia-specific report from the Australian Academy of Science about risks to them particularly, but many of the authors are also part of the IPCC, and the results of the general IPCC AR6 I've seen are basically identical. The full AR6 will be out in July, but here's the Australian one that this was drawn from: https://www.science.org.au/supporting-science/science-policy-and-analysis/reports-and-publications/risks-australia-three-degrees-c-warmer-world
