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“Climate change is a racist crisis: that’s why Black Lives Matter closed an airport”

Alexandra Wanjiku-Kelbert, who will help train you as a socialist campaigner for three thousand quid, has done a beautiful thing. Not only has she caused the left to lie down with right on the Guardian comments pages, she has made the left to lie down with the left. Verily, the Corbynite and the Blairite shall dwell together and jointly speak trash of Ms Spellcheck-Kelbert.

Here is the article that gave rise to such wonders:

Climate change is a racist crisis: that’s why Black Lives Matter closed an airport

Today we are saying that the climate crisis is a racist crisis. On the one hand Britain is the biggest contributor per capita to global temperature change.

Those who closely follow the carbon dioxide emissions league tables (app available on Android and iOS) will have been surprised by this sudden promotion of Britain to the top spot. All will be explained if you click on the link. You will see that the figure she quotes for each nation is calculated over all time. Seriously, they are blaming Britain for having been first with the industrial revolution.

It is also one of the least vulnerable to the effects of climate change. On the other hand, seven of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in sub-Saharan Africa.

We’re not saying that climate change affects only black people. However, it is communities in the global south that bear the brunt of the consequences of climate change, whether physical – floods, desertification, increased water scarcity and tornadoes – or political: conflict and racist borders. While a tiny elite can fly to and from London City airport, sometimes as a daily commute, this year alone 3,176 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean, trying to reach safety on the shores of Europe.

Got all that? Climate change causes racist borders.

We are coming under fire for the fact that the protesters on the runway today were all white. That is not an accident.

True enough. The SWP (for it is they) can’t be fussing with their lineup of professional protesters every time there’s a black theme month.

40 comments to “Climate change is a racist crisis: that’s why Black Lives Matter closed an airport”

  • Sam Duncan

    “… will help train you as a socialist campaigner for three thousand quid”

    I’ll do it for a thousand.You accidentally end up libertarian, but what do you expect for a grand?

  • These folks are beyond parody… actually no, they are great fun to parody.

  • Paul Marks

    The mainstream media and the education system keep desperately trying to pretend that “Black Lives Matter” are something noble.

    But their actions and words keep betraying them for what they are – a bunch of evil Marxist scumbags.

    And, no, it was not any different in the 1960s – the “Black Panthers” and so on were also a bunch of evil Marxist scumbags.

  • Mike Borgelt

    Dammit, I thought it was Australia that was meant to have the greatest per capita CO2 emissions (not true anyway but that line has been used).
    Also I believe there is evidence that the extra CO2 is causing greening of sub Saharan Africa and the planet generally.
    Wrong on so many counts.

  • PersonFromPorlock

    Paul Marks
    September 6, 2016 at 9:00 pm

    And, no, it was not any different in the 1960s – the “Black Panthers” and so on were also a bunch of evil Marxist scumbags.

    I have always had a sneaking suspicion that the Panthers were a net positive for the civil rights movement; sometimes, ‘telling’ works better than ‘asking’. And back in the late ’60s, there were still plenty of people who needed to be ‘told’.

    Not so much, today.

  • Mary Contrary

    The SWP (for it is they) can’t be fussing with their lineup of professional protesters every time there’s a black theme month.

    Oh Nathalie, that’s such a perfect put-down, an absolute gem. I’m going to have to steal it.

    Paul Marks succinctly sums up my own view of Black Lives Matter.

  • PhilB

    If Black lives mattered, especially in the USA, then Black people would stop killing black people on an industrial scale, would cooperate with the Police to track down and arrest killers in their communities and in general, hold their people responsible for their actions.

    But they don’t.

  • Brian Swisher

    World to end at midnight. Women, minorities hardest hit.

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker!) Gray

    I bet climate change has been accelerating because of Brexit! Brexit allows racists to come out of the closet, and all the hot air spent on the referendum, and looking for a way to reverse it, has worsened climate change, and these have all made Black Lives Miserable!
    Also, Brexit has enabled the Europeons to start talking about a Europeon Army. Any army will need fuel, which will further damage the Environment.
    See what you irresponsible Brexiteers done? When are you going to fix it?

  • Vinegar Joe

    Snow is white. Storm clouds are black. Weather is racist!

  • Thailover

    Yeah, too bad that sub-Saharan deserts which were predicted to grow because of “climate change” has actually grown greener.
    Why?

    Because green plants love the F*%& out of co2. and warmer temps mean more atmospheric moisture, which means rain. Gee, Whodathunkit.

    How Fossil Fuels are Greening the Planet. (Matt Ridley). youtube 19minutes.

  • Thailover

    Brian Swisher,
    Well, according to Hillary Clinton, “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.”

    Either she doensn’t know the meaning of “primary”, or she’s expecting her “because vagina” followers to not know the meaning of primary.

  • Thailover

    “We’re not saying that climate change affects only black people. However, it is communities in the global south that bear the brunt of the consequences of climate change, whether physical – floods, desertification, increased water scarcity and tornadoes – or political: conflict and racist borders. While a tiny elite can fly to and from London City airport, sometimes as a daily commute, this year alone 3,176 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean, trying to reach safety on the shores of Europe.”

    Gee, I means be a real dumbass. I never knew that the Mediterranian is in the “global south”. Is it somewhere near Australia?

  • Chip

    The climate change issue has done one useful thing and that is to separate the cautious critical thinkers from the great mass of gullible humanity that twitches and quivers at every tug of their emotions.

    Every single time I’ve discussed climate with raving lunatics they quickly reveal they know squat about it. Even Canada’s greatest environmentalist- David Suzuki – admitted in Australia that he had no clue what the RSS data set referred to (satellite temps).

    This debate over a very complex and often chaotic subject is being run by utter fools.

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker!) Gray

    Well, Thailover, it’s not that far from Australia! The Chinese name for the country called China translates as ‘Middle-land’, so the seas near them belong to Middle-land, i.e. China! Mediterranian means middle-earthian, so there you go!

  • bobby b

    “This debate over a very complex and often chaotic subject is being run by utter fools.”

    One small quibble:

    The debate is being run by smart, calculating con men.

    It’s being fed to, and eagerly consumed by, utter fools.

  • Runcie Balspune

    She’s right, but for the wrong reasons. Climate change has prevented many non-white countries from developing national power systems that improve quality of life.

  • James Hargrave

    Paul Marks ‘the education system’. The what? A system for inculcating ignorance into the gullible.

  • Frank S

    Ben Pile has an excellent post on this tawdry display of inhumanity and mindlessness by those ‘protestors’ ad their like over at CliScep: https://cliscep.com/2016/09/06/do-black-lives-really-matter-to-greens/

    ‘It is also not clear that decisions about choice of technique have not been swayed by pressure from green campaigning organisations, which routinely put ‘the climate’ before the needs of people. If black lives matter then coal matters. When the final history of environmentalism is written, the influence of green NGOs over the global poor will be read as no less a disgusting intervention than shooting people from fossil-fuel powered helicopters.’

  • Andrew Duffin

    I can never understand why we are so patient with these dolts. People who obstruct runways should just be removed, immediately, to a custody suite somewhere nearby, and they can discuss their grievances with the custody sergeant, and then, the next morning, with the magistrate. There must be dozens of existing statutes that would cover this…

    I’d like to see them try it in Russia, or even France.

  • Rob

    Long jail sentences please. There won’t be any, of course.

  • Stuck-record

    This is rather moving.

    A very angry black man interrupts a liberal media’s circle-jerk and sets them straight on ‘Black Lives Matter’.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rMBhJVr28w

    And you’ll never see it on the TV news.

  • Kevin B

    They should be classed as terrorists and locked up for a long time. Also, those who finance them, (cough Soros cough), should have all their assets frozen and be arrested on charges of financing terrorism.

    Of course this will never happen because if ever anyone opposed to the left’s agenda were to be in a position to turn these sorts of weapons against them, they would be far to principled to do so.

  • Watchman

    In an odd moment (OK, being me, this is a characteristic moment, but for anyone else this is odd), I would like to suggest we extend sympathy to the original black lives matter movement here. It does after all arise from a perception (statistically not particuarly accurate, but certainly locally accurate in some cases) of police racism towards black people in the US, even if it has been hijacked by political drones and violent extremists. It’s roots are people perceiving a problem, even if many of those people look for a problem and hoping it will be the new civil rights movement.

    In the UK however, black lives matter UK appears to be the appropriation of a genuine social movement in the US by the Socialist Workers Party in order to provide a front organisation for more of their inane and undirected protest. You can’t help but feel that the US movement has really lost out here – even their extremists at least have a perception of what their problems are that are more coherent than the UK bunch’s failure to articulate anything approaching a reasonable argument. It seems unfair on the original movement to have this bunch of professional protestors jumping on their bandwagon.

    Still, what this article tells us is that if you are looking for a problem with the way the UK treats people based on their physical appearance, your only choice is to try and claim criminals are unfairly treated (by being deported…) or to try and construct an argument from a wierd collection of figures. If even the Socialist Workers can’t identify anything that appears to be a genuine problem based on racism (apparently London Airport is racist because… well, I am not sure what that idiot was arguing), then we might well have hit a society that is not racist. Excellent.

  • Chris

    Of course when the world was warmer during the Neolithic Subpluvial, the result was a Green Sahara because a warmer world means a wetter world. Global warming means the air has more capacity to hold moisture from the oceans, leading to more rain and less arid climes. Areas that are desert now were a savanna then, and the Sahel was forested because of the extra moisture. Saharan lakes (like Lake Chad) were all bigger, and places that don’t have lakes or rivers now did have lakes then. So while rising global temperatures would be harmful to some areas, it would be beneficial to others. Even now satellite images show that the Sahara is shrinking and more green is showing at its edges.

    The increase in temperature is still below the temperature heights recorded in various parts of the Holocene including the Holocene Climactic Optimum so we are still withing “normal range”.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    What KevinB said.

  • Mike Borgelt

    Saw Ms Wanjiku-Kelbert on the TV news last night. If the cops won’t remove the swampies from the runway pronto, they should just say to the passengers who were being delayed: “There are some swampies blocking the runway, which is why you are being delayed. We’ve got to leave on other business for the next couple of hours”.

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    The Guardian‘s environment editor, John Vidal, chimed in with this article: The Black Lives Matter protesters were right: air pollution is a race issue. Once again, the comments are almost unanimous in their scorn. Many comments came from people worried about climate change and/or sympathetic to the American Black Lives Matter movement who felt that this protest discredited their cause. It’s been an own goal.

  • Vinegar Joe

    Mankind can survive a hot climate a lot easier than a cold climate.

  • Julie near Chicago

    PfP,

    No. The Black Panthers were a street gang, Marxist only for cover, murderers, extortionists, who played politics with the Mayor of Oakland and terrified the Oakland police to the point that they, those in charge of law enforcement, declined to investigate or prosecute many a known killer among them.

    Even some of the Big Noises in the more-or-less conservative Negro community, like Shelby Steele — I believe, but will not swear to it that it was he whome I sow extolling Newton and Malcolm — to this day think Huey Newton was a prince and a swell fellow. He was not: He was a stone-cold killer. Mr. Steele is also a great fan of Malcolm X….

    The best book I know of that deals with the marauding Panthers in the ’60s is David Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son. It was the Panthers’ murder of his friend Betty van Patter that finally forced him to accept the truth. The book is his autobiography from the time of his youth, when his parents were members of the NYC chapter of CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA) up to sometime after he finally “pulled the lever” for Pres. Reagan.

    The writing style is great, and the book is rivetting. And yes, there is testimony from others as well as to the doings of these gangsters.

  • Laird

    What Vinegar Joe said.

  • Watchman, September 7, 2016 at 3:58 pm: “In an odd moment (OK, being me, this is a characteristic moment, but for anyone else this is odd), I would like to suggest we extend sympathy to the original black lives matter.”

    No, we should not. As PhilB (September 6, 2016 at 10:11 pm) said: “If Black lives mattered, especially in the USA, then Black people would stop killing black people on an industrial scale,”

    or rather, then the BLM movement would be concerned about that reality, and aware that the statistics disprove claims that police killing black perps disproportionately.

    Watchman is right that the UK end is a rare real example of “cultural appropriation”.

  • CaptDMO

    OK, I have to check with my UK peeps……
    Is “Wankerati” becoming a meme, implying otherwise clueless trust fund
    babies in DESPERATE need of relevance and attention they DIDN’T get from Da and Mum?

  • Andrew Duffin

    “Wanjiku-Kelbert” ?

    The mind reels with appropriate puns.

  • Watchman

    Niall,

    At the risk of being a bit difficult here, can I note that there is definetly a problem with racism from a small minority of US police forces (in the sense they treat people differently due to their pigment rather than something reasonable like their behaviour or their awful taste in music… I can’t be the only person who wants to ensure anyone playing Abba’s Dancing Queen ‘falls down some stairs’ on the way to a long prison sentence? (it’s harm to others – they might get away with it on headphones…)). I am not sure this is actually linked to deaths but the national statistics for deaths do not exonerate all police forces, just make it clear there is no systematic problem.

    So there is some grievance for people there, which the professional race hustlers of black lives matter exploit with a misuse of statistics (admittedly ones that were only investigated after the movement started – and the guy who did it was surprised by the result (one genuine reason to be sympathetic to them – some of their supporters are still honest enough to realise that the evidence they are investigating says something different from what they expect, but still release it)). But even if there wasn’t, I would still feel sympathy for people who thought they were fighting for equality (whatever they want that to mean) when they have to put up with a bunch of people with fourteen surnames between ten people (nine protestors and a spokesman) trying to hijack their bandwagon with the world’s least intellectually rigourous justification.

  • PeterT

    If you believe that you are part of a collective, and you are thick, it would be natural to suppose that somebody else has thought things through properly for you. You might not be thick, but there are still people out there smarter than you, so again you have an excuse not to do your own thinking. And of course, this can be exploited by those with ulterior motives.

  • Watchman (September 8, 2016 at 3:38 pm) given the clear overall statistics, if one statte or city police force were in fact disproportionately killing blacks, it would necessarily follow that another must be as disproportionately not killing them, through insufficiently resisting black crime and/or disproportionately killing non-black criminals.

    This is of course possible. For example, Rahm Emanuel’s people in Chicago could be disproportionately killing blacks (and the same in Detroit and similar places), while areas with less PC-protected leaders are disproportionately failing to resist black perps. However that would only be even more reason to have even less sympathy with “the original black lives matter” movement. (Watchman, September 7, 2016 at 3:58 pm.)

    More often IMHO, individual policemen and individual incidents vary. The incidents that started BLM (Zimmerman, Wilson) were blatant frauds and they clearly have a hard time getting enough incidents where it looks like there is any case to answer to make up half their total, so either there is not much of a problem anywhere or the case-to-answer events disproportionately occur in areas led by the PC-connected, so are disproportionately ignored relative to the fraudulent cases.

    Meanwhile, as regards the original post, s BLM get disproportionate airtime, so they are well placed to distance themselves from their UK friends, should they so wish. No need to waste any sympathy on them for that.

  • bobby b

    I, living in Minnesota, USA, am a card-carrying member of Minnesotans For Global Warming.

    I burn plastic just for the hydrocarbons that can be released. I use plastic bags from the grocery. I actively encourage cows to fart. (Don’t ask.)

    I’m tired of living December to February at -20f. That’s fifty degrees colder than what it takes to make ice. Glenfiddich is better warm.

    Why is my life so much less important than tossers who built their huts 1″ above sea level?

  • gongcult

    If someone were to find the data on CO2 emissions and overall pollution and if say the majority came from the 3rd World, not the Industrial West would this be racist to say the”so called contributors to the majority of global warming” are non-European peoples of the world ?

  • The Wobbly Guy

    The modern globalist elite view is as follows:

    All problems are caused by climate change.

    All problems can be solved with immigration.

    If you do not accept the above statements, you are a science denier and a racist, and you must shut up.