The next Big Thing, following on from the climate change apocalypse, is eco-racism, or environmental racism, and it is already here, with the academics getting into writing about it. The idea here is that because of structural racism, the minorities, already victims, become environmental victims, hence double victims, or what I will call, in an original burst of creativity, hyper-victims. Thus, the Third World get disproportionately affected by say droughts and heat waves, all supposedly caused by climate change, which is all the West’s fault. So, abandon affluence, dismantle the West, de-growth, and rollup into a ball of eternal guilt. Makes sense. Anyway, here is some coverage of this topic by Nature.com.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01881-4?utm_source=gnaa
"In the past few years, a growing body of research has revealed the environmental injustices that have left some residents baking in vast expanses of asphalt while other urban neighbourhoods benefit from green parks, spacious lawns and sprawling trees. “It’s really shocking,” says Angel Hsu, a climate scientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “We have to ask ourselves why — to try to figure out why these patterns are so consistent and so pervasive.”
Similar inequalities threaten urban residents in many other countries, but some of the best-documented examples are in the United States, where researchers are increasingly exploring the links between discriminatory policies and heat risks. Many cities are now working to incorporate heat equity into their urban planning, such as by planting trees and painting roofs white in neighbourhoods that have typically received fewer resources. But such climate-adaptation plans have a long way to go to counter decades of deliberate neglect of the most vulnerable residents.
Fatal conditions
Worldwide, more than 166,000 people died in heatwaves between 1998 and 2017, according to the World Health Organization. That makes heat among the deadliest of all weather-related disasters, including cold spells, floods, lightning and hurricanes. Yet its impact is routinely underestimated, because death certificates commonly list a cause of death, such as heart failure, without noting that the person had been exposed to high temperatures.
In a study of deaths and emergency hospital admissions in Houston, Texas, between 2004 and 2013, scientists found that people older than 65 were probably dying as a result of hot days at higher rates than had been officially recorded. “Extreme heat is one of the underappreciated natural hazards,” says Olga Wilhelmi, a geographer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and an author of the study.”
I feel so guilty, that even though I am too poor to afford heating, I will take all of my old sociology books from the 1970s, and anything left-over, Left-wing, and burn it in a 44-gallon drum that my refugee neighbours have set up outside to remind them of home.