ICE agents standing in front of a border wall.

Climate change is too often imagined as religious rapture — instant, just, and painless. Though we understand that sea levels will rise, storms will become more intense, and forest fires more common, we rarely conceive of those tragedies in human terms. Some are brave enough to describe the death toll of climate disaster — but even those who do fail to communicate who will die, and how they will perish. Climate change is not a God. None of its victims will vanish painlessly. They will die painful deaths, and they will do so along racial and economic lines.

Some, perhaps most, will be killed by fascists.

Before his murderous spree, the Christchurch fascist terrorist made exactly such a promise:

The environment is being destroyed by over population, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the over population and by doing so save the environment.

Any moderately informed person could describe in detail why this screed is wrong — both in terms of ethics and basic science. There is no overpopulation crisis; our world is dying because of how our economy is structured, not because of how many people rely upon it. Compared to Americans and Europeans, the average Bengali has virtually no ecological footprint. Migrants are human beings, not invaders. But none of that matters, does it?

The fascists have already decided who they will blame for climate disaster, and they have already decided how to punish them. If climate apocalypse comes, the genocides will not only be committed by hurricanes in the Atlantic, nor by fires in California. They will also be committed by armed border police in El Paso and Hungary. When billions of men, women, and children are dislocated by climate change, they will flee to the imperial core. And they will be met with concentration camps.

It is not enough to fight climate change. It’s too late to stop its destabilizing effects even by the best estimates. As leftists — as decent human beings — we must recognize that radical change to national borders will be necessary to prevent genocide.

Ecosystems are already failing. ICE is already armed. The wall is already being built. If we are to reverse course and prevent the greatest tragedy in human history, we need to understand that fascism and climate change are inextricably linked. And we need to fight like hell.