Climate breakdown is an injustice multiplier

How we talk about climate breakdown matters a great deal, Friederike Otto argues in this very welcome book. 

We need to think not about “the whole world ending”, but about the parts of the world “already being destroyed by the global injustice amplified by climate change”.

BUY: Climate Injustice is available at Bookshop.org.

Metrics such as global average temperature or centimetres of sea level rise, important as they are, can obscure the impacts of heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires, and the ways that they intensify, and are intensified by, poverty and social injustice.

Corporations

They can obscure the human agency of governments, corporations and other power structures who have made populations outside the rich world vulnerable by their actions.

“Climate change is no asteroid”, Otto insists. “It is a human-caused reality that escalates the inequality and injustice in our society. An injustice we consider so normal that often we don’t even talk about it. But we need to start talking.” 

Heat waves are normalised. “The planetary apocalypse fails to materialise; local disasters become the new normal”, she writes, in a chapter about the unprecedented heat wave on Canada’s west coast in 2021.

Otto has identified an important issue here. The political mainstream has largely abandoned crude denial of the causal connection between the fossil fuelled-economy and global heating, even where extremists like Donald Trump  have not. 

But even in the mainstream new ways have been found to depict the heating as external. It is gutted of content, stripped of its origins in human economic activity and social hierarchies. The responsibility of powerful humans in corporations and governments is concealed.

Extreme

Climate change is “injustice”, Otto writes, not “an undeserved stroke of misfortune”. And the normalisation of actual climate-related disasters, in which people are suffering and dying now, has an unpleasant twin: the climate-change-as-apocalypse-movie narrative. 

“Why did Don’t Look Up, a hit Netflix movie, make do with comparing climate change to an asteroid, an analogy that doesn’t help us at all. Why doesn’t Hollywood produce a thrilling blockbuster about a lawsuit against ExxonMobil?”

Good questions. Although I did think Don’t Look Up used black humour to good effect against right-wing climate-science-denying populism.

Climate Injustice is a model of clear writing about complex subjects for a general readership. Otto explains the interaction of social, economic and political factors with the physical changes brought about, or exacerbated, by climate breakdown. In the first part, she tackles heat waves.