Climate fascists

Christian Parenti, veteran reporter for The Nation, takes a look at how climate change is affecting geopolitics in Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. The midlatitudes—already suffering from post-colonial political upheaval, internal strife, economic stress and agricultural difficulties—are also bearing the brunt of climate change; it’s a hard irony that those with the least resources are suffering the most. Parenti looks at the response of wealthy nations, including the United States, which has primarily been to guard our own political interests (and energy needs) at the cost of the human beings who happen to live there. What Parenti calls “climate fascism” is a subset of Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism,” and might be called an aspect of 21st-century colonialism. He argues that the collapse of these stressed states will have a cascade effect, and that we must take a holistic approach to piracy, lawlessness, civil war and climate disasters.