A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #43 - Climate Change Deniers - Carmine Valente (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

"Humanity's developments are most closely intertwined with the 
surrounding nature. A secret harmony is established between the land and 
the peoples it nourishes; when reckless societies dare to tamper with 
what defines the beauty of their territory, they always end up 
regretting it. Where the soil has been defaced, where all poetry has 
vanished from the landscape, imagination has died out, the mind has 
become impoverished, and routine and servility have taken hold of the 
soul, leading it to torpor and death. Among the principal causes of the 
decline of so many successive civilizations, the brutal violence with 
which most nations have treated the nourishing Earth must be placed 
first."[1]
The geographer and anarchist Élisée Reclus, in his 1866 essay "Du 
sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes," reprinted in the 
aforementioned text, already gave us an example of that "sentiment of 
nature" that would characterize all of his mature geographical work. As 
a careful observer of the land and landscapes that surrounded him, which 
he had observed throughout his work as a geographer, he was not unaware 
of the destructive work that man was wreaking on both agriculture and 
nascent industrialization. Reclus's reflections are essentially based on 
his empirical observations, but science had even earlier identified 
certain mechanisms that demonstrated how human action affected the 
climate and, consequently, the land.
As early as the early nineteenth century-in 1822 to be exact-Jean 
Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) was the first to discuss the 
"greenhouse effect." Although he didn't foresee its consequences for 
climate, he hypothesized that energy from the Sun, reflected skyward by 
the oceans, was trapped by water vapor and other gases in our planet's 
atmosphere.
It was Eunice Newton Foote, at a time when women were often excluded 
from academia and science, who paved the way for modern climate science.
Foote was the first scientist to test the effect of sunlight's heating 
on various gases and theorized that changing the proportion of carbon 
dioxide in the atmosphere would alter its temperature. She presented 
this research in her article, "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the 
Sun's Rays," at the 1856 conference of the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science. Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian 
Institution presented the research, as social norms of the time 
prevented women from presenting papers before the association. Joseph 
Henry, reflecting the changing times, including the issue of rights, 
introduced the research findings by stating: "Science belongs to no 
country and no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful 
and the useful, but the true."[2]
The importance of Eunice Newton Foote's discovery lies in the fact that, 
as early as the 19th century, a female scientist had identified the 
crucial role of CO2 in warming the atmosphere. This insight is the basis 
of contemporary climate science and our current concerns about climate 
change.
Foote's discovery was later confirmed, again in the 19th century, by the 
Irishman John Tyndall and the Swedes Svante Arrhenius and Nils Ekholm.
John Tyndall is considered the "father" of climate science and 
discovered and explained the greenhouse effect, demonstrating that gases 
in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, absorb 
infrared radiation (heat). His 1859 discoveries paved the way for 
subsequent research, particularly that of Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 
developed a model to calculate the impact of CO2 on global temperatures.
Today, the scientific consensus remains nearly unanimous: over 99% of 
scientists agree that global warming is caused by human activity.[3]
There is none so blind as he who will not see.
This proverb, originating in the Gospel of John, effectively summarizes 
the position of those in power who deny, against all scientific 
evidence, that the climate crisis is a consequence of global warming. 
170 years after Eunice Newton Foote performed simple experiments with 
flasks and sunlight, demonstrating that carbon dioxide trapped more heat 
than the normal atmosphere, we are witnessing delusional declarations 
from those who hold the fate of humanity in their hands.
During his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 
September 2025, US President Donald Trump made a series of statements 
regarding climate change. In front of approximately 190 representatives 
of countries from around the world, Trump called global warming "the 
greatest scam ever perpetrated in the world."
Earlier, in 2012, he tweeted that the Chinese invented "the concept of 
global warming" because they believed it would somehow harm US industry. 
In late 2015, he called global warming a "hoax."[4]
Despite the obvious charade of these claims, the campaign against any 
green approach went so far as to coin the phrase "clean, beautiful 
coal," making it a trademark of his political rhetoric to promote the 
American mining industry, claiming that new technologies would make coal 
a green energy source. Faced with such arrogance and ignorance, the 
response of Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University, is 
exemplary. "Coal kills millions of people every year. The American 
president can tell you that coal is clean, but there are people-mothers, 
fathers, sons, and daughters-who will die for this lie."
The natural conclusion of these ravings came on January 20, 2025, when 
US President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders calling 
for the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate 
change.
The US president, in this denialist campaign, is in good company: 
populist leaders and billionaire entrepreneurs echo him, from Europe's 
Orbán and Salvini, to Latin America's Milei in Argentina and Bolsonaro, 
now out of the picture, in Brazil, with the support of entrepreneurs who 
exploit climate denialism to protect industrial assets tied to fossil fuels.
The Consequences of Climate Change
In October 2025, before COP30, Bill Gates entered the debate, earning 
Trump's applause: "We just won the war against the climate change hoax. 
Bill Gates finally admitted he was completely wrong about this," he 
added, "It took courage to do that, and for that we are all grateful."
But what did Bill Gates say that was so important?
The Microsoft founder stated that climate change, although it has 
serious consequences, "will not lead to the end of humanity." Gates 
added that, although climate change will have "severe consequences, 
people will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the 
foreseeable future." He then argued that addressing disease and poverty 
globally would help prepare vulnerable populations for a changing 
climate, rather than raising warnings of global catastrophe.[5]
Bill Gates' approach to climate change reflects the vision of the 
economic and financial elites who govern the world and outlines a path 
that, to some extent, is already being realized today. Armageddon, the 
final apocalypse, that many climate catastrophists predict, is not 
actually around the corner: like many processes, it will be accompanied 
by a series of small and large disasters, and we are already witnessing 
this in many parts of the world in recent years. What is certain will be 
the different impacts that climate change will have on different 
territories.
Where poverty is a constitutive trait of communities, natural 
forces-water, seas, and rivers; wind; heat-will destroy landscapes, 
sweep away homes and places of production, and obliterate cultures; 
where wealth is concentrated, barriers will be erected, people will 
build on water, purify the air, and people will look to space with the 
idea of colonizing other hypothetical planets in mind. A blind faith in 
technological possibilities that in the short term seems and will seem 
sufficient to counter ecological disasters, accompanied by a deep-rooted 
class egoism that seeks to conceal the obvious signs of a process 
rapidly approaching the point of no return.
In the beating heart of capital, in the financial cities of London, New 
York, Singapore, Paris, and Milan, what is happening in Niscemi, and in 
the many Niscemis around the world, is little more than a blip, the 
inevitable and natural consequence of the elements. All this, while not 
impacting the mechanisms of exploitation and accumulation, will not halt 
the process; environmental contradictions will increase, and the 
consequences will increasingly be transversal, crossing continents, 
territories, and cities, involving social classes and classes.

Perspectives on Anticapitalist Struggle

Many in the left-wing political debate argue that ecological issues, 
like those of peace, are unsuitable for creating strong anticapitalist 
forces. This limitation lies precisely in their universality, which 
prevents them from establishing themselves as social forces, lacking a 
defined social identity. This point of view, if taken schematically, 
fails to grasp the changing reality-namely, the acceleration of climate 
change-and the new militant subjectivities that these contradictions 
have generated, which are not unrelated to radical protest practices and 
horizontal and essentially libertarian forms of organization.
Perhaps speaking of an "environmental proletariat," as Japanese 
environmentalist philosopher Kohei Saito does, citing Anglo-Saxon 
authors[6], may seem excessive, but undoubtedly the intertwining of 
environmental protection, opposition to war, and economic struggle 
represents the ideal terrain for building a vast and deep-rooted 
movement that can concretely counter the mad rush toward increasingly 
widespread and devastating war scenarios and the environmental disaster 
that war strongly accelerates.
Notes
[1]Élisée Reclus, Nature and Society: Writings in Subversive Geography, 
Elèuthera, Milan, 1999, p. 175.
[2]Kyla Mandel, "This woman fundamentally changed climate science - and 
you've probably never heard of her," «ThinkProgress», 18/05/2018. 
(https://archive.thinkprogress.org/female-climate-scientist-eunice-foote-finally-honored-for-her-contributions-162-years-later-21b3cf08c70b).
[3]Scientific consensus, «IPCC Focal Point for Italy», 
(https://ipccitalia.cmcc.it/consenso-scientifico).
[4]Anthony Zurcher, Does Trump still think it's all a hoax?, «BBC», 
02/06/2017, (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40128034).
[5]Bill Gates: "Climate change will not make us extinct," «Prometeo 
360», 29/10/2025, 
(https://prometeo.adnkronos.com/green-economy/bill-gates-cambiamento-climatico-non-fara-estinguere-umanita-strategia-green-premium).
[6]John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York, The Ecological Rift: 
Capitalism's War on the Earth, Monthly Review Press, New York, NY (US), 
2010.

https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en