Fossil Fascism: Why Trump is Accelerating the Race to Climate Catastrophe

Twelve Sinister Synergies

“The Most Dangerous Criminal in Human History”

You may have noticed that Donald “Windmills Kill Birds” Trump and other fascists around the world are militant eco-cidal advocates for the continued and indeed ramped up mass extraction and burning of fossil fuels – of turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber.

Donald “Climate Change is a Chinese Hoax” Trump’s sadistic assault on all government efforts to control carbon emissions was the main reason that Nom Chomsky called him “the most dangerous criminal in human history” back in January of 2020. As Chomsky explained:

‘Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘“eviants,” along with tens of millions of Slav “Untermenschen.” But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species)…Trump is. And those who think he doesn’t know what he’s doing haven’t been looking closely…We’ve discussed it often before. There is no need to review what is happening on Trump’s watch while he devotes every effort to accelerating the race to catastrophe, trailed by such lesser lights as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Australia’s Scott Morrison…Every day brings new forebodings. We have just learned, for example, that the gigantic Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has been eroding from warm water below. The Washington Post describes this as “a troubling finding that could speed its melt in a region with the potential to eventually unleash more than 10 feet of sea-level rise,” adding, “Scientists already knew that Thwaites was losing massive amounts of ice — more than 600 billion tons over the past several decades, and most recently as much as 50 billion tons per year.” It has now been confirmed, as suspected, that “this was occurring because a layer of relatively warmer ocean water, which circles Antarctica below the colder surface layer, had moved closer to shore and begun to eat away at the glaciers themselves, affecting West Antarctica in particular.” The chief scientist involved in the study warns that this may signal “an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise.”…That’s today. Tomorrow will be something worse. What’s causing the warmer water? No secret. This is only one of the likely irreversible tipping points that may be reached if “the Chosen One,” as he modestly describes himself, is granted another four years to carry out his project of global destruction.’

So Far in Trump47

Read that again: “If …granted another four years to carry out his project of global destruction.”

Let that sink in.

Trump’s wild fossil fascist war on livable ecology half a year into his second presidency includes:

• removing references to climate change from federal websites and documents.

• wiping out decades of federal climate science data.

• enacting massive cuts in the Environmental Protection Agency’s staff.

• shuttering the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas reporting program.

• attacking the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), the federal government agency formerly charged with studying the impact of human activity on the environment and producing the annual National Climate Assessment.

• opening up vast swaths of Alaska to oil and gas drilling.

• withdrawing from international climate agreements.

• making massive personnel cuts at the National Weather Service.

• successfully working with its Trumpified Republifascist party to end tax incentives for renewable energy including energy-efficient home construction, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, on-site solar and wind power, and more.

• attacking National Parks and Tribal Lands’ protections against oil and gas drilling.

• the president and his officials regularly attacking and mocking basic climate science and climate mitigation efforts.

Some Leftish Objections

This is the most underestimated horror of Trump and Trumpism-fascism, now bidding to consolidate and cement RepubliNazi rule in the United States, which has long been the world’s leading carbon emitter and top national menace to the global environment as well the chief agent and enforcer of a world capitalist system that is hard-wired to destroy livable ecology.

I say most underestimated horror because there’s no hope for a decent future on a dead planet.

I can already hear some leftish readers’ objections:

“Hold on, Dr. Street, what’s this got to do with fascism? You have written before about how you had to argue with Chomsky, who (at least through mid-2020) didn’t think Trump45 was actually a fascist. You also just now said that capitalism is the cause of the destruction of the environment, which is being led by climate change, which you yourself have long been calling capitalogenic climate change. It seems like the enemy of livable ecology is capitalism, not fascism, and that we need a revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a socialist order in which humanity seeks to repair the massage damage capitalism has done to the planet and take up a role as ‘fit caretakers of the Earth,’ to use Bob Avakian’s phrase.”

This merits a detailed response.

Yes, I (and others) did in 2020 argue with Chomsky about whether or not Trump45 was fascist. He was wrong, and I was right. (Please see my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping America, which contains an entertaining chapter titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial.” There I explain at great length how and why Trump and Trumpism checked off all the key definitional boxes of fascism between 2016 and 2021, with January 6 as pretty much the final proof regarding the first Trump presidency.)

Good book!

All serious academic debate on this question has pretty much ended with the second Trump administration, which is so obviously and brazenly fascist that only a few doctoral buffoons like Daniel Bessner are still sticking their heads in the sand. (Maybe even Bernie Sanders will have to stop saying “oligarchy” and “tendencies towards authoritarianism” [ya think, Senator?] again and again and start mouthing the F-word (fascism) on a regular basis.)

Yes, anarchic and soulless, profit- and accumulation-addicted capitalism is in fact the taproot driver of ecocide. And yes, capitalism will have to be overthrown if we want to save livable ecology – ecocide cannot and will not be overcome under the profits system.

But guess what, my friends/comrades: fascism is thoroughly aligned with eco-cidal capitalism. Socialism, properly understood and implemented, is a break with eco-cidal capitalism; fascism is not. Fascism is a virulent form of capitalist governance wherein the political superstructure is stripped of what’s left of previously normative bourgeois democracy, civil rights, civil liberties, and rule of law. Channeling a lethal synthesis of white supremacism, patriarchal misogyny, and xenophobic nationalism, fascism is capitalism with a more or less explicit dictatorship atop the domestic political order as well as atop the underlying modes of production, investment, and distribution. And it’s pretty damn hard to sustain a movement for the socialist transformation that is required to save livable ecology once fascist governance consolidates.

Fossil Fascism: Twelve Sinister Synergies

And fascism accelerates the ecocide inherent in capitalism because the fascist version of capitalist rule today has a particularly strong connection to fossil capitalism – to fossil fuels. Here below I list twelve mutually reinforcing synergies between (a) 21st Century fascism – a movement that finds its leading expression to date in Trump’s second presidency – and (b) climate-cooking fossil capitalism. Five (#s 1, 7, 8, 9, and 10) of these synergies are adapted from Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Group’s remarkable 2022 book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (which I reviewed here):

1. Fascists’ attachment to fossil fuels as part of a nation’s great inherent heritage and “stock,” a source of the nation’s endangered greatness akin to its racial heritage and stock.

2. Fascism’s hyper-masculinist, arch-patriarchal commitment to conquering and essentially raping the Earth, perfectly aligned with a preference for, rapaciously extracting and burning its accumulated fossil fuels over learning how to live in harmony with the planet’s abundant renewable resources.

3. Amerikan fascism’s close alignment with fundamentalist Christianity, whose adherents deny the relevance of climate (and other) science and believe “God” will sort any problems humanity faces in ways that reward the faithful. Some fundamentalists welcome climate change as “God’s will” and some look forward to a climate-related apocalypse that will “sort out the damned from the saved.”

4. Fascism’s anti-intellectual contempt for truth, intellectuals, education, and science, which fuels toxic and militant climate denialism.

5. Fascism’s virulent racism, which predisposes Trumpists to embrace attacks on Native American lands that contain oil and gas resources fossil capital seeks to extract and burn. (In a similar vein. the “Trump of the Tropics,” Brazil’s former fascist president Jair Bolsonaro drew heavily on anti-Indigenous racism in his terrorist and eco-cidal campaigns to clear the Amazon rain forest for his capitalist agro-industrial allies and sponsors.)

6. Fascism’s virulent anti-socialism, which hates positive government action for the common good and thus for environmental sanity.

7. The xenophobic nationalist narrative that climate concerns are a cloak for poor and nonwhite nations’ supposed nefarious effort to “steal” justly rich white nation’s wealth and power.

8. The neo-Malthusian “eco-fascist” and xenophobic nationalist claim that immigration and Third World over-population are the real causes of environmental spoilation at home and abroad.

9. First World (rich nation) indifference to the climate crisis on the grounds that its primary victims are poor nations and people in the nonwhite periphery of the world system.

10. The negative impact of climate mitigation efforts on the economic status of significant rich nation sectors and regions, providing ground for right-wing parties to sell anti-climate policies to certain constituencies as economic “populism.”

11. Strong financial support for fascist parties, including now the Trumpified US Republican/ Republi-fascist Party, from wealthy fossil capitalist campaign donors. Much of this backing comes in the form of stealth “dark money” in the US.

12. Fascism’s sadistic Social Darwinism and faith in the supposed “survival of the fittest,” which says that only “the weakest” succumb to harm from external causes like a (dangerously) warming plant and that the dying off of the weak is a good thing for human evolution.

Trump’s lethal environmental policies may actually be the top reason that, as Refuse Fascism (on whose editorial board I sit) says, TRUMP MUST GO NOW!