A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

Soaring gas prices, accelerating drought, crop disruption, shockingly early and unusually large wildfires across the American Southwest, and now, bewilderingly, an extended baby formula shortage: Resource scarcity—both climate-driven and market-driven—has been making headlines for months. The survivalist communities I keep a fascinated eye on are convinced their time has come, their expertise proved useful, their hoarding of canned goods vindicated.

For years, prescient climate writers have been pointing to an emerging problem as the narrative around climate change moves from the abstract long-term danger (i.e., this will hurt the next generation) to the more immediate, concrete threat. Resource scarcity forces communities to a fork in the road: Will you treat a lack of stormproof housing or safe drinking water as a communal problem to solve or a competition?

Just because climate change has become impossible to deny, these writers have warned, doesn’t mean climate deniers will start voting for city cooling centers in heat waves, affordable housing, and low-emission public transit. Instead, some will flip straight into ecofascism: blaming resource scarcity on overpopulation or immigration; favoring racist and xenophobic policies to help white people hoard resources rather than making the world more livable for everyone.

This repellent view is held by the 18-year-old white man who murdered 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday. “Like mass shooters in New Zealand and El Paso, Texas—who set out to murder Muslims and Latinos, respectively,” Kate Aronoff wrote yesterday, the shooter in Buffalo “referred to himself as an ecofascist, pointing to overpopulation of nonwhite people as a driver of environmental destruction in a rant that amounted to microwaved Blood and Soil nationalism.” Elements of his manifesto also, she argued, closely resembled rhetoric from right-wing politicians and pundits who for years have been signaling a shift from climate denial to specifically right-wing climate policy:

“For too long,” Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron wrote, echoing [California Congressman Tom] McClintock, “we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs.” He blamed the left for “presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization, whilst offering no true solution to either issue."

There’s reason to worry about these kinds of beliefs spreading, particularly among the young, Kate wrote. Concern about climate change is very high among young people, she noted, and while many climate voters lean left, that’s not guaranteed: “The paranoid racist fantasies of national decline being spun by the likes of Carlson, J.D. Vance, and other ‘populist’ GOP luminaries offer a grab bag of ideological frameworks that viewers can map onto their own set of concerns,” and Carlson in particular “has casually flirted with ecofascism in recent years.”

Last week, Rob Meyer at The Atlantic wrote about Democrats “blowing a once-in-a-decade chance to pass meaningful climate legislation” before the November midterms. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem to realize, he wrote, that “if Democrats fail to pass a bill this term, then America’s climate commitment under the Paris Agreement will be out of reach, and worse heat waves, larger wildfires, and damaging famines across the country and around the world within the next decade and a half will be all but assured.”

Rob’s piece is worth your time. But the repercussions of Democratic fecklessness go well beyond the ones he lists. Yes, aggressive action is needed to keep global warming from spiraling completely out of control. But it’s also needed because politics abhors a vacuum, and the globe is replete with maniacs: If halfway-reasonable politicians don’t come up with a response to climate change, someone else will.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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