Environmental Racism: A Certain Way of Living
Image by Bhautik Patel.
The planet is on fire—literally, across continents—and yet the drilling continues, the deforestation accelerates, wars rage, and the wheels of death, the military-industrial complex, keep turning.
Year on year, the number of people dying from climate-change-related causes is increasing; and whilst there have been deaths in the West, the vast majority of victims are poor, black, and from the Global South.
Cake and eat it
For decades, climate scientists and environmental activists have been calling for policy changes and urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). “But despite repeated warnings and sustained public protest throughout the world, the response from governments and corporations has been totally inadequate.”
‘Net-Zero’ (GHG emissions) targets (non-binding) have been agreed by governments of 137 countries (plus some corporations); policies to transition away from fossil fuels have been designed and in some cases instigated. But the fossil fuel economy, materialistic lifestyles, and animal-based diets that are enflaming the crisis remain untouched. Total hypocrisy.
These governments, however, are neither autonomous nor principled; they are controlled, more or less, by money: by corporations and ‘the markets’, by people with vested interests—in the fossil fuel economy, the military-industrial complex, big tech, digital technology, and more.
And it is here, in the shiny world of the oligarchs, a parallel universe of insatiability and clawing luxury, that action and change are most fervently resisted. The greed of this small but extremely powerful group of insulated men is limitless, their GHG emissions staggering, their complacency criminal.
In its groundbreaking report, ‘Carbon Inequality Kills,’ Oxfam states that “fifty of the world’s richest billionaires on average produce more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in just over an hour and a half than the average person does in their entire lifetime…[and] they tend to favour investments in heavily polluting industries, like fossil fuels…If everyone’s emissions matched those of the richest 1 percent, the carbon budget [CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere without pushing temperatures above 1.5°C] would be used up in under five months.”
Global warming has already reached 1.5°C (above pre-industrial levels), and according to British global-systems researcher Tim Lenton of Exeter University, “we are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature.”
None of which matters to the industrial polluters; they are wedded to the fossil fuel economy and the military-industrial complex—poisons that are fuelling climate change, as well as war, of course, which is regarded as a business opportunity to the oligarchs. Peace is of no interest to such men, and without peace, GHG emissions will continue to increase, climate change will accelerate, and more and more people will die as a result.
Climate Deaths
As temperatures rise and extreme weather conditions increase, every year more and more people are dying from climate-related causes.
The Lancet Countdown report 2025, produced in conjunction with the World Health Organisation (WHO), makes clear that complacency and climate inaction “are resulting in millions of avoidable deaths every year.”
Their findings are stark: heat-related mortality has increased by 63% since the 1990s, to an annual average of 546,000 deaths in 2012–2021; exposure to wildfire smoke led to an estimated 154,000 deaths in 2024; and air pollution from fossil fuels and household sources was responsible for a combined 4.8 million deaths.
Shocking as the current figures are, the numbers of climate-related deaths are set to increase dramatically. A 2024 report from the World Economic Forum, using a methodology that includes floods, droughts, wildfires, and tropical storms, forecasts that by 2050—a mere 24 years away—”climate change could cause an additional 14.5 million deaths.” The true figure will likely be even higher.
Overwhelmingly, the victims are from the Global South—Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—regions that have contributed next to nothing to the crisis. They are poor, black/brown: men, women, and children who are regarded as dispensable by a disconnected global elite, concerned with nothing but itself and the perpetuation of its privilege.
This is environmental racism, and it applies throughout the world. It is one of the many consequences of extreme income and wealth inequality, resulting in some cases in death.
The fact that it is mostly poor, black, and brown people, living thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, who are dying, is a major reason behind the complacency and inaction around climate action. But even as the impact of climate change spreads to middle-class white people in Europe and America—as is now beginning to happen—governments are still failing to act.
The changes needed are not just structural and ideological; they are, what we might call, spiritual—relating to values, attitudes, and behaviour. The structures, systems, and ideologies that create the collective modes of living flow from these—both need to change, and in parallel: the values that permeate society, as well as the systems and institutions, the governance, etc.
Like all crises facing humanity, the destruction of the natural world is a consequence of a certain way of living. A divisive materialistic approach rooted in desire, pleasure, and selfishness: only in such a world could oligarchs come into being and environmental racism occur—if perennial ideals such as unity, compassion, and justice were evident, such perversions would not exist. It is this corrosive way of living that, if the environmental emergency is to be faced with the seriousness it demands, must change.
