the growth of climate reaction

[alyaza]

Alyaza Birze (January 19)

Today’s [proletarian] reactionaries are increasingly ethno-nationalist and, rather than acknowledge the fires they see with their own eyes, will instead dial up the violence.

Since they are both conservative, the bourgeois capitalist denialist ISA and the proletarian reactionaries ally on the right. For example, when the Koch brothers funded the Tea Party movement after the election of Obama, they took advantage of anti-Black racism to astroturf an apparatus conducive to deregulation. In what Ernesto Laclau called a “chain of equivalences,” deregulation stitched itself to ethno-nationalism.
—Tad DeLay, Future of Denial

i promise i'm not always bad news; unfortunately many of the things i take an interest in will be significantly affected by the change in administration, and there's a lot i want to say about that. one of those things is climate change: already it has become obvious that the second-Trump-term backlash to climate change mitigation is going to be significantly stronger than anything we experienced in his first term.

i don't say this particularly lightly. you may remember my essay "Just How Bad The Antifa Wildfire Panic Got In Rural Oregon in 2020" which recounted some of the collective psychosis that gripped the American right during 2020 (a psychosis which has largely been memoryholed). things have been bad in this space for years now, and it is evident that what Tad DeLay characterizes as the "proletarian reactionary" response to climate change has developed into a fever that will not recede easily. but the highly-visible Oregon roadblocks of 2020 were in many ways just the first great culmination of climate change, widespread anti-government paranoia, and the Obama-era and Trump-era revitalization of the far-right. the militia movement has been aggrieved and preparing for domestic crisis since Waco, and was given second wind by Obama's presidency. Oath Keeper "community preparedness teams" appeared in Ferguson during the 2014-15 civil rights protests there and deployed themselves in Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico during the disastrous 2018 hurricane season. given the confluence of absolute fucking disasters that occurred in 2020, it is not particularly surprising that 2020 was a landmark year for climate reactionaries.

what might be surprising though is how the stories of the proletarian reactionary militia groups have continued at an alarming pace. it is likely you are familiar with Kyle Rittenhouse (who fashioned himself as something of a militia teenager) and the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer because those are not climate related and are conventionally ideological for militia groups. but you probably are not familiar with the Oath Keepers trying to render disaster aid during tornado outbreaks in 2021; or the Echo Company militia feeding people and attempting to recruit among those displaced from the 2022 Oak Fire; or the efforts by the Oath Keepers and their sympathizers, after January 6th, to reinvent themselves (or at least complicate their image) as a sort of accessory to FEMA and disaster management. this is new behavior, and behavior that has allowed militia groups to become an increasingly normalized feature of disasters. these groups now launder political reaction through the rhetoric of private community service,¹ a pivot that is handsomely paying off. some states like Idaho have outright repealed their prohibition on such militia groups. but even places like Nassau County, New York—effectively suburban New York City—are finding this manifestation of reactionary politics quite appealing. in March of last year, Prism reported on Nassau County's Republicans, and their effort to organize the county's own disaster militia.

militia groups are only one half of the backlash, though—and the second is actually the part i'm particularly worried about.

the proletarian reactionary as a surrogate for the bourgeois capitalist

the other half of the backlash consists of proletarian reactionaries in state legislatures acting out the interests of DeLay's "bourgeois capitalists" (as opposed to those capitalists taking initiative themselves). perhaps because it is being led by proletarians and not by fossil fuel executives, this reaction seems uninterested in the usual deregulatory schemes and is instead prepared to settle fossil fuel hegemony by force and state mandate.

Oklahoma: ground zero of fossil fascism

ground zero for this phenomenon is Oklahoma, as helpfully described by Heatmap's Jael Holtzman. although stereotypically associated with coal and gas, the state now produces nearly half of its energy from renewable energy. this green energy revolution has been so inarguably great for Oklahoma that even its terrible Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, frequently flexes the state's renewable energy credibility and thinks the free market should decide its energy mix—an implicitly pro-renewable position cloaked in conservative rhetoric. to this point, Oklahoma has actually been a remarkable success story for renewables and how they can thrive in a very conservative state. under the surface, however, an extremely grim revolution is brewing: one that seeks the ban of all green energy in the state.

to be clear, Oklahoma is not the only place where backlash to renewables is occurring. around 15% of US counties have restrictions or outright bans on such developments, most of which have been passed in the last 15 years. it is effectively impossible to build wind turbines in several states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Vermont, and Connecticut; solar bans have not yet been taken up by an entire state but are a growing problem in the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Mid-Atlantic areas.

but what distinguishes Oklahoma's experience is the character of the backlash to renewables and the totality of the demand. when you look at Tennesseee and Vermont's functional bans, for example, these rested on concerns like property values and noise pollution—classic NIMBYism, in other words. Tennessee's governor at the time, Bill Haslam, explicitly opposed a total ban on wind projects in the state; certainly Vermont, one of America's most liberal states, has no hang-ups about green energy. in Oklahoma the character of the backlash is explicitly fossil fascist—that is, motivated by reverence for oil and gas and ideologically opposed to any alternative which threatens these. to the extent that NIMBY-like concerns do exist, they are recognized only insofar as they advance this fossil fascism.

Jim Shaw, a newly-elected politician who successfully primaried the chair of the Appropriations and Budget Committee in part by running on a statewide wind moratorium, makes this fossil fascism quite explicit. Shaw believes that a "taxpayer-subsidized 'green energy' agenda" is a "huge land grab is destroying our agriculture and ranching communities, our overall way of life and working to eradicate the oil and gas industry." in an interview with Breitbart, he explicitly argues that green energy would be the death of Oklahoma. there is no hiding behind aesthetics, or noise, or setbacks—and a significant of his contemporaries are clearly in the same headspace. on January 9th, he appeared with numerous other legislators, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, and Education Secretary Ryan Walters at a "Stop the Green" rally demanding Governor Stitt pass an "Executive Order to stop the wind turbines, solar, and other “green” energy agendas from destroying Oklahoma!" this desired Executive Order is unlikely happen for reasons already stated—Stitt is effectively pro-renewable—but in many ways it is also a diversion. from my perspective the real point of the rally was to demonstrate how widely fossil fascism has penetrated in Oklahoma, and to scare other legislator into compliance.

the organization behind the rally, the Freedom Brigades, seems to confirm this assumption; in an interview with Holtzman, its founder Charity Linch stated "I don’t believe that [pro-renewable Republicanism is] going to continue in Oklahoma. If [other Republicans] haven’t figured it out yet, they will very soon." indeed the Freedom Brigades have quickly become a vanguard against green energy projects in Oklahoma—and that they have the Attorney General on their side is not trivial. (Drummond, it should be noted, has fought extensively to instate a law that would prevent Oklahoma from investing in companies that boycott or divest from the oil and gas industry; he is also now running for governor in 2026.) this is to say nothing of Freedom Brigades' several elected officials, of which Jim Shaw is just one. Representatives Tim Turner and Neil Hays (both attendees of the organization's January 9th rally) are just as oppositional as Shaw is to green energy, and now they have a body count to show for it. just days ago they killed a wind farm project in their region, apparently with the backing of House Speaker Kyle Hilbert no less. Turner's words at the rally—“It’s time to let the outsiders know, we will protect our quality of life in Oklahoma. Time to get back to oil and gas—drill baby drill!”—seem disturbingly close to a promise for what is to come in parts of America whose economies are heavily reliant on fossil fuel revenue: compliance by force.

Wyoming: the farcical conclusion

and the logical conclusion of this "what is to come" is not something we must idly speculate about either. Wyoming, another state heavily reliant on fossil fuels, once saw its politics moderated by an interesting sort of old-guard frontier libertarianism. its current governor, Mark Gordon, comes from this wing of the party and is comparatively moderate.² but in the Trump era the state as a whole has simply careened to the right behind an ascendant, far-right Freedom Caucus. their vicious efforts in the 2022 elections saw them gain an ally in Secretary of State Chuck Gray, and in the 2024 elections the Caucus took a majority in the state House of Representatives and scalped numerous leaders of the legislature. that majority is now seeking to completely reshape an already conservative state.

given its significance to the state, the fossil fuel industry is not exempt from that reshaping—and in this area the Wyoming Freedom Caucus can best be described as accelerationist. nowhere is this more evident than with the ‘Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again’ proposal, a just-introduced bill by Freedom Caucus ally Cheri Steinmetz and Freedom Caucus Chairman Emeritus John Bear that earnestly argues "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and is a beneficial substance" and would make it unlawful to enact any sort of carbon reduction measures in Wyoming. to say this is an expression of fossil fascism and a move to benefit the bourgeois capitalists is obvious. Steinmetz is blatantly laundering fossil fuel corporation talking points when she speaks of carbon mitigation measures bearing "high economic costs and questionable environmental benefits, and clearly negative effects on our people and our industries." she's even doing so when she speaks of people "vilifying this essential gas"—points that come from the George C. Marshall Institute and its successor in the CO₂ Coalition, at least one of which has been funded by Exxon Mobil and both of which are allies of the American Petroleum Institute.

but that's to be expected. really it is the penetration of these extreme beliefs which is remarkable, just as in Oklahoma. in ordinary circumstances this bill could be written off as posturing or attention seeking—but, in Wyoming's legislature, its only impediment is whether the Freedom Caucus will take it up or not. in my mind that is a very real question. multiple Freedom Caucus members such as Representatives Christopher Knapp and Scott Heiner—who have argued Wyoming should maximize fossil fuel production and minimize any carbon sequestration—seem to agree with Steinmetz. and when Steinmetz brought the CO₂ Coalition to the legislature last year, multiple Senators attended. fossil fascism has many takers in Wyoming.

if there's any good news, it's that Mark Gordon would probably veto this bill if it reached his desk. it would certainly be easy to justify: even constrained to its own internal logic the bill would be a disaster for Wyoming and the independence the Freedom Caucus claims to want. but Gordon will be termed out in 2026,³ and it seems very unlikely that his successor will be comparatively moderate like he is. will the interests of fossil fuel companies in Wyoming be lessened by then? will the Freedom Caucus in Wyoming be lesser in influence by then? the chances of a fossil fascist state government in Wyoming seem alarmingly plausible before the end of the decade. and mind you, i have not touched on the other canards of fossil fascism. racism and immigration fearmongering are just one constant—the hardliners in Wyoming want to bring the boot down on "illegals" and the indigenous. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond is already promising to "DEPORT illegal immigrants" as Governor and has called on Donald Trump to immediately begin rounding up anyone with a deportation order. a genuinely fossil fascist government, even with the constrained powers of a U.S. state, would be capable of enacting a great deal of localized harm—particularly if it began to deputize and normalize the militia groups who have become increasingly common in disaster areas.

a more optimistic conclusion

fortunately, the nationwide context remains much better. it's hard to make of what a second Trump administration will do for militia groups, but much of America's existing climate progress and green infrastructure will be hard to dismantle. even in the worst case scenario right now, the reaction is also limited in geographical extent. most states are still making state-level progress on climate change because it's good business and creates good, high-paying jobs. almost $100 billion in grants from the Inflation Reduction Act are effectively future-proofed (and Republicans are divided on the tax credits it passed, making it much harder to repeal those). believe it or not, federal initiatives like the Climate Corps are also surprisingly insulated from the next few years because they didn’t employ people directly (an issue-turned-benefit, you could say). markets, of course, still quite like renewable energy over most fossil fuels and are not likely to change their minds because wind turbines make certain Republicans mad. finally, America is just one country even if it is a very large contributor to climate change. it would take monumental backsliding here to offset everyone else's progress—and, at least right now, it is an open question whether American backsliding will be more than a selective and regionalized phenomenon. is the creep of fossil fascism bad? yes, and it is very worrying—if not for everyone, at least for the people likely to be affected by it. but i'm ultimately not a doomer here and, at least right now, you shouldn't be either.

footnotes

¹ of course, these groups are still quite explicit in terms of who they seek to marginalize and who they identify as the enemy. you need look no further than the things they get up to on the side—unlawfully operated militia training facilities in Vermont, voter intimidation in Arizona, confrontations with civil rights protesters, and efforts to police the US-Mexico border extrajudicially among others.

² to the point where he has faced censured for being too moderate; in general, Gordon has a bad relationship with much of his party and a very bad relationship with the Freedom Caucus of his state.

³ with the caveat that he may challenge Wyoming's term limits in court.