Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Open Democracy author Sulaiman Ilyas-Jarrett, racist white people are holding back from committing to climate action, because white people are not suffering the full impact of climate change; though the author also attacks climate activists themselves for being too white.
Why don’t we take climate change seriously? Racism is the answer
If climate change directly affected white Westerners, action would have come quicker.
Sulaiman Ilyas-Jarrett
1 July 2020We have known about climate change for decades. As early as 1992 the threat was sufficiently obvious, and the science sufficiently clear, to justify a UN treaty on the topic. Yet we’ve only even begun to get our act together in the last five or so years. Why?
…
Race has justified the systematic exploitation of non-white people and their lands, and continues to disadvantage Black and Brown people through both institutional and individual bias. But it is not the only reason that action on climate change has been slow.
…
But we rarely talk about the impact of race. The murder of George Floyd, and the wave of protests it has inspired, reminds us how Black and Brown lives are often less valued by those in positions of power. An injustice that stretches far beyond the policing system.
…
The UK has one of the world’s highest historical CO2 emissions, but has borne almost none of the consequences.
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Decolonising climate movements
The climate movement itself has a reputation for being predominantly white. In the West, there is some truth to this, though there are also a range of diverse voices doing fantastic work on the subject. One reason for this is that a lot of Black communities have more immediate struggles to focus on. It can be difficult to focus on the thing that might hurt you tomorrow when there’s something else that might hurt you today.
Another reason may be the lack of representation in the movement, which reinforces the idea that this is a ‘white’ issue. Many people have simply never thought of climate in relation to race, though this is rapidly changing, and many young activists of colour now consider climate a vital issue.
…
Read more: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-dont-we-take-climate-change-seriously-racism-is-the-answer/
Accusing people opposed to climate action of being racists, without providing evidence to back such a claim, is a pretty nasty thing to do.
Setting aside justifiable outrage at this ugly evidence free generalisation, I was impressed in a purely technical sense at the effort the author made to unify incoherent activist narratives. But you would expect a technically impressive effort from a former Cambridge University Isaac Newton Scholar.
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“racist white people are holding back from committing to climate action, because white people are not suffering the full impact of climate change”
Yes sir. Of course. Racism is all over the climate change issue. For one thing, it is a creation of rich white people who have run out of things to worry about.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/06/11/racism-and-climate-change/
” Accusing people opposed to climate action of being racists, without providing evidence to back such a claim, is a pretty nasty thing to do. ”
I have come to think that the obvious racists are those that bring up the word to lay blame. Pot stirrers!
Ah, racism is in the eyes of the beholder, which is why they find it everywhere. If a white person is talking to another white person, the racist will demand to know why he is not talking to a black person, even though no black person is present. Why on earth would a white man marry a white woman unless they were racist. And, the icing on the cake is that, if the white person is indeed talking to a black person, the racist will say that the white person is pandering to the black person and that the black person is an Uncle Tom for even talking to the white person. It’s a no win situation when dealing with a real racist, as everything they see is racist. Even arguing with the racist is racist as why are you not admitting to your sin?
Oh, it gets better. Many voters rather blindly elected an American president twice, fathered by a black African (a closet bigamist no less, with a Kenyan wife and children) who impregnated a white American college student, so that Barack Obama is quite plainly half white. Yet peculiarly he’s exclusively identified as ‘black’ in that very old segregationist fashion that disregards his entire white ancestry in a single generation. This seems destined to sire a mixed race angst without any promising surgical remedy.
Seems like before he was elected, Obama was biracial, or Post-racial, according to the Marxist media. The day after the election, he became black.
I was wondering how long that post would stay up. Despite the fact that it is a parody of the most cartoon-like aspects of black and white “races,” it is, after all, a parody.
I didn’t write it, or perform it. But it is hilarious. Too bad we can’t laugh at anything, any more.
Hi, Mr. Higley:
Your phrase, ” … the icing on the cake … ” made me realize that I am, in fact, a bigoted, nasty, awful RACIST in every sense of the word.
For many decades now, I have enjoyed CHOCOLATE cake with WHITE icing, and on rare occasions, WHITE cake with CHOCOLATE icing.
I am at a loss as to how to do penance for my BIGOTED HEINOUS crimes of RACISM, especially since I enjoyed the former on many of my numerous birthdays. I’m open to suggestions on how to pay for my crimes … … …. ……
Vlad
“I’m open to suggestions on how to pay for my crimes ”
Falafel.
I am so damn sick of ‘RACISM!’
You know who’s really racist?
The Chinese.
You know who doesn’t give a damn about ‘Climate Change’?
The Chinese.
You know who’s funding most of these anti-Western ‘Climate Change’ groups?
Progressives.
and chinese – you should hear how they talk about Indians and Pakistanis.
and Africans
sy, do you think things will get better? Ever? The progressives are firmly entrenched in our neck of the woods. Of course they choose to be progressives because there’s money in it. Our local council has just been awarded 2 million dollars (of taxpayers subsidies) for the new solar farm that has just been approved. Not the first, and more are proposed. Thousands of hectares of renewables will carpet our beautiful countryside and there are no plans for future recycling.
Greed and corruption, you want to know what’s funny, our water is being cut off by this same council at the end of the month. This is having a significant affect on the residents in the street and all I can think about is the overwhelming feeling of the damage that renewables are doing during the mining of multiple materials, their construction and the fact that they will sit in our beautiful countryside when they die. And all for nothing.
Racism has never been on my list of concerns. All people are either good or they’re not, colour isn’t relevant.
“You know who’s funding most of these anti-Western ‘Climate Change’ groups?”
The Rockefeller foundations have funded many environmental (and other pro-left) NGOs. Same for a lot of other wealthy left-wing foundations.
On one of the Rockefeller pages, it says in a somewhat gloating way (I’m paraphrasing) that ‘they believe they were the catalyst for the environmental movement’
They also seem to have a special interest in China and I believe this ties in with their stances that the west uses too many resources and them pushing/funding NGOs that are trying to lower our lifestyles.
OH, the irony of it.
And to think that the Rockefellers acquired all their “billions” via the sales of fossil fuels.
I thought they were saving the whales. So much whale oil…
I thought they were saving the whales. So much whale oil…
“‘they believe they were the catalyst for the environmental movement’”
Should have said:
“‘they think they [i]might have been[/i] the catalyst for the environmental movement’”
Less face it, the The Rockefeller foundation loves the China’s form of government. Total control.
Your second para seems to indicate that climate change is racist. Its not giving the same impact to white people.
Now, that’s funny right there!
CO2 is racist!
Yes often depicted as one “black” atom being squeezed by two “white” atoms.
SNIP! I have snipped myself, knowing what I was wanting to say, and wishing to spare ctm the trauma of snipping me (it would have been the third time and I would have won a prize!) Stay sane and safe.
Real microagression.
As is the corona virus.
Everything is racist:
https://youtu.be/Rp1Q-X-M-mI
The proportion of privileged elites (defined as people of high education and income) has been increasing at a geometric rate, while the proportion of oppressed minorities for them to lead has been decreasing at an arithmetic rate.… As the supply of oppressed minorities was decreasing, the demand for them was increasing… . To justify its aspirations for leadership, therefore, the privileged elite has a vested interest in crying (that society is) foul…Injustice in America grows apparently in direct proportion to efforts to alleviate it…The beauty of the search for the oppressed is that it generates its own growth.
“We have known about climate change for decades. As early as 1992 the threat was sufficiently obvious, ”
Yea ? So how come nothing’s happened in 3 decades ?
I wonder why the climate change crowd have not addressed the problem of cooking with “chit,” in Africa the racest homeland, it’s the done thing ah , l know, it’s not politically correct.
People have completely lost the ability to think critically, and the result is people blaming everything bad that happens to them (or doesn’t even happen to them) on the boogie man (i.e. climate change and/or white people). It’s almost as if mankind is falling into a second dark age.
Bogeyman or boogeyman.
boogie man is someone who plays old fashioned boogie style music which requires a powerful left hand and is interesting about once a year.
Of course we all know climate change is Trump’s fault … in collusion with Russians and the Bulgarians and variations of extraterrestrial space dust.
Don’t blame it on the sunshine
Don’t blame it on the moonlight
Don’t blame it on good times
Blame it on the boogieman
It’s just like the Crazy Years that sci Fi writer Robert Heinlein put on his Future History time line.
Maybe – if they win, the only thing Heinlein got wrong was the religion of the prophet.
Eric, are you related to the Australian geologist(?) Lisa Worrall?
OMG! I had forgotten about that! I read everything Heinlein wrote when I was I a kid. His future history time line, which provided the background for many of his stories, was classic. Yes, exactly like the Crazy Years. What did he know?
I blame social media. It seems people don’t rationalise critically anymore, preferring to impulsively react to those who subjectively shout from a protective soap-box as loud as possible on the twitter-face. Though it has a use, it seems to me that social media is devoid of any information quality. It’s a mob mentality because we’ve lost the ability to control the speed and quality of how we communicate. There’s no time for reflection….real shame and I can’t see it getting better.
I blame our failed education system. People are admitted to universities without valid evidence they academically fit. Once there, they end up with a useless degree in some sort “studies.”
We have a nation full of college grads with no idea how ignorant they truly are.
Amen to that WR2! Besides, if you “think critically” about something, doesn’t that mean you are a defacto racist? sarc….
Argh.
Yes, racism is the obvious (non) answer to just about everything certain people want to complain about. Anyone who is skeptical of climate change is obvious a racist. Probably a sexist too. Which would mean no person of color or female can possibly be skeptical because we can’t call them racist of sexist.
I would call the author racist but…no, wait, I AM going to call the author racist! Anyone who has to define their reality by classifying buckets of people based on skin color is a RACIST.
People need to learn to be independent of their hair, eye, and skin color. Do not let people herd you into buckets – you get to decide for yourselves what you want to believe. People need to develop a healthy skepticism as well. Quite believing all this nonsense that people with hidden agendas are telling you.
Yes, indeed, this guy need look no further for racism than his bathroom mirror.
A racist is usually someone who has just won an argument with a Leftist.
A racist is anyone who dares to disagree with a leftist. In their minds, they never lose arguments. They just decide that you are no longer worth dealing with.
Crying “Racist” is a POC’s way of saying … “Not my problem”
When I was growing up a “color-blind” society was a progressive idea. Now it’s racism. Huh.
Thomas Sowell: “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labelled a Radical 60 years ago, a Liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today”.
No one suffers more than Africans from misguided green energy policies. Only 18% of the people of Sub-Saharan Africa have access to any electricity. The remaining 80% aren’t served by safe, reliable, grids. In Kisangani, DRC Congo, I have seen countless exposed electric wires at underground service drops, primary and secondary voltages, where anyone can walk up touch wires and electrocute themselves. Remember people with access to any electricity are the fortunate few. The rest of the area cooks with sticks, charcoal, or if they can afford it, diesel or kerosene. The air pollution in the dwellings is unbearable.
Why? No money, you have 100s of millions of Africans living on less than a dollar a day. Nothing can help lift the Africans out of their dire poverty more than inexpensive, reliable, safe, energy. This guy is advocating policies that will shorten the lives and increase the misery of Africans. He speaks about racism. I am telling you the truth.
The problem with Congo is the DRC part.
Declaring that anyone who disagrees with them are racist, sexist, whateverist has been the primary weapon of the socialists since the beginning.
They have absolutely convinced themselves that anyone who disagrees with them is evil incarnate, guilty of any and all sins, and must be destroyed thoroughly.
It also doesn’t matter how small the deviation from dogma, all except the pure are to be destroyed.
The education system needs to more properly cover 20th century history. If liberals understood what happened in the Soviet Union, they might be a lot more circumspect. At least Stalin’s show trials had the veneer of legality and due process. What’s going on in America now has no such pretense. The mere accusation of something is enough to get someone fired from everything. An unproven minor thought crime is seen as justification for making it so that someone can’t earn a living. It’s a lot like being sent to Siberia.
The thing is that the victims of the show trials were often those who were formerly considered heroes of the revolution. So, my dear liberal friends, just because you are pure of heart it doesn’t mean you are exempt from some kind of purge or even actual violence.
Open Democracy promotes “free thinking for the world”. What is the difference between thinking and free thinking?
George,
“Free thinking” = “agreeing with them”, while anything else is “racist” or evil in some way.
“…incoherent activist narratives” says it all.
When Gore and Hansen first started pushing climate catastrophe, the adherents claimed that increasing heat would kill millions of people. Many articles have pointed out that cold is more of a threat to the poor than heat, and that the majority of elderly are able to hide from the heat effect by air conditioning.
Sulaiman Ilyas-Jarrett should consider that all the efforts of the Green Gang would lead to immense expense to the poor, driving electrical costs upwards, and lead to millions of deaths from excess heat or cold. These policies are inherently racist. The term used to be “disproportionately hurt the poor.”
Clearly, racism accounts for differences in IQ between people.
Whoops…
That’s one confused and deluded dude..
When all you see is racism everywhere,perhaps you are the racist.
That is a modern scholar?
Shut down the institute and burn it.
The “Victim of the day” stakes are pretty low.
What is next?
Participation prizes for brown eye colour?
Takes a mighty small talentless individual to demand praise or condemnation based on the colour of the skin you are born in..
What a life achievement,how accomplished..
How pathetic.
Being a follower of my lying eyes rather than our “trusted media”,I do not buy B.L.M,means what the media keep insisting.
All the evidence points to Burn Loot Murder.
Actions speak a truth no amount of verbiage can bury.
Amen to all of the above!! Couldn’t of put it better. Another poor sop who’s been indoctrinated rather than educated. Typical these days.
The other day I told someone that “Black lives matter just as much as all the other lives.” They told me that was racist, but they couldn’t explain how equality was racist.
Suliaman is a textbook racist, the capitalization of “blacks and browns” and the non-cap of white betrays the inner racist.
Why do we put up with this crap? White people also gave the world antibiotics, plastics, glass, almost all metals, phones, cars, TV, planes, trains, democracy, economics etc etc etc.
The only reason supposed GW is a caused by whites is because 99.9% of everything on the planet is invented by whites.
If it wasnt for whites the entire planet would be living in the middle ages, or even worse, the stone age.
You cant give up one without the other Mr Ilyas-Jarret. You want to give up your comfortable modern life, and go back to hard manual work, poverty, disease, and feudalism?
Reminds me of a song. It begins a little slowly but is worth it.
Classic!
So you admit guilt!
/s
You just can’t make up how stupid this is. I mean I try to think of the absurd but the academics win every loonie toon 🥇
Interesting he spells ‘black and brown’ starting with capitals and ‘white’ is spelt, as just plain old white.
I’m just wondering who the racist one is.
But . . . but . . . but, he’s a former Cambridge Isaac Newton Scholar!
And “people of color” is exclusionary. Isn’t white a color? And no one is truly “white”, we’re varying tones of beige.
Sheesh!
Racism …. because of increasing global warming.
The Dark Ages are upon us…. again.
To even pretend that warming would affect black people more than white people is completely absurd. Africa is one of the hottest continents on earth. Their skin has more melamine in order to protect them from the intense sunshine. They are also better adapted to a hotter environment. Crazy…
LOL, that would be a very serious medical condition! Melamine is a plastic material used to make cheap dishware. You meant melanin, of course.
Buy that man a diamine ring.
Or a 1,3,5-Triazine-2,4,6-triamine ring?
A Disgusting racist bigot, great, Eric please this is really bottom of the barrel stuff.
Two comments at Open Democracy, both saying more or less what WUWT commenters have already said above. There is sanity out there, as well as this kind of nonsense.
Want to know something else The West did?
Industrialisation.
And what did that do? It meant that large labour intensive things like say… cotton picking, could now be down more cost effectively than using say… massed human labour.
Well meaning political words may sound great, but industry is was what helped make slavery economically distasteful as well as ethically and morally repulsive.
The extension to this argument is that if Industry causes CO2 and CO2 causes Global Warming(tm), and if ‘Pre-Industrial’ is ‘perfect’… Yeah, if you want to return the planet to Pre-Industrial you are going to have to ’employ’ a LOT of cheap human labour.
Yup, had Lincoln just waited 40 years, industrialization would have obviated the need for most slaves and ~640,000 dead and over a million wounded Americans could have been saved!
But the Civil War was started by the North’s squeeze on the South’s commerce and the emancipation proclamation only saved the conflict from certain failure!
Fitting that Lincoln is featured on the penny–a denomination not worth picking up and for which you can’t buy anything!
The Civil War began when South Carolina seceded and fired on Fort Sumter.
South Carolina’s secession proclamation makes it very clear that defense of slavery was the deciding cause of their secession.
The South Carolina view on states’ rights was quite correct.
But those rights were invoked in defense of an institution that violated the basis of freedom for anyone, namely they violated the right of freedom for all that is both foundational to the United States and is announced in the Declaration of Independence.
South Carolina abused its right in defense of a deeper evil. Hence the Civil War.
The Confederacy sacrificed states rights on their altar to slavery. It was a huge mistake. States rights have been besmirched because of it, and we have suffered as a nation ever since.
If the North hadn’t been determined to economically strangle the South, there would have been no need for secession.
So true!
I stand by my previous statement!
The Civil War cost way too many American lives, on both sides, to advance a solution that was a certain eventuality!
Economically strangle = outlawing slave-taking, pushing for abolition, and protecting runaways, does it?
South Carolina’s secession proclamation is all about slavery, and mentions not one word about economic strangulation.
So the battle of Gettysburg played no role.
And millions of slaves should have been content to live out the rest of their lives in bondage.
Maybe Lincoln didn’t really say it, but …
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.“
Why is it that the self righteous work so hard to miss the point?
Was eliminating slavery a couple of years earlier than it would have died on it’s own worth 640,000 lives, not to mention the economic devastation the war caused?
Don’t be so absurd Mark. The war was forced on Lincoln by the Confederates who believed they would win quickly and wanted no part of compromise. Of course he could have opted for disunion, but that would not have meant that the southern states would have shifted away from their preferred slave-based agrarian economy. It would certainly not have ended “a couple of years” later. The post that I reacted to imagined it to be 40 years. I doubt that, but even if accurate, then most adult slaves would have lived out the rest of their lives in bondage. You speak with authority about a counterfactual hypothetical scenario. But had the Confederacy not been put down, it is more than likely that they would have annexed much of Central America and the Caribbean, which would have changed the whole dynamic. As it was, despite slavery being abolished throughout the rest of the Western Hemisphere, it persisted in Brazil until 1888. How much longer might it have lasted if Brazil and an imperial
CSA were a slave-holding bloc, not entirely isolated internationally?
I take it that you refer to protective tariffs that benefitted industry in the north and made manufactured goods expensive for the south. Had the CSA been left alone and had moved forward with their free trade policies, how much more would that have extended the viability of their slave economy? Do you imagine that British concern for slaves would have outweighed their sudden increase in profitable trade with a CSA unable to supply its own needs for manufactured goods?
There’s no doubt that northerners were complicit in the evils of slavery, and that Union motives for war were not pure or even mostly about abolition. Certainly it would have been preferable not to have war. But I reject the notion that slavery would have withered away in the short term. The blood spilled on both sides was the result of 240 years of grave injustice perpetrated by both sides.
If that opinion constitutes self-righteousness then so be it.
Rich,
Did England fight a civil war to eliminate their slavery?
No, it did not, and they did it before Amrrica!
You divert attention from you thirsty warmongering by claiming selfrighteousness!
Big mistake!
Lincoln was no statesman; he was a warmonger like you!
@RockyRoad
Happy 4th of July!
Do you celebrate that or is it just a disturbing reminder of the fall of Vicksburg 156 years ago?
We can recite a litany of all the mistakes that our ancestors made over four-plus centuries and tear down our country focusing on the negative. We can forget the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and squabble over events that can’t be changed from more than 150 years ago. Is that your goal? Don’t we have enough of that already?
He is not well-meaning. He is a bigoted swine, a race-baiter, and, no other way to put it, a whiny ungrateful b1tch.
Cambridge University, of course, is the university which offered a fellowship to Jordan Peterson and then rescinded the offer after protests from some staff and students who didn’t agree with his opinions; but who the other week defended an academic who said ‘white lives don’t matter’ on the grounds of free speech (days after a guy was sacked from his job for having had a ‘white lives matter’ banner to be flown over a football stadium). Cambridge believes in free speech just as long as it fits the approved meme. Most other ‘top’ universities appear to take the same line.
Perhaps what’s most surprising is that (as far as I’m aware) no-one has yet denounced Isaac Newton for having been white.
Didn’t Newton invent gravity or something? Gravity has killed millions falling off cliffs and tall buildings and out of trees, etc. Lynchings depend on gravity.
Cancel him I say!
Let’s cancel Karl Marx, and replace him with Groucho who was much funnier. Even Harpo sang better.
It must be racist trying to ‘save’ old whitie polar bear then? He/she/ze is the epitome of white supremacy. They are also meat eaters which is making the planet warmer. And there is no diversity within the toxic Polar Bear community; there are no Koalas, Grisleys, Blacks, Browns, Spetacled etc.
Most troubling to me is that the North American aboriginal peoples were so xenophobic and non-inclusive, and rejected the opportunity to embrace diversity. Worst of all, they expressed their hatred of immigrants through the worst kind of atrocities imaginable. Nazis!
As they while away the hours. In their ivory towers.
I think Joe South got it about right. The COGS just keep grinding.
Oh the games people play now.
Every night and every day now.
Never meaning what they say now
Never saying what they mean.
https://www.google.com/search?q=while+they+while+away+the+hours+in+their+ivory+towers&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB775GB775&oq=while+they+while+away+the+hours+in+their+ivory+towers&aqs=chrome..69i57j46.20782j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8