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.
Yep, I can do that. I’ve got a class to teach in… four three 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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
