Climate change is class warfare — fight back

Climatology is driven by scientific research, but climate change is caused by intersecting forces that exist far beyond science. And that’s a problem. Because if no one field of study constitutes the ‘truth of climate change,’ then it renders everyone working in climate studies a non-expert about the phenomenon.

Many scientists are uncomfortable tackling the intersecting causes of climate change. But there are brilliant exceptions.

Since the 1980s, the climatologist and former NASA scientist James Hansen has doggedly engaged with politicians and popular media to warn us about climate change. And in 2020, the physicist Mike Lynch-White and astrophysicist Tim Hewlett started a coalition of concerned scientists, modelled on Extinction Rebellion, called the “Scientist Rebellion.”

It has taken science activism to the next level: civil disobedience. In May 2023, Lynch-White was given a 27-month sentence in the U.K. for peacefully protesting the production of military components used to kill Palestinians.

Decades ago, we assumed that good science was enough to inspire the changes needed to avert the worst outcomes of carbon emissions. But profiteering has always trumped research, and science activism has become even more urgently necessary — and, in the face of draconian measures across the West, heroic.

What’s more surprising is that there aren’t more humanist scholars in climate studies.

Once again, the complex intersecting causes of climate change are to blame. For anytime a philosopher or literary critic, for example, ventures into climatology they will always remain amateurs about the science. This is the cultural flip side of scientists expected to engage with the big social, political and economic issues of our time. Most of us stay in our lane for fear, essentially, of ridicule.

But humanists are exactly the right people to tackle some of the intersecting causes of climate change that scientists often leave at their door.

That’s because climate change is not a science problem at all. It’s an emissions problem. And that problem is caused by a particular kind of society made possible — and tremendously wealthy — by petro-capitalism. Petro-capitalism is also, and emphatically so, not a science problem. It’s a socio-economic problem that carries all the baggage of a system that places profits ahead of people.

And that’s why we need more humanists to join the program to save the planet. It’s obviously not about watering-down our public discourse about science — because, again, it’s not about science at all.

It’s about making the intersecting causes of climate change as accessible, concrete and prosaic as possible, and in terms humanists are trained to understand.

The same reticence to engage with climate change holds for the public, too. People aren’t just busy with their lives. They’re afraid to navigate this complex terrain.

But climate studies needs everyone, from all walks of life, to ensure we achieve the best possible outcome. That outcome is not inevitable because it’s broadly cultural. Carbon emissions are ‘anthropogenic’ — we create them by the way society is organized around extractive capitalism.

These events aren’t happening to us. They are caused by us or, at least, by political and corporate leaders who pretend to represent our values and interests.

So we know that scientific research won’t motivate the big changes required to save the planet from catastrophe. What we need is a mass movement of people committed to something very basic: the principles of life.

What we need is climate revolution. And that will take people like us who comprise the 99 per cent of humanity.

In this spirit, allow me to connect the dots between everyday life and the facts of climate change.

Rolling back our human rights, impoverishing us with austerity, hoarding the wealth we create through work, buying up our homes, subverting our voting rights, criminalizing, jailing and killing us for exercising free speech, and spending our taxes on weapons, war and genocide — these everyday occurrences, totally normalized in the West, aren’t separate from the problem of climate change.

On the contrary, they’re direct reflections of the commodification and debasement of human existence for the purpose of generating unimaginable profits for a tiny number of sociopaths. Let’s be real about it: this is evil. At this very moment, the worst of them, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are attempting a coup d’êtat while we sleepwalk our way through Instagram.

If we want to advance the principles of life, we can do no better than stopping the 3,200 billionaires from business as usual — and before they’ve disenfranchised and enslaved us all while rendering the planet uninhabitable.

So not only are carbon emissions not a “science problem.” They’re a class warfare problem, one endemic to Western society today. And unless you’re fantastically wealthy, you’re on the losing side of it.

Protests, civil disobedience and strike actions demanding justice are the start of making both the natural and social worlds better. Let’s begin there and adjust as we go. Because while we might start with climate science, the future obviously belongs to political science. It belongs, in short, to whatever actions we take now.

Those actions involve voting for and supporting candidates who still reflect Canadian values. In the U.S. it involves supporting progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In Canada it involves supporting Avi Lewis. Because in Canada, unfortunately, there’s literally no one else. There’s just Prime Minister Mark Carney, someone who has shifted the Liberal party even further right as they plot to undermine, willy nilly, the freedoms, rights and civility that alone guarantees a better tomorrow for all Canadians. It’s as simple — and clarifying — as that.

So do your thing. Start or join a group. Sign a petition. March with allies who challenge your worldview. Vote for candidates who care about people, not profits. And make your citizenship count before it’s cheapened by the avarice of the Epstein class and its many minions — even here in Winnipeg.

Todd Dufresne is the author of The Future Belongs to Those Who Fight: Climate Revolution for Beginners, and will be having a book launch in Winnipeg on May 7.