John Clarke, former major organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), recently posted the following on Facebook:
With even greater intensity than the pandemic [my emphasis], the impacts of climate change are running along the fault lines of social, racial and global inequality. Our resistance must be taken up along just those lines if it is to prevail.https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/9/13/libya-floods-live-thousands-missing-as-derna-counts-human-cost-of-disaster
As far as I can see, there is no mention of climate change as the cause of Storm Daniel in the attached article–although it could of course might have been a factor–but that would require more research. The article mentions the more likely immediate cause of a lack of maintenance of the dams that failed to prevent the massive flooding and subsequent mass deaths in Libya:
There were two major dams upstream from Derna that, for one, had not been maintained since 2002, according to Ahmed Madroud, the beleaguered city’s deputy mayor.
Or again:
The country’s infrastructure had been neglected under the decades-long authoritarian rule of Muammar Gaddafi and fared no better since his overthrow and assassination in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.
To claim that the impact of climate change is greater in terms of its effects on “social, racial and global inequality” would require substantial research and justification.
To be fair to Clarke, in a more recent post he writes:
The suggestion is that ‘those people’ don’t have adequate infrastructure and protections in place because they don’t have good government and have despotic tendencies. The undeniable record of Western aggression and exploitation in creating the Libyan ‘failed state’ is simply kept out of picture.
Inadequate infrastructure is at least in part due to “Western aggression and exploitation” and not due exclusively to climate change. However, in still another post on the same topic, he writes:
While it’s too early to definitively attribute the storm to the climate crisis, scientists are confident that climate change is increasing the intensity of extreme weather events like storms. Warmer oceans provide fuel for storms to grow, and a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, meaning more extreme rainfall.Storms “are becoming more ferocious because of climate change,” said Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in the UK.
I have noticed that Clarke has increasingly emphased climate change and its social impact in his Facebook posts. Although climate change is undoubtedly real (the smoke in Toronto this summer from wildfires much further away was a visible reminder of its effects) , on the one hand to focus on this hardly justified minimizes the “social, racial and global inequality” of Covid. I am highly suspicious of his assertion and would want data comparing the effects of both along the fault lines of “social, racial and global inequality.”
On the other hand, although climate change may be referred to as part of a critique of capitalist society, politically it should hardly be the focus; it is highly unlikely that there will be organizational efforts to address it if organizational efforts to address what more immediately affects workers, citizens, immigrants and migrant workers (such as working conditions while working for an employer); that should be the focus and climate change should be a secondary focus. After all, unless we stop the infinite movement of the capitalist production and circulation process (see The Money Circuit of Capital), climate change will continue to threaten our lives and all living beings on this planet.
The Abolitionary 