Climate: environmental racism is a false controversy – 01/27/2024 – Marcelo Leite

Almost every day, the Jornal Nacional shows houses and shacks that are flooded or have marks left by muddy water. Poor people crying over lost furniture and appliances in Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Sorocaba…

In Vila do Sahy, sirens rang to signal the risk of collapses and a repeat of the tragedy that claimed 64 lives less than a year ago. On the other side of the globe, in China, half a hundred people died in another landslide.

Images went viral of monstrous hangovers breaking down doors and windows in the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific Ocean. In Bangladesh, chemical reactions due to the intrusion of salt water into groundwater, as the sea rises, threaten to contaminate the population’s water supply with arsenic.

Linking these extreme events is the climate crisis triggered by global warming. A few thermoskeptics (or thermocephalians) still deny that the atmosphere is warming due to the greenhouse gases that humanity dumps into it by burning fossil fuels and forests.

If they previously disbelieved computer climate simulation models, now it is up to them to refute satellites, thermometers, rain gauges and anemometers. Since they can’t, they run into the lap of Bolsonaro, Trump, Milei et al.

Denialism is facilitated by the human tendency to reject complex explanations and believe in simple solutions. To address the doubts that skeptics sow, science finds increasing support in accumulating disasters and in so-called attribution studies.

A good example of this new field of research emerged on Wednesday (24). A survey by the global network of researchers World Weather Attribution announced that climate change was much more decisive than El Niño for the 2023 drought in the Amazon.

Who suffered most from the unprecedented drought? River dwellers, fishermen, small farmers who saw their means of subsistence and transport converted into a desert. Brown people, Cafuza, Mameluca, indigenous people — and white squatters expelled from smallholdings in the South.

Poor, after all. People in the same condition as the victims of Porto Alegre, BH, Sorocaba, Vila do Sahy… Or China, the Marshall Islands and Bangladesh. It is clear that the impacts of global warming punish the inhabitants of less developed countries and areas more.

True, there are floods even in Dubai, San Diego and Auckland. But inhabitants of affluent cities have more resources, services and insurance to face misfortune — not to mention that they also contribute more carbon emissions to the atmospheric disaster.

Climate justice: This is the topic of another emerging academic field. The London School of Economics, among other institutions, highlights the subject in its Grantham Institute for Research on Climate Change and the Environment.

Imagine now if the name of this area of ​​research and political action were called “climate imperialism” or “climate colonialism”. The liberals on duty would climb on their heels to decry, with good reason, the exorbitant mix of ideology and climatology.

It is obvious that floods and hurricanes do not choose targets, much less under the command of Wall Street or the Pentagon. However, this hypothetical criticism of an unfortunate label would also risk diverting the focus from the main issue: the poor are already and will increasingly be the biggest victims of global warming.

This is more or less what happens with the controversy surrounding “environmental racism”. It is not a good name, as it induces in simple minds the fanciful idea of ​​intentionality and the paranoid reaction that obscures what really matters: the revolting inequality that makes Brazil such a difficult country to defend.

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