Source: It’s Not Climate Denial, It’s White Supremacy
| HOT TAKE |
| It’s Not Climate Denial, It’s White Supremacy |
| BY HOT TAKE – 01 MAY 2022 – VIEW ONLINE → |
| It’s Not Climate Denial, It’s White SupremacyBy Mary Annaïse HeglarLast week, Amy and I went on Pod Save America to play a special climate edition of a game called Take Appreciator. In the game, the producer reads us some of the worst climate opinions out there and we have to react. Y’all, the first one was Ben Shapiro out here making his trademark argument that sea level rise isn’t a problem because when the water comes, people will just move. (And no, it wasn’t the classic video with the blessed ax coming through the wall.) Something about hearing Ben’s fever-pitched voice took me back to 2019 when his minions swarmed my Twitter mentions, so my response was a little bit incoherent and there’s a lot I wish I’d said.Here’s the part I got out on the episode: if you take this argument in good faith, it’s incredibly stupid, but it’s Ben Shapiro, so it’s an inherently bad faith argument. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Y’all, Ben is not stupid, he’s evil. He knows good and goddamn well everybody can’t move when the water comes—he just doesn’t care about the folks who don’t have the resources to move. Their lives do not matter to him.I wish I’d clarified that the people who don’t have the resources to move are, by and large, people of color. And that the people who peddle in climate denial, or climate downplay, are almost never actual climate deniers. They “believe science,” they know what’s about to happen and, crucially, who it’s going to happen to: people of color, people of the global south, poor people. Climate denial was never about science and always about white supremacy. |
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