Naomi Klein is still throwing rocks, and these rocks are hairier than ever. Try this: if you disagree about climate sensitivity you are not just an unconvinced mind, but a white supremacist. It’s racism, racism all the way down, I tell you!
Lucky Naomi is here to unpack the sinister World Order of evil white men who control the climate. Who knew? In her world, man-made climate change will kill more non-whites than whites, but the white guys who run everything just don’t care. So there! (Is she saying that white men can control the weather but black men can’t?)
The namecalling reaches a new level of absurdity in “Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate“. Forget money, power and sex, the world is run on racism:
“What would governments do if black and brown lives counted as much as white lives?”
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.
Hmmm. The IPCC warned that the biggest temperature rises would be at the poles. If this was about the “intersection of climate and race”, as she calls it, the worst hit nations would be those dark skinned nations like Canada, Finland and Norway, eh?!
The truth is that the temperatures will always be most stable in the tropics — where the evaporation rates and humidity keep things from heating or cooling too rapidly.
She whips out every red flag she can find – it’s not just superstorms and rising seas, but police killing blacks, and asthma, and healthcare.
She mentions “Ferguson” but not “poverty”.
What Klein has spotted, spun and turned into fairy floss, is that any bad weather hurts the poor more than the wealthy. This is the unfortunate, banal truth. Some of us evil people think the answer is to solve the poverty, not to change the global climate. Those who care about the poor want to improve their economies, reduce corruption, and create more wealth. With wealth comes more freedom from the ravages of storms and floods.
Klein is seeing very big monsters under the bed:
The grossly unequal distribution of climate impacts is not some little-understood consequence of the failure to control carbon emissions. It is the result of a series of policy decisions the governments of wealthy countries have made—and continue to make—with full knowledge of the facts and in the face of strenuous objections.
I vividly remember the moment when the racism barely under the surface of international climate talks burst onto the world stage. It was exactly five years ago this week, on the second day of the now-infamous United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen. Up until that point, the conference had been a stultifying affair, with the fates of nations discussed in the bloodless jargon of climate “adaptation and mitigation.” All of that changed when a document was leaked showing that governments were on the verge of setting a target that would cap the global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius
Naomi thinks it’s policy-by-racism, as if old white men sit in dark smoky rooms putting racism before profit and power. There are some greedy psycho bastards at the top of some corporates and in politics, I don’t think they care as much about the color of their victims as they do about the size of the pay-off.
If she paid attention to the numbers she’d know the big profits are in carbon exchanges, not pie-in-the-sky planetary tinkering. I’ve written about her crippling problem with numbers before. Only someone who can’t add up would predict that the old white men are hankering to do geoengineering, rather than broker carbon credit deals and derivatives and cream off the fee.
And in the not too distant future, the firm if unstated belief that not all lives matter could well push our governments to deploy high-risk “geoengineering” technologies like spraying sulfur into the stratosphere in order to reduce global temperatures. Never mind that several studies project that a side effect could be suppressing the summer monsoons in India and Africa, with the water and food security of billions of people hanging in the balance.
Indeed, it is distinctly more likely that our governments will favor these terrifying techno-fixes over approaches to emission reduction that are far more likely to succeed, in no small part because those solutions are being offered by poor people with darker skin.
The financial houses must be happy with gullible Klein — who thinks that the poor want “emissions reductions” (rather than the bankers). Study after study shows the poor don’t want either carbon credits or techno fixes; they want food, health, and education.
h/t to Climate Depot