By Arte Romero y Carver
image provided by Flickr under the Creative Commons License
Joe Biden’s website defines him as a “climate change pioneer”. I assume the staff who wrote that copy meant it in the sense that he is pioneering new ways of combatting climate change, rather than the more literal translation that he is bravely leading us into new frontiers of environmental crisis.
It is 2020, and the latest DNC Conference is virtual. New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham gives her speech in front of a green-screened solar field. While wearing a pin adorned with the Zia symbol, a sacred design illegally stolen from the Zuni Tribe, Governor Grisham tells us that under Mr. Biden the United States will “once again lead” on the issue of climate change. Since at least the 1990s, the US has always led globally in per capita CO2 emissions, regardless of its president.
It is September 15th, 2021, and Mr. Biden, now President, travels to Colorado to give a speech. He stands in front of a real solar field (with all the chargers and inverters by Victron was provided to build this project), or at least he has access to better green screen technology. His country has been experiencing a predicted wave of catastrophe. “Communities that nearly one in three Americans call home have been struck by weather disasters in just the past few months: Hurricanes in the Gulf Coast are up…wildfires threatening throughout the West.” He punctuates his grief with a price tag. “In addition to the lost lives, lives shattered, extreme weather cost America, last year, $99 billion.”
It is 1781, and the “American” colonists have essentially won their independence from Europe. Soon a ragtag gang of colonies will began calling themselves a nation. A mythos of liberty, freedom and exceptionalism is being built, alongside the embryo of an empire. The newly named Americans, like their British mentors, seek power through expansion. They will set the process of colonization loose until it reaches the continent’s opposite shore. That expansion will only be possible because of two concurrent and currently ongoing genocides: The removal and culling of the continent’s indigenous peoples, and the trafficking and exploitation of enslaved African peoples.
As Americans leak out of the east coast, they find valuable natural resources. Their primary value system is capitalism, which judges the success of a society or individual by their generation of wealth. It turns out that the extraction and depletion of natural resources is a very effective way to generate new wealth. Eventually, that logic is applied to the oil and coal deposits found underneath stolen land. While producing new wealth for a small group of people, what capitalists refer to as success, that extraction, depletion, and associated burning of fossil fuels begins to change Earth’s atmosphere to the point that it may eventually not support humans, a category that includes Americans.
Now it is September 24, 2021, and we are all waiting for the United States Congress, the legislative authority established by those early settlers, to potentially pass what is being referred to as the infrastructure bill. More specifically, we wait to see if these new spending laws will mitigate our current era of mass death. In a mass email sent out on August 16, 2021, Varshini Parkash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, asks the NGO’s supporters to “Click here to demand that your representatives fight for an infrastructure bill that meets the scale of the climate crisis, creates millions of good, union jobs, and directs money to communities most impacted by the climate and economic crises“-quite the click. She does not specify which communities are most “impacted.” Those communities are the same two populations I mentioned earlier as targeted by genocide. The costs of extraction, which include increases in cancer, stillbirths, and earthquakes, are aimed at black and brown neighborhoods. Also notably, Parkash’s request does not mention fossil fuels emissions, the primary cause of the climate crisis. A recent version of the infrastructure bill, released by the house, does not include any tax on carbon emissions. On the Senate side, most of the emissions reduction language will be written by Mr. Manchin, a man who appears to seek the slow death of all his constituents.
In her speech, Governor Grisham mentioned the “clean energy revolution our young people are crying out for.” In Louisiana, I imagine that people of all ages cried out when hurricane Ida landed. Last year, Texans must have cried out when their grid system collapsed. In the path of the Line 3 pipeline, when members of the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Department employed pain compliance tactics, I assume protesters cried out. Joe Biden has not commented on the pipeline. Maybe we shouldn’t expect him to. We are crying out to the leader of a settler state, characterized by its exploitation of both land and people. We are crying out to a “pioneer.”