During a brief moment of the Covid-19 pandemic, it seemed as if the global climate movement had finally managed to break through the resistance and paralysis in the socioecological transformation to mitigate the climate crisis. But, as is so often the case with social movements, every step forward is followed by a reactionary backlash. In 2023, anti-environmental resentment reached a new level of virulence in Germany. Even democratic parties reproduced narratives that used to come primarily from the far right (including slurs such as “energy Stasi,” “ecofascists,” and “climate dictatorship”). Back in 2021, it was the extreme right-wing that waged a dirty election campaign against the Greens as the party of climate protection. Now, in 2023, anti-Green polarization has reached the democratic center, who accuse the Green party of “climate ideology.”
None of the parties in the German Bundestag nor the government is pursuing a policy that would enable us to meet the 1.5°C target. There are many reasons and motivations, influences and disinformation at play. The aim is to protect the interests of fossil fuel industries, destabilize democracies in general, and block socioecological transformation in particular. Years ago, Putin’s digital information warriors were already helping to promote fossil fuels in the West, agitating against the ecological transition. For decades, it has been known how large Western fossil fuel companies exert influence by funding PR campaigns, foundations, think tanks, the media, and more. In the US, organized manipulation by oil companies is particularly well documented. Journalists and scholars are currently investigating these issues, and litigation for compensation is underway.
Under increasing pressure to take action to counter the climate crisis, new political formations and alliances against decarbonization and climate justice are emerging. Neoliberal and plutocratic ideologies and practices are radicalizing into new extremes of right-wing libertarianism, negating society and critical of the state to the point of hostility. One example and role model for this is the newly elected Argentinian president and climate change denier Milei. Ideologically, in keeping with Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “extremism of the worst,” it is logical that climate change denial, classism, Social Darwinism, and racism go hand in hand with decreasing social solidarity on the far right; this often also includes antisemitic conspiracy narratives. Much of the hatred is now directed at the governing Greens as a proxy for the state as such in its regulatory role. The democratic state has a political mandate to guarantee social security and provide social balance while making sure that citizens do not exercise their freedoms at the expense of the freedoms of others. Right-wing libertarians, however, seek to weaken or dismantle the state.
In fact, with our overconsumption of environmental resources, we are not only systemically depriving future generations of their freedoms, but also destroying the foundations of life and opportunities for freedom of those people and regions that are particularly threatened by climate change. Government compensation should primarily demand change from the wealthiest and most powerful, who bear the main responsibility for global heating. In addition to culturally and economically ingrained mechanisms of racism, classism, and sexism, those who suffer most from industry-driven climate change are those who bear the least blame for causing it: non-White, poor people and, disproportionately, women. Global and intersectional inequalities and the apparent hopelessness of the situation are accelerating radicalization and the decline in political solidarity and are driving isolationism, both from other countries and from lower strata of society. In the process, the beautiful value of “freedom” is being reinterpreted as a right-wing ideological battle cry that simply means securing one’s own privileges. EIKE, for example, the radical right-wing pseudo-institute of the German climate denial scene, usurped the term “freedom” in its slogan: “It’s not the climate that is under threat, but our freedom.”
The threat does not emanate from radical climate activists, as some claim, but from the lack of solidarity, from panic, brutalization, and ignorance among “mainstream” society. This – combined with increasing isolation and a lack of solidarity brought about by structurally and institutionally violent means – serves to protect the relative privileges of the status quo of global social inequalities, which the climate crisis highlights and exacerbates.
Dr Matthias Quent is Professor of Sociology at Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences. In 2022, he and his coauthors Christoph Richter and Axel Salheiser published a book on climate racism entitled Klimarassismus. Der Kampf der Rechten gegen die ökologische Wende (published by Piper).