Climate Change

How Capitalism Torched the Planet and Left it a Smoking Fascist Greenhouse

How Capitalism Torched the Planet and Left it a Smoking Fascist Greenhouse

"My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it."

"But I want to tell you the sad, strange, terrible story of how we got here. Call it a lament for a planet, if you like. You see, not so long ago, we — the world — were optimistic that climate change could be managed, in at least some way. The worst impacts probably avoided, forestalled, escaped — if we worked together as a world. But now we are not so sure at all. Why is that? What happened? Fascism happened — at precisely the wrong moment. That shredded all our plans. But fascism happened because capitalism failed — failed for the world, but succeeded wildly for capitalists."

Adirondacks affected by warming climate in a number of ways

Adirondacks affected by warming climate in a number of ways

"The go-to images that illustrate our planet’s rising temperature are the rising ocean around the Florida Keys, coral reefs fading or glaciers melting into rushing rivers. But the Adirondacks have suffered from our rising thermostat, and the trend is continuing. Algae is growing in the region’s warming lakes. Invasive species are creeping north, threatening forests, animals and water bodies. Activities like skiing, snowmobiling and snowshoeing are threatened as winters get warmer and less snowy. These changes are infringing on an Adirondacks tourism economy in which visitors spent $1.4 billion last year."