T. J. Demos

Trump’s infamous attacks on the term “climate”—tainted by its association with “climate change,” which he dismisses as a “hoax,” “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” by so-called “prophets of doom”—are part of a broader assault on climate knowledge and action. This includes efforts to purge language from federal agencies, attacks on scientific research, the cancellation of federal grants, authoritarian repression of dissent, and so on. Together, these measures have intensified the political and legal threats facing climate justice movements and their advocates.

What is so threatening here, why does it matter? What does its banning reveal?

It is the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring—supported by the overwhelming majority of independent global research—that most threatens fossil capitalism, of which Trumpism is an extreme political expression. We now know that to stop climate change we urgently require system change, including the end of capitalism as a world-destroying economic structure. “For our Earth and relatives to live, capitalism and colonialism must die,” rightfully declares The Red Nation.¹ This is why the administration has pursued every means available—propaganda, disinformation, misrepresentation, lawfare, the politicization of funding bodies, attacks on independent universities and scientific institutions, brutal policing, and the criminalization of dissent—to suppress not only climate action but even the very language of climate itself.

“Climate,” we know, refers to long-term regional weather patterns, while “climate change” describes shifts in these patterns—historically driven by natural forces such as solar variation, continental drift, ocean circulation, and volcanism, but, since the late nineteenth century, dominated by anthropogenic global warming caused primarily by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and industrial activity.²

Yet there is a deeper transformation underway: Capitalism has long been producing its own destructive climate—a social and political atmosphere of ecological crisis, environmental violence, profound inequality, and authoritarian reaction. As investigative journalist Christian Parenti argues in Tropic of Chaos (2011), the worst constitutes “climate fascism”: the militarization and political hardening of wealthy states—such as the contemporary US—in response to climate disruption, expressed through fortified borders, global counterinsurgency, and the abandonment of vulnerable populations in the Global South.³ A similar dynamic appears in Andreas Malm’s more recent concept of “fossil fascism,” describing the growing alliance between far-right nationalisms (often white supremacist) and fossil fuel interests posed against the perceived threats of climate science and racialized migration.⁴

While the Trump administration has elevated corruption, contempt for the rule of law, and neo-imperial militarism to unprecedented levels—from its support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, to its own outlaw aggressions in Venezuela and Iran—the underlying dynamics are hardly new. As the Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte notes, for Indigenous peoples, climate breakdown is not an unprecedented crisis but the latest intensification of centuries-long processes of colonial violence, including environmental devastation, forced displacement, and the systematic disruption of social and ecological relations.⁵ Indeed, for the Chalon Ohlone and Hispanic artist Christine Howard Sandoval, “genocide is climate change,” as she states in her video Niniwas—to belong here (2022). Sandoval confronts the colonial erasure of Indigenous histories embedded in California’s mission system, itself an outgrowth of the sixteenth-century colonization of the Americas, a process many scholars identify with the onset of the Anthropocene.⁶ The conquest precipitated the mass death of an estimated fifty-six million Indigenous people, leading to widespread reforestation and a measurable decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

From a related perspective rooted in radical Black thought, Christina Sharpe describes “climates of anti-Blackness” that persist “in the wake” of transatlantic slavery and its enduring regimes of racial violence.⁷ The violent abduction of Africans, their forced transport into unfamiliar environments, the rupture of kinship networks, and the imposition of enslaved labor can also be understood as an early form of modern “climate change”: the coercive remaking of ecological, social, and embodied worlds through racial capitalism. Quoting Sharpe on how “antiblackness is pervasive as climate,” the artist Imani Jacqueline Brown notes, “the war against Blackness, begun 500 years ago, is the event horizon of planetary extinction.”⁸

These views—which insist on an intersectionalist understanding of climate, biogeophysical as much as sociopolitical—resonate with early accounts of extractivist racial capitalism. As Marx observed early on: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”⁹

The same violent, extractivist logic structures the present: in the persecution and deportation of migrants; the expansion of tax-funded detention regimes operated by private prison corporations such as GEO Group and CoreCivic; the dismantling of the social state and public resources; and the rise of billionaire-controlled AI systems and resource-intensive hyperscale data centers that deepen social inequality, erode organized labor, accelerate ecological destruction, and intensify capital accumulation.

This is climate fascism, including the revival of a new Red Scare that weaponizes the judiciary to criminalize climate activists and environmental defenders as “domestic terrorists.” These strategies serve to obscure the structural roots of the climate crisis, deflecting attention from the extractive logics of capitalist accumulation and the authoritarian systems that sustain them.¹⁰

Given this, it is unsurprising that Trump seeks to suppress even the language of “climate”—despite the fact that a majority of people reject his denialist propaganda—because the term opens onto a broader structural critique of racial colonial capitalism and its sacrifice of planetary life for the short-term accumulation of wealth by a ruling elite. As commentators such as Naomi Klein and eco-Marxist theorists like John Bellamy Foster argue, capitalism—of which Trumpism represents an extreme acceleration—is inseparable from climate change: it transforms the world into a reservoir of extractable resources, exploitable labor, and disposable populations, while systematically undermining the ecological and social conditions necessary for life to flourish.

Yet this trajectory is neither inevitable nor universal. Other climates are possible, ways of organizing collective life beyond capitalism—despite authoritarian efforts to foreclose these alternative futures.

There are numerous roadmaps toward alternative horizons of collective well-being, ecological sustainability, and peaceful coexistence, many grounded in anticapitalist ecosocialist principles. These include the Green New Deal, which advances a worker-centered transition to clean energy and quality jobs; the decolonial Red Deal, which extends this framework toward abolitionist horizons by challenging the prison- and military-industrial complexes and systems of policing while affirming commitments to community safety, universal housing, education, and healthcare; and the Pacto Ecosocial e Intercultural del Sur (Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South), which advances a post-extractivist vision grounded in climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and ecological and social transformation beyond perpetual economic growth. To these can be added the many cultural projects—in the visual arts, music, theater, and beyond—that cultivate the imaginative horizons of climate justice, multispecies flourishing, and ecosocialist futures.

Achieving these aims—moving toward a climate of life rather than capitalism’s climate of death—will require a transformation of historic proportions. It demands the collective power of majoritarian social movements, organized labor, and international solidarity: nothing less than climate change as class war.¹¹ Without such a transformation, we face the continued expansion of misery, ecological destruction, and the enduring rule of racial colonial capitalism.

Notes