It’s been record hot in parts of Europe and Asia over the last week and this has provoked an outburst of three things that have become de rigeur whenever this happens:
- Climate change scepticism
- Exclusive focus on heat by legacy media
- Divorced context
The first one is baked in to the conversation, you might say, if you were reaching for an appropriate metaphor. And normally I’d not be that bothered. But I’ve been seeing more of it across my social media, especially on Twitter/X, and the explanation I think is two-fold.
Firstly, and most obviously, Musk and Nikita Bier, the guy in control of the algorithm, boost right-wing accounts by policy, which means scepticism and denial at moments of climate extremes become more visible, given these positions tend to be rightist in nature. Secondly, despite my leftist politics, my anti-Zionism and pro-Palestine writings have attracted people who approach anti-Zionism from a more right-wing, pro-sovereignty, pro-nationalist perspective. These people, my intuition tells me, put climate change and Zionism in the same bracket – as a mainstream, elite-led “narrative” to be rejected. As such I’ve been seeing some of these accounts, who I agree with on Israel, Palestine, imperialism and Zionism, in my feed posting content and takes sceptical of climate change.
To me, this is not a coherent politics. Zionism and a heating planet grow from the same root. Imperialism is a fuel source for climate change, and anti-imperialism cannot be separated from ecological destruction. The Pentagon is the single biggest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, burning more fossil fuels annually than entire countries like Portugal, Sweden and Denmark. An empire which projects global power and launches missiles thousands of miles from its shores to impose its violent will on the world could not survive without fossil fuels. Which is why, among many other reasons, Trump, and US empire historically, have loved oil so much.
In the first 15 months of the genocide in Gaza, Israel burnt more fossil fuels than Estonia and Costa Rica burn in a year combined.
Now it’s been more than two and a half years, the ecological cost to the atmosphere of genociding Gaza and mass murdering Palestinians will be equivalent to the pollution necessary to power the lives of tens of millions of people. But instead of using fossil fuels to provide the necessities of life, Zionism uses fossil fuels on a massive scale to end lives. Zionism kills Palestinians as a first order effect, and then boosts the heatwaves that cause death and suffering years later.
That brings me to number two.
A heating planet is just one outgrowth of the current global system, yet far too often legacy media ignores the vast scale of the ecological crisis to focus narrowly on climate change. And this is where an argument for climate as a narrative can be made, but it’s not the argument made by those who scorn it as a tool to provoke fear and impose control. If climate change is pushed as a narrative, it’s because an easy solution can be sold within the existing confines of globalised neoliberal capital. A transition to solar and wind, fuelled by mega-mining companies blasting the holes and digging up the minerals which are transported by the mega-shippers, the market lubricated by metals traders, with the profits captured by the energy giants.
Crucially, in this telling of the crisis, nothing really has to change. On the contrary in fact. In this telling, capitalist growth policies become essential to combating climate change.
The root of climate change as a mainstream narrative is better understood then as seeded in and growing out of imperialist-capitalist relations, not conspiracist adjacent globalist plots.
Which brings me to complaint number three.
If the crisis is understood not just as a climate crisis but as a whole-system ecological crisis underpinned by the existing system of globalised neoliberal capital, no easy, sellable solutions can be proffered. If our ecological predicament is understood as encompassing greenhouses gases, plastic pollution, ocean acidification, nitrogen pollution, tropical forest destruction, ozone depletion and species extinction, the story of the crisis becomes far harder to tell as a soundbite. If ecological damage is assessed not just in terms of extreme heat but in terms of an integrated system under a multi-faceted assault, the breadth and scale of the problem quite obviously defies any singular, energy source-focused solution.
Taking the crisis as a whole would require a discussion which slays sacred capitalist cows, confronts elite power structures and concludes with the necessity to completely reshape not just energy systems, but many of the systems which drive our civilisation. It would require serious policies that reject global capital and move us towards sustainable, local systems that benefit communities not oligarchic structures and corporate entities, whether that be in energy, farming, tourism or trade.
Here’s the unifying kicker: a politics of true global sustainability would require the same kind of revolutionary thinking and action that would also end imperialism and Zionism.
In conclusion, yes, the world is heating up, and that’s because of the extraordinary increase in the rate at which carbon dioxide is being released from burning fossil fuels. And yes, this heating will have to stop or lots of people will die and the system will collapse. But fossil fuels can be used usefully or badly, and the externalities of their burning (the heat trapping pollution) can be more, or less, worth the cost of burning them.
Genocide, conquest and imperialism are vile and depraved ways to use any energy resource, let alone a non-renewable one that has planetary effects long into the future.
To be honest, I may have written this article for an audience that doesn’t exist. But I have been frustrated for a long time now with how ecological collapse has been so divorced from the majority of anti-imperial thought. I think that is also partly to do with a belief that imperialists weaponise climate change to demonise, for example, China’s use of coal or Venezuela’s use of its oil revenues (now of course captured by empire).
I understand this perspective, and imperialist media definitely does this.
But that isn’t a reason to pretend basic physics is wrong or to write off climate change as a conspiracy or a globalist plot.
It’s a reason to think more deeply about how and why climate change is presented to us as a problem in the way that it is, not a reason to doubt whether it is a problem at all.
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