UN Expert Condemns the 'Racism' of Solutions to Climate Change

Sometimes, you’re damned whether you do or don’t.

UCLA Professor Tendayi Achiume has a message about remedies for climate change. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance isn’t impressed with so-called “green” solutions. Those would include electric cars, renewable energy, and the “rewilding of vast tracts of land.”

As explained to The Guardian, the world’s high-tech address of climate change is polluting the planet with prejudice.

Tendayi tells it:

“You can’t think that you solve the climate crisis and then attend to racial justice or racial discrimination. What you have to realize is that every action that is taken in relation to ecological crisis — environmental, climate and otherwise — has racial justice implications, and so every action becomes a site of undoing racial subordination.”

Amid wrapping up her tenure with the UN, in October, she delivered her final report to the general assembly…

[Tendayi] tackled the relationship between racism and the climate and ecological crises. …

The rush towards sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels…was creating what Achiume described as “green sacrifice zones,” where already marginalised groups were exposed to environmental harms from the extraction of the very minerals needed for green tech.

If we’re going to stop climate change, the solution must be “antiracist“:

This climate justice-oriented perspective demands antiracist solutions, [Tendayi] said. But the very same structures that created racial inequalities were now being relied upon to solve the environmental crisis, leading to a “doubling down on racial inequality and injustice.”

Profit-based corrective technology is targeting minorities:

“Indigenous communities and racially marginalized communities are being displaced by innovations that are supposed to be leading us towards clean energy. And there you see how a green transition, unless it explicitly centers racial justice, can come at the expense of and reproduce these sorts of racial injustices. … We’re basically again trying to profit our way out of a crisis that is defined by an approach that thinks that profiting out of crisis is sustainable.”

That creates quite the complication, as we’re informed that — just as the solutions to climate change are racist — change in climate itself is racist, too.

Indeed — environmental havoc is evidently obsessed with skin color. See the book Climate Change Is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice.

And also:

Nickelodeon Schools Kids on the ‘Environmental Racism’ of Pig Farming

Julian Castro Saves the World, One Problem at a Time. Previously: Pregnant Men; This Week: Racist White Weather

Like a Slick Latex Glove, AOC Drops Science: ‘Environmental Racism’ is an ‘Underlying Health Condition’

Even Tendayi herself believes climate change is racist. From Section D of her report, “Dispossession of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples”:

[I]ndigenous and Afro-descendant peoples are frequently on the frontlines of extractive projects, and thus bear an outsized risk of harm from environmental degradation. At the same time, climate change threatens indigenous peoples in the Pacific, the Americas, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa with the loss of their homelands. The profusion of extractive projects and the subsequent emission of greenhouse gases can be attributed to the systematic dispossession of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples and the denial of their lands and right to self-determination.

Bottom line:

The status quo is that global and national systems distribute the suffering associated with the global ecological crisis on a racially discriminatory basis.

As made clear earlier this month, RedState front-pager Jennifer Oliver O’Connell wasn’t impressed with the above:

This is among one of the stupidest takes I have heard. Assigning atmosphere, temperature, and physical forces to race and supposed white supremacy is peak insanity.

According to Tendayi, it appears, climate change is racist; and also according to her, so are the efforts to stop climate change. We’re in a real pickle.

But the professor has ideas for how to fix the world’s flaws — not necessarily concerning climate change, but other social ills.

Per The College Fix:

[She] has indicated she opposes secure national borders and that slavery reparations are “essential to the fulfillment of human rights” and the “inherent dignity of all.”

Maybe one day the world will figure out how to right radical wrongs without being ruinously racist. But not being racist seems increasingly tricky…

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee's 'Equity Summit' Condemns 'Individualism' as White Supremacy https://t.co/25kUZyckfK

— RedState (@RedState) December 30, 2022