“Make conservatives care about climate change,” the child whispered to the wish-granting monkey paw, confident that there was no way such a wish could backfire.
But of course, it did. Instead of adopting sensible policies to transition off of fossil fuels, and providing funding to shore up communities facing climate impacts, a different set of policy prescriptions has emerged. Not just sea walls to hold off the water, but border walls to hold off the immigrants. Not supplementing food supplies for areas hit by drought or famine, but hoarding supplies to sell to the highest bidders. Not campaign finance laws to prevent the fossil fuel industry from buying off politicians and using charity front groups as tax-free lobby and ad firms to forestall regulations, but voter restrictions to keep minority communities from voting at all.
This is not a pitch for the upcoming Twilight Zone reboot (yay!) but the answer to an unfortunately not-quite-hypothetical question posed by Casey Williams in Jewish Currents: What happens when the alt-right believes in climate change? (Spoiler: they use it as an excuse for racist policies.)
While many have been focused on getting moderate Republicans on board with climate action, with some limited success (“climate peacocks” anyone?), Williams discusses something far more sinister happening at what is, for now, the fringes of the right. But it’s all too easy to see it moving to the mainstream, as “hyper-conservative immigration policies,” Williams writes, “have drifted from the populist periphery to the White House.”
Although there are some great right-leaning groups like Niskanen and R Street who take climate change seriously and support real solutions, Williams warns of the plausibility “that ethno-nationalist climate proposals could go mainstream.” And they’ll do so based, at least in part, on the legitimate climate science that points to migration as an outcome of sustained warming. “By framing climate change as an immigration issue,” Williams writes, the racist-right is pinpointing “a strategy that’s likely to play well with Trump and his base.”
Slowly but surely, denial is running its course and Americans are coming to grips with what an addiction to fossil fuels costs (remember that even as the organization fights against climate litigation, the National Association of Manufacturers’ president recently said “it’s too late for denial.”) But that doesn’t mean that good policies are just around the corner. There will still be political fights between those with conflicting ideas about how best to respond, and if the climate community isn’t careful, the rise of the racist right will take on the issue as a justification for its hate.
This is yet another reason why climate action needs to move forward as an intersectional issue. Because, as Williams concludes, if the explicitly, openly racist right continues to goosestep its way into the mainstream, “it is not hard to picture rank xenophobia—in the form of stricter immigration quotas, more militarized borders, and tighter restrictions on women’s fertility—taking over the federal climate agenda. The results would be nightmarish.” Without an intersectional approach that thoroughly incorporates the experiences and perspectives of all those impacted, the climate agenda could all too easily be co-opted by those using climate to make bad faith arguments in the service of racism and hate.
It’s not just those who deny climate change, then, that people need to be on the lookout for. Instead, we’ll have to add to our watchlist those who nominally accept the science, but use it as an excuse to uphold the Rich White Christian Man’s status quo.
Because even if we had magic wishes, climate justice is never going to be easy.
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