Turns climate – under the colonial and biopolitical state, rhetoric of climate change urgency increases exploitation of marginalized people, cements colonialism and capitalism, and makes solving warming impossible.

In this paper, we have highlighted the link between climate change, colonialism, and capitalism, and the ways that emergency politics have been used by the settler-colonial nation state to consolidate itself. If our goal is climate justice, and not merely climate mitigation and adaptation that leaves existing inequities intact, emergency politics has little to offer. We have noted that so far, climate emergency declarations are largely ineffective in achieving their stated goals, but this is not our primary concern— if they were effective, we would be even more concerned about the implications of their use. As discussed in section “Emergency politics in the climate movement”, there yet remains some distance between climate emergency declarations and the kinds of authoritarian politics often justified by emergency politics, and we hope this paper serves as a timely caution. For, while we cannot make firm predictions, there are troubling precedents where systems established to respond to environmental disasters are used to sustain the oppression of marginalised people. For instance, the U.S. Emergency Management Assistance Compact was established to support disaster response and relief116; its powers have been used against Black and Indigenous movements for justice, notably those protesting the police after the death in custody of Freddie Gray, and the water protectors at Standing Rock117.

By learning from histories of emergency politics as practiced in the settler colony and from long-standing critiques of Indigenous scholars globally, we argue that climate emergency politics may actively stymie our attempts to create climate just futures. Discourses and practices of emergency politics tend to reinforce existing modes of governing and knowing, increase the use of authoritarian, militaristic, and carceral measures, reduce opportunities for participatory and accountable decision-making, and reinscribe exploitative settler colonial capitalism as the ‘status quo’ to which we seek to return. We note that the push for climate emergency declarations is generally coming from more liberal, progressive, even left-wing groups, who may well also hold critiques of the state and desire more equitable modes of governing and distributing benefits and harms. And yet, in their (our!) legitimate frustration, desperation, and fear, we often find ourselves co-opted into a crisis politics that obfuscates and reproduces colonial power and capitalist hegemony.

Because emergency politics is increasingly prevalent62, it is a readily available and familiar rationality, discourse, politics, for social movements to reach for. And yet, it is an approach that is likely to leave the political economies that created climate change largely untouched in efforts to address it. Furthermore, climate emergency politics is readily open to co-option by ecofascist movements, who can use (and are already using) the climate emergency to justify militarised borders, eugenics, massacres, and genocide. Fascist movements in the 1930s and 1940s used ‘crisis’ to sacralise the nation state, and to justify treating certain populations as sacrificial118. We have already seen ecofascist and Malthusian concerns in the manifestos of mass murderers, like the Christchurch and El Paso shooters119,120. Environmentalism is not inherently progressive or emancipatory. So, while climate emergency politics may have emerged from progressive environmental movements, it is a politics readily available for co-option by the settler colonial state, and by ecofascists.

In developing this critique of climate emergency declarations, we encourage those who support climate justice to direct their energies elsewhere. We must attend to the ways crises and emergencies are used strategically to serve the existing, inequitable order62. We must attend to Whyte’s warning that, “people who perpetuate colonialism often imagine that their wrongful actions are defensible because they are responding to some crisis. They assume that to respond to a crisis, it is possible to suspend certain concerns about justice and morality”28. We must not allow climate action to be reduced to emissions reductions, ignoring all other facets of climate and environmental injustice. And we must actively oppose climate colonialism, climate securitisation, and the ways alt-right and fascistic movements leverage climate change for their destructive ends.

Scarry54 warns, “If it is perilous to cede our collective political responsibilities to any single authority under normal peacetime conditions, it is far more perilous to do so when vast injuries to the earth’s people, and to the earth itself, are at stake”. To take collective responsibilities in ways consistent with climate justice, enacting what Táíwò calls collaborative climate politics121, requires foregrounding Indigenous self-governance and self-determination as “a necessary political corrective”45. The dystopian eco-fascism of the present conjuncture is a direct descendent of the imperial occupations and colonial regimes that persist into the present. The tools and strategies required to challenge these dynamics therefore already exist, theorised, held, and practiced by First Nations Peoples and all those organising for emancipation from capitalist colonial oppression. As Winzer1 puts it: “the opportunity this crisis presents (is) to end these toxic, dysfunctional and imbalanced relationships once and for all”. Not an emergency response, but a structural transformation.