Last week’s decision by the Supreme Court to curtail the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions comes as far-right groups try to use the issue as a Trojan horse to push other issues like anti-immigration policies.
David Roberts, who writes the climate newsletter Volts, tells The New Abnormal’s Molly Jong-Fast why the court’s decision could propel a rise in eco-fascism.
“The point of this is to remove EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, right? That’s what they want to do and this legal justification, this case they’ve come up to do it by, is so forced,” he said. “If you are of a perhaps more reactionary mindset and you find out that things are going to hell in a handbasket, perhaps your reaction is we need to build higher walls. We need to keep out more immigrants. We need to mine and drill the hell out of our fossil fuels while we can. That’s the lifeboat mentality—everybody’s going down, let’s stock our lifeboat and be the last one standing.”
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“That is what reactionaries are going to think about climate change. Once they really internalize it, you know, this sort of green fascism or whatever you wanna call it. You’ve seen it pop up in little bits and pieces here and there sometimes in Europe too, but it hasn’t really come together yet,” he said. “That’s gonna happen in the next few years.”
Plus, Kate Aronoff, who covers climate and energy for the New Republic and is the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back, says the democratic process needs to do better at translating the majority view into action on climate change.
“If you look at public opinion about the climate crisis, the public does really care about this. The public does want action and the problem… is that we just have a political system, which is really not equipped to translate public opinion where, you know, there are strong majorities and support on climate action into democratic majorities that can pass that policy into law.”
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