I asked a similar question a week ago. It emanated out of the yellow vest protests of western Canada. Many of these right wing protesters espoused positions that were pro-oil and pipelines, an anti-immigration with Islamophobic overtones. To somewhat digress, a recent anti-mask rally in Saskatchewan was organized by a known white supremacist. Research is needed to deconstruct these strange juxtapositions between anti-science beliefs and overt racism.

I asked a similar question a week ago. It emanated out of the yellow vest protests of western Canada. Many of these right wing protesters espoused positions that were pro-oil and pipelines, an anti-immigration with Islamophobic overtones. To somewhat digress, a recent anti-mask rally in Saskatchewan was organized by a known white supremacist. Research is needed to deconstruct these strange juxtapositions between anti-science beliefs and overt racism.

Thanks Paul Orlowski for your comment. Nice to see you here. Yes, I do agree with you that we need to decolonize both we as researchers and our research. A few years ago, I wrote an article on this issue.

Datta, R. (2017). Decolonizing both research and researcher, and its effectiveness in Indigenous research. Research Ethics. (1-24), http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1747016117733296

The question could be better posed if it related climate change activism to ideological and political agendas. The reference to racism alludes to a possibly non-existent relationship and in the best case narrows the subject unnecessarily.

Thanks Michael Sidiropoulos for your comment. Climate change and systemic racism are interconnected for a long; however, many researchers overlooked this for a long. We, as a researcher, need to decolonize both the ways we see climate change and our research on climate change. Researchers including in ecology, geology and paleontology, have urged decision-makers to confront racism in the field of climate change solutions. Significantly, the climate change crisis is a structural, historical, and ongoing high-risk challenge for many Indigenous, new immigrant, and refugee people in Canada The following reading may be helpful on this

Anna Kaijser & Annica Kronsell (2014) Climate change through the lens of intersectionality, Environmental Politics, 23:3, 417-433, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2013.835203

Michael Méndez, Genevieve Flores-Haro, Lucas Zucker, (2020). The (in)visible victims of disaster: Understanding the vulnerability of undocumented Latino/a and indigenous immigrants, Geoforum, Volume 116, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.07.007.

Julie Koppel Maldonado, Rajul E. Pandya, and Benedict J. Colombi, “Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the United States: Impacts, Experiences, and Actions,” Climatic Change 120, no. 3(2013).

Thank you, Ranjan Datta, for the citations. I will find them. In the meantime, my thinking on the intersectionality between white supremacy and climate science deniers has led me to hypothesize that it has to with an individual's 'identity'. And yes, as Michael Sidiropoulos suggests, one's political ideology is at the root of identity in this context. Farther right conservatives have adopted anti-science stances to other positions around race (and bigotry in general), guns (and war in general), and tax avoidance (and selfishness in general). One can see a new connection in the US today with selfishness around opposition toward single-payer healthcare and now wearing a mask to stop the spread of the coronavirus. As has been documented in the mainstream media, people of colour are suffering to. greater degree from COVID-19. A newer conservative identity is becoming entrenched in the US body politic.

Thanks Paul Orlowski. In many cases, White supremacy and climate science deniers are deeply interconnected with neo-liberal ideology. In fact, in many cases, they both (White supremacy and climate science deniers) are the same, player of the neo-liberal era. They both are far from Thomas Kuhn's definition of science. They control all powers and maintain these uneven and racist systems. I am wondering, how can we free ourselves from these unequal systems? Is there any light for hopes?

Dear Ranjan, dear all

thanks for starting this discussion. I agree that we need more thorough research of the connection between attitudes towards climate change, ideology and right-wing positions. I just explored the connection between climate change deniers (in the US). I'd argue that the persistence of climate change denial among conservatives/hard right in the US stems from anti-liberal/anti-intellectual sentiment but also expresses an unwillingness to accept responsibility for the climate change related problems of "underserving" people (= the poor and, for instance, people in the global south).

In case your interested, the article is publishes open access:

Ruser, A. (2020) A Mission for MARS: The Success of Climate Change Sceptic Rhetoric in the US. Res Rhetorica 7(2): 48-63

https://resrhetorica.com/index.php/RR/article/view/378

Will surely follow this discussion

Best wishes and take care

Alex