Climate change threatens people of color

Woke America’s despair for virtue signaling nears complete idiocy

The Center for American Progress held an event to debate “Putting Racial Justice at the Heart of Climate Action.” In introducing the debate, the DC think tank lumped all its favorite talking points — climate change, racial injustice and economic inequality — and used them to thrash “racial policies, racial institutions, and colonization.” Bottom line is this: People of color are good, white people are evil.

But anyone familiar with the global climate debate knows that combating climate change originated with white Western people, such as former Vice President Al Gore, who was among the first to take the debate to the national stage. 

For decades now, white people of the West, from Gore to Swedish teenager activist Thunberg, have been at the forefront of the war against climate change. Meanwhile, Western governments have also urged global action in a bid to slow such change. Those who have been reluctant in doing their part to fight climate change have been developing countries — mainly China and India, the biggest polluters in the world.

China and India argue that white Western countries have had their share in polluting the planet, a process through which they climbed the ladder of wealth to become wealthy industrialized and developed nations. Hence, China, India and other predominantly non-white nations ask for exemptions from capping their carbon emissions until they become developed enough.

So the global debate is non-whites who are reluctant in combating climate change vs white people in Europe and North America who advocate for combating climate change. 

But such narrative does not fit the militant talking points of the Center for American Progress, whose introduction to the event was as follows:

Climate change, racial injustice, the coronavirus pandemic, and economic inequality have formed interlocking crises that threaten the health, safety, and well-being of communities of color across the globe. Racist policies and institutions, stemming from legacies of slavery and colonization, have burdened Black and brown neighborhoods with disproportionate amounts of air and water pollution. These same communities battling pollution’s disparate health effects are often simultaneously on the front lines of pollution’s other catastrophic effect: climate change. Sea level rise, heat waves, and storms are becoming more intense—and more deadly—as the climate crisis worsens. But just as the root causes of racism and the climate crisis are interwoven, so are the solutions.

Not only the Progressive think tank confuses — wittingly or not — unrelated concepts, it goes as far as printing an absurdity in which it hints that people of color are at the front lines of climate change. 

So how does climate change affect poor people of color more than rich white people? Does climate change threaten predominantly black South East Washington DC but not the affluent coastal Martha’s Vineyard? Do billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk own islands that are immune to rising sea levels?

It is unfortunate that many DC think tanks have stopped serving as repositories of ideas and instead transformed themselves into centers of partisan propaganda and hyper partisan nonsense. The Center for American Progress is Exhibit A.