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climate refugees
Why Don't Lefty Media Emphasize Capitalism's Greatest Crime—the Climate Crisis?
The cause and effect linking industry to extinction ought to be the greatest horror story ever told. Our hands should be sweating as we shakily turn the pages.
Jan 02, 2025
If climate overheating is the biggest threat to life on Earth, one might expect that progressive platforms would be all over this issue. Of all the great crimes of capitalism—war, imperial conquest, siphoning pocket change from workers into bloated coffers of corporate wealth, shaking down ordinary people for a false promise of healthcare, buying up housing with private equity to spike rents, etc.—the baking of the biosphere stands out as an act of unprecedented, monstrous proportions.
Corporate greed, in its bureaucratic, industrial ability to divorce sentiment from institutional momentum, has entered a realm unique in the half billion year evolutionary history of multicellular life. Corporate humanity, armed with technology, has the ability to fast-track mass extinction. The oligarchs of our species have gained admittance to a dimension formerly restricted to geological processes. If implosion of the biosphere had always been a consequence of rare acts of volcanism—the caprice of plate tectonics unfolding across eons—we now can completely obliterate living systems on a dime.
Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it.
Progressive media, thus, has every reason to be utterly riveted and obsessed with the climate—climate extinction is worse than war, worse than racism, worse than colonial expansion, worse than arbitrary police power, worse than union busting, worse than any corporate crimes short of nuclear war. Indeed, climate destruction might be thought of as the pure tincture of capitalism, the compressed essence of all forms of injustice. Climate, however, requires that people grasp a different order of magnitude to seriously address its lethal certainty. While police brutality, war, housing shortages, human rights abuses, and racism can possibly be addressed with reform, there is no wiggle room for climate's destructive trajectory. No series of incremental policy adjustments can placate Mother Nature and her planned revenge.
Climate remediation demands revolutionary change—there is no path forward to, as Jeremy Corbin words it, "turn the Titanic around," under our current political and economic systems. Climate overheating, unlike all the smaller threats plaguing our (and all other) species, requires an almost unimaginable shift in our institutions and ways of thinking—the transitions that might give the planet a hint of optimism have to take place globally within an international community hopelessly addicted to nationalism. A recent piece by Mark Wilson posted at the World Socialist Website (WSWS) encapsulates the gargantuan task—Wilson, referencing the suit by impoverished countries to access climate reparations via The World Court, states:
Whatever the verdict of this case, the major capitalist powers responsible for the climate crisis will continue to base their policies not on science, human rights, or environmental protection. Instead, the ruling elites and big business will make their calculations based on profit and on enriching themselves.
What is required by the working class globally is instead a break from the institutions that defend the capitalist system as it plunges the world into ecological devastation. The conscious political fight to abolish capitalism is the necessary strategic task to which all workers and young people must orient, as the only path to safeguard Earth and its living inhabitants.
As a regular reader of the WSWS, I generally find perspectives that are more pointedly directed toward revolution than incrementalism, but oddly, one has to look hard at WSWS offerings to find climate related analysis. I had to scroll through at least 30 pieces to find the above quote. That is not to begrudge the focus on international labor struggles, worker's rights, Gaza, and Marxist cultural perspectives, but the paucity of climate related reporting is not so much a failure of WSWS as it is a universal problem characteristic of progressive platforms in general.
A quick personal and anecdotal survey of five different online, leftist platforms reveals that fewer than 10% of pieces deal with climate, and only a tiny handful go into detail regarding the more nuanced debates around climate overheating mitigation. For example, the exploration of Degrowth—ubiquitous on niche environmental sites like Resilience—almost never receives detailed unpacking on more general online sites that promote leftist journalism. Unfortunately, we have a poorly informed public with a below threshold investment in civil disobedience, and little familiarity with the prevailing positions—largely emerging from academia—regarding the strategies that will be urgent and essential to transition from a political culture of runaway ecocide. Many have complained that the climate movement does not resonate with poor and working people. The massive mobilization needed to confront the sixth extinction depends on a well-informed public armed with the requisite narrative tools.
The problems confronting climate activism may be uniquely psychological. We don't see the same sort of immediate nexus that binds perpetrators and victims in the manner that a bloodied Gazan child can be traced to a conscious act of colonial expansion. The sort of violence manifest in the gratuitous burning of fossil fuels rather evades the scope of public understanding. We simply don't see the Central American refugee as a victim of corporate designs in the same way that we recognize a murdered Gazan child as a target of Israeli and U.S. military intent. Yet that connection is real and urgently needed to be framed for those who struggle to grasp the storyline. The cause and effect linking industry to extinction ought to be the greatest horror story ever told. Our hands should be sweating as we shakily turn the pages.
The murder of George Floyd pulled at our collective heartstrings. Tens of millions of people cringed at the specific, personal, intimate revelation of police violence. We oddly respond emotionally to a single act of injustice, yet numbly fail to resonate with the onrushing death of billions. Perhaps it is our job as writers to make climate crimes personal and immediate. Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it. The enormous bridge linking the planet's greatest global catastrophe to the private suffering of real people may be nearly impossible for writers to span.
At the very least we can picture the suffering of Roger Hallam—sentenced to five years in prison for climate civil disobedience. Perhaps we can also appreciate that John Mark Rozendaal has been threatened with a seven-year sentence for playing a Bach Cello Suite outside of Citibank in NYC as part of the Summer of Heat protest. A man holding an umbrella above the cellist also risked Draconian retribution. Civil disobedience has often been energized by collective outrage toward state violence directed against those who stand up for human rights—think of Rosa Parks who became the iconic symbol of the civil rights movement.
All of the things that make journalism vivid and anxiously relevant ought to drive the climate narrative. The corporate world and their political puppets want nothing more than to see readers on leftist platforms bored with climate coverage.
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Immigration Justice Must Be a Climate Fight, Too
We need to work together to forge a bold vision to protect displaced people in a climate-disrupted world.
Nov 19, 2024
Donald Trump’s return to the White House poses an existential threat to the climate movement’s goal of a livable future. In the face of this magnitude and multitude of threats, it is imperative that we resist the impulse to retreat into our niche issue silos and limit our vision. If we hope to preserve a stable climate, we must prevail in the fight of our lives against authoritarianism. And to do that, climate movement leaders must commit to an unprecedented level of solidarity with the communities targeted by Trump, in particular immigrants and refugees.
For a number of years now, we have taken part in, and led, conversations between immigrant and climate leaders aligning our movements for this moment. To meet it, the U.S. Climate Movement must grapple with the connections between climate disruption, migration, and rising authoritarianism; commit to the fight against mass detention and deportation of migrants; and help build a narrative and vision of climate resilience that includes protections for displaced people.
Trump’s electoral victory comes in the midst of a global wave of authoritarian politics stretching across Western democracies. These movements share a worldview of scarcity in a chaotic, disrupted world, and their politics are defined by brutal scapegoating of migrants and displaced people. Wherever they win power these authoritarians are climate disasters, expanding the fossil fuel economy, and delaying action. The threat of eco-fascism lurks in authoritarian ideology like the great replacement theory and has motivated terrible acts of individual violence. The authoritarian movements gaining political power by demonizing migrants and refugees are firmly aligned with fossil fuel billionaires and their interests. Climate and immigrant rights movements succeed or fail together; our political fortunes are inextricably bound.
Climate advocates can deploy the legal and political tactics that blocked tar sands pipelines and new coal-fired power plants to challenge the construction of the vast network of detention centers, camps, and militarized sites essential for the administration’s agenda.
As climate-disruption accelerates it creates the conditions these authoritarian movements thrive on. More frequent and severe domestic disasters, like back-to-back hurricanes Helene and Milton, feed the psychological sense of scarcity of disruption. Globally, increasing climate impacts intensify factors like persecution, conflict, and economic desperation, driving internal displacement and forcing some to cross borders to seek safety. Authoritarians like Trump prey on these conditions, falsely blaming asylum seekers for stealing FEMA funds from hurricane survivors in a calculated attempt to pit the victims of the climate crisis against vulnerable immigrants instead of billionaires.
One reason these manipulative tactics have been so effective is that they go unchallenged. On both sides of the Atlantic, climate and other progressive organizations have seen defense of immigrants and refugees as a political third rail, remained silent in the face of growing attacks, and ceded the narrative to the worst political actors. In advance of June’s European elections where parties advancing anti-immigrant ideology made significant gains, advocates were advised to avoid “being distracted” by engaging with anti-immigrant rhetoric and focus on mobilizing voters with a message of climate action. American climate groups took a similar approach in the recent election, with similar results. As climate disasters continue to rise, so will the fear-mongering, finger-pointing, and manipulation. We cannot afford to let it go unchallenged.
With the incoming administration’s imminent threat of mass detention and deportation, the first step for climate organizations must be to actively and materially join the defense of immigrant communities. This means participating in the political resistance to the program, including mass marches and strikes, but also directing chapters and members to join ICE raid rapid-response networks, immigration court accompaniment projects, mutual aid efforts, and the like. These actions will go a long way in building needed trust with immigrant rights leaders, who can be wary of the environmental movement’s checkered past and recent silence on this issue.
Climate and environmental organizations also bring a critical skillset to the table—their experience stopping the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. Climate advocates can deploy the legal and political tactics that blocked tar sands pipelines and new coal-fired power plants to challenge the construction of the vast network of detention centers, camps, and militarized sites essential for the administration’s agenda. Groups like the Prison Ecology Project and the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons have experimented with using these strategies to challenge the construction of new jails, with some success. If the climate movement applied the same grassroots, legal, and inside political coordination that brought down the Keystone XL pipeline, we could challenge every new building, airstrip, and cage linked to mass deportation. In this fight every delay will be valuable in preventing measures of suffering and cruelty.
Second, climate organizations need to launch a massive program of popular education to help their members and leaders understand the connections between climate and migrant justice and reject authoritarianism. It’s time for a movement-wide reckoning around climate and migration similar to those around racial justice and Indigenous rights that have already transformed the movement’s language, analysis, and agenda. Pre-election polling shows alarming support for the concept of mass deportation and the militarized internment of undocumented people—including among Democrats. Our conversations about climate and migration with a wide swath of environmental leaders and activists showed us that these sentiments are more pervasive in the climate movement than many would like to admit. Luckily research shows support for deportation programs collapses when respondents better understand the details of who is targeted, pointing to an opening for popular education.
Part of this project will need to be confronting the damaging narratives the movement has used, which too often cast increased migration as a threat comparable to storms, fires, and heatwaves. Some research shows that these kinds of stories, often highlighting unreliable numerical predictions of mass climate displacement, actually increase anti-immigrant sentiment, even among highly motivated climate activists. Both of our organizations have worked to shift these narratives in recent years, and see elevating the complex stories of displaced people in our communities as the key.
Lastly, we need to work together to forge a bold vision to protect displaced people in a climate-disrupted world. For too long the climate movement, and the progressive movement writ large, have ceded this issue to those who offer guns, walls, and cages as their solution. In the absence of an alternative, these have become the only solutions in our discourse. Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on one of the most restrictive border bills in the modern age, while President Joe Biden’s climate negotiators fought the creation of tools for global climate reparations, like the United Nations Loss and Damage Fund.
The authoritarian narrative paints climate disruption as a competition for survival, and tries to pit vulnerable people against each other. But this is a lie, crafted to protect the fossil fuel billionaires. The truth is that the climate crisis can only be solved through cooperation and interdependence. It profoundly illustrates how our fates are bound together, and demands an expansive vision of safety and resilience. The climate and migrant justice movements need to bring a new urgency to calls for global investments to protect vulnerable people’s ability to stay in their community and thrive, and safe and orderly pathways for them to leave if and when necessary, as a counter to the militarized borders currently on offer.
Taking this path will require real commitment, resources, and dedication. But our opponents want us divided because the world we deserve can only be won together.
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'Groundbreaking' Report Calls for Protecting Rights of Climate Refugees
"ICAAD's report incorporates lived-experience testimony and in-depth cross-disciplinary research to propose an innovative and, most importantly, practicable legal standard for the right to life with dignity," an advocate said.
Jul 03, 2024
A human rights group on Wednesday released what it called "a gift to the international legal and climate action communities" to support their efforts to protect people around the world displaced by the fossil fuel-driven planetary emergency.
The "groundbreaking" policy brief from the International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination (ICAAD) was crafted to fill a "void in international human rights law" using the insights of Indigenous and climate frontline communities, attorneys, climate modeling experts, social scientists, researchers, and data analysts.
Already, the climate emergency is displacing people within and beyond their home countries. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, over 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2023 for a range of reasons. The report comes as Hurricane Beryl is leaving a trail of destruction through the Caribbean.
The Institute for Economics & Peace has estimated that by 2050, ecological disasters and armed conflict could forcibly displace about 1.2 billion people, about 10% of the global population. Given such warnings, ICAAD's report urges countries to "adopt inclusive, evidence-based legal frameworks" for climate refugees that center on "the right to life with dignity" (RTLWD).
The brief builds on a January 7, 2020 decision from the United Nations Human Rights Committee. As the document details:
Ioane Teitiota and his family sought to remain in New Zealand after migrating from Kiribati. Though the claimant identified how environmental degradation and its downstream impacts would violate his family's right to life with dignity, the majority of the committee did not find that returning the claimant to Kiribati would violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), citing a lack of individualized and imminent harm. Nevertheless, the committee did provide a significant opening by recognizing that environmental degradation could be so severe as to violate Article 6, right to life (with dignity), and Article 7, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (CIDT). This policy brief's analysis centers on Article 6, right to life with dignity, by first looking at the origin of the term "dignity" in legal contexts and how it should be applied today when considering climate-induced displacement.
After examining the etymology of "dignity," its use in international human rights law, and meanings in non-European philosophies and cultures, ICAAD proposed a legal standard for determining whether a climate-displaced person's RTLWD has been violated.
Under the group's standard, the right has been violated if they are deprived of, or are at risk of being deprived of:
- Life or access to basic necessities of life, including but not limited to potable water, food, or shelter;
- Security from serious illness or injury, whether physical or psychological; or
- Something that is fundamental to the identity, conscience, or the exercise of human rights of the applicant and of a particular social group to which the applicant belongs, including but not limited to the ability to engage in cultural practices vital to the particular social group.
ICAAD also offered an evidentiary standard for tribunals charged with considering a displaced person's application: "An applicant is entitled to protection and nonrefoulement if there is a reasonable chance that the applicant will suffer, in the applicant's lifetime, a violation of their right to life with dignity."
"In cases where multiple similarly situated applicants with familial or community ties apply for protection, some of whom satisfy this reasonable chance standard and some of whom do not, complementary protection should be extended to a nonqualifying applicant if denying protection to the nonqualifying applicant would violate any applicant's RTLWD," the group emphasized.
The new brief points out that "the proposed legal standard could also be adopted in national immigration policies, bilateral immigration policies, and internal relocation policies," highlighting that "in May 2019, a group of eight Torres Strait Islander people submitted a complaint against the Australian Government to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, alleging that Australia's failure to protect them from climate impacts was a violation of their rights under the ICCPR."
In a Wednesday statement, Yumna Kamel, co-founder and executive director of Earth Refuge, welcomed that "ICAAD's report incorporates lived-experience testimony and in-depth cross-disciplinary research to propose an innovative and, most importantly, practicable legal standard for the right to life with dignity for climate-displaced persons."
In addition to recommending legal and evidentiary standards, she noted, the brief "goes so far as to provide a guide to incorporating scientific modeling into future cases."
"The legal standard and overall thesis proposed is one that Earth Refuge would readily support and indeed seek to apply in pursuance of the rights of climate-displaced people," Kamel said. "It provides the practical, conscientious answers to the questions that those working in this field, and those experiencing these travesties, have been asking for years."
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