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70 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 71
R
ound the cycle turns. As millions
are driven from their homes by
climate disasters, the extreme
right exploits their misery to
extend its reach. As the extreme
right gains power, climate programmes are
shut down, heating accelerates and more
people are driven from their homes. If we don’t
break this cycle soon, it will become the
dominant story of our times.
A recent paper in Nature identifies the
“human climate niche”: the range of
temperatures and rainfall within which human
societies thrive. We have clustered in the
parts of the world with a climate that supports
our flourishing, but in many of these places
the niche is shrinking. Already, around 600
million people have been stranded in
inhospitable conditions by global heating.
Current global policies are likely to result in
about 2.7C of heating by 2100. On this
trajectory, some 2 billion people may be left
outside the niche by 2030, and 3.7 billion by
2090. If governments limited heating to their
agreed goal of 1.5C, the numbers exposed to
extreme heat would be reduced fivefold. But
if they abandon their climate policies, this
would lead to around 4.4C of heating. In this
case, by the end of the century around 5.3
billion people would face conditions that
ranged from dangerous to impossible.
These conditions include extreme
disruption, morbidity and death through heat-
shock, water stress, crop failure and the
spread of infectious disease. The figures do
not take into account the eect of rising sea
levels, which could displace hundreds of
millions more.
Already, weather stations in the Persian Gulf
have recorded wetbulb measurements – a
combination of heat and humidity – beyond
the point (35C at 100% humidity) at which
most human beings can survive. At other
stations, on the shores of the Red Sea, the
Gulf of Oman, the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of
California and the western side of south Asia,
measurements have come close. In large parts
of Africa there is almost no monitoring of
extreme heat events. People are likely to have
been dying of heat stress in high numbers
Fascism thrives on
climate breakdown
The Climate
Catastrophe spawns
crises to which
Fascism reacts,
dangerously
By George Monbiot
already, but their cause of death has not been
registered.
India, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea,
Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and central
America face extreme risk. Weather events
such as massive floods and intensified
cyclones and hurricanes will keep hammering
countries such as Mozambique, Zimbabwe,
Haiti and Myanmar. Many people will have to
move or die.
In the rich world we still have choices: we
can greatly limit the damage caused by
environmental breakdown, for which our
nations and citizens are primarily responsible.
But these choices are being deliberately and
systematically shut down. Culture war
entrepreneurs, often funded by billionaires
and commercial enterprises, cast even the
most innocent attempts to reduce our impacts
as a conspiracy to curtail our freedoms.
Everything becomes contested: low-trac
neighbourhoods, 15-minute cities, heat
pumps, even induction hobs. You cannot
propose even the mildest change without a
hundred professionally outraged influencers
Current global policies are
likely to result in about 2.7C
of heating by 2100, leaving
3.7 billion in geographic
zones where it is impossible
to thrive. by 2090
Climte disster in Lhin
ENVIRONMENT
70 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 71
Anti-immigration politicians curtail climate
policies, leaving more people with no choice
but to seek refuge in the diminishing human
climate niche: often the nations whose
policies drove them from their homes
leaping up to announce: “They’re coming for
your …” It’s becoming ever harder, by design,
to discuss crucial issues such as SUVs, meat-
eating and aviation calmly and rationally.
Climate science denial, which had almost
vanished a few years ago, has now returned
with a vengeance. Environmental scientists
and campaigners are bombarded with claims
that they are stooges, shills, communists,
murderers and paedophiles.
As the impacts of our consumption kick in
thousands of miles away, and people come to
our borders desperate for refuge from a crisis
they played almost no role in causing – a crisis
that might involve real floods and real
droughts – the same political forces announce,
without a trace of irony, that we are being
“flooded” or “sucked dry” by refugees, and
millions rally to their call to seal our borders.
Sometimes it seems the fascists can’t lose.
As governments turn rightwards, they shut
down policies designed to limit climate
breakdown. There’s no mystery about why:
hard-right and far-right politics are the
defensive wall erected by oligarchs to protect
their economic interests. On behalf of their
funders, legislators in Texas are waging war
on renewable energy, while a proposed law in
Ohio lists climate policies as a “controversial
belief or policy” in which universities are
forbidden to “inculcate” their students.
In some cases, the cycle plays out in one
place. Florida, for example, is one of the US
states most prone to climate disaster,
especially rising seas and hurricanes. But its
governor, Ron DeSantis, is building his bid for
the presidency on the back of climate denial.
On Fox News, he denounced climate science
as “politicisation of the weather”. At home, he
has passed a law forcing cities to continue
using fossil fuels. He has slashed taxes,
including the disaster preparedness sales tax,
undermining Florida’s capacity to respond to
environmental crises. But the far right thrives
on catastrophe, and again you get the sense
that it can scarcely lose.
If you want to know what one possible future
– a future in which this cycle is allowed to
accelerate – looks like, think of the treatment
of current refugees, amplified by several
orders of magnitude. Already, at Europe’s
borders, displaced people are pushed back
into the sea. They are imprisoned, assaulted
and used as scapegoats by the far right, which
widens its appeal by blaming them for the ills
that in reality are caused by austerity,
inequality and the rising power of money in
politics. European nations pay governments
beyond their borders to stop the refugees who
might be heading their way. In Libya, Turkey,
Sudan and elsewhere, displaced people are
kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, raped and
murdered. Walls rise and desperate people
are repelled with ever greater violence and
impunity.
Already, the manufactured hatred of
refugees has helped the far right to gain or
share power in Italy, Sweden and Hungary,
and has greatly enhanced its prospects in
Spain, Austria, France and even Germany. In
every case, we can expect success by this
faction to be followed by the curtailment of
climate policies, with the result that more
people will have no choice but to seek refuge
in the diminishing zones in which the human
climate niche remains open: often the very
nations whose policies have driven them from
their homes.
It is easy to whip up fascism. It’s the default
result of political ignorance and its
exploitation. Containing it is much harder, and
never-ending. The two tasks – preventing
Earth systems collapse and preventing the
rise of the far right – are not divisible. We have
no choice but to fight both forces at once.
www.monbiot.com
Displced people pushed into the Mediterrnen but used s scpegots by fr right for ills generted by others
