The right-wing solution to environmental problems: more borders and exclusion. As the impacts of human-induced climate change become harder and harder to ignore, some on the right have moved away from denying it exists and toward a new strategy: blaming immigrants for contributing to the problem. (…) The lawsuit alleges that immigrants “drive cars, purchase goods, and use public parks and other facilities. Their actions also directly result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which directly affects air quality.” Some advocates are worried that the Arizona case, which uses climate change as a weapon against immigrants, communities of color, and poor people, could become a more common means of attack for the right.
This idea has deep roots in right-wing environmentalism. But it also has disturbing echoes of a far-right ideology known as “ecofascism.” Ecofascism refers to “groups and ideologies that offer authoritarian, hierarchical, and racist analyses and solutions to environmental problems,” Blair Taylor, program director at the Institute for Social Ecology, told me. The solution to those problems, ecofascists believe, is “the same as the right’s answers to many other issues: more walls, more borders, more exclusion, and more justification of hierarchy and elite rule,” said Taylor, author of “Alt-Right Ecology: Ecofascism and far-right environmentalism in the United States.” Two mass shootings brought ecofascism into the mainstream. In March 2019, an assailant targeted two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, leaving more than 50 Muslim worshippers dead and at least another 50 injured. The shooter left behind a nearly 80-page manifesto detailing a white nationalist ideology and blaming immigrants and overpopulation for environmental problems. Then in August of that year, a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, left 23 dead. The shooter told reporters that he intentionally targeted Hispanics in the attack and made a statement blaming them for plastic and water pollution.
via vox.com: The far right is weaponizing climate change to argue against immigration