White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism

Description

In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilian president has opened the Amazon and watched it burn. In Europe, parties denying the crisis and insisting on maximum combustion have stormed into office, from Sweden to Spain. On the brink of breakdown, the forces most aggressively promoting business-as-usual have surged - always in defense of white privilege, against supposed threats from non-white others. Where have they come from? The first study of the far right in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, and reveals its deep historical roots. Fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. None loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. As such forces rise to the surface, some profess to have the solution - closing borders to save the climate. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.

Andreas Malm is a scholar of human ecology and author of, among other books, Fossil Capital and The Progress of This Storm. The Zetkin Collective is a group of scholars, activists and students working on the political ecology of the far right.

Praise for Fossil Capital: "Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming." -- Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of Fear Praise for Fossil Capital: "Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again-and take notes." -- John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx's Ecology Praise for Fossil Capital: "The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject." -- Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine Praise for Fossil Capital: A unique reconceptualization of the relationship between nature, capitalism, and Marxism. * Jacobin * Praise for Fossil Capital: The birth of the fossil economy, avers human ecologist Andreas Malm, arrived when steam eclipsed water power in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Around that, Malm builds a deep, insight-packed history of how society came to be in thrall to the twin engines of combustion and capital. -- Barbara Kiser * Nature * Praise for Fossil Capital: Remarkable book -- Benjamin Kunkel * London Review of Books * Praise for Fossil Capital: This is a denser, wonkier, and more historical survey of the long, ugly marriage between fossil fuels and capitalism - in fact, between fossil fuels and the entire history of economic growth. -- David Wallace-Wells * New York Magazine * Praise for Fossil Capital: The best book written about the origins of global warming ... Like Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, Fossil Capital trenchantly demonstrated that capitalism and capitalists are responsible for climate change. -- Michael Robbins * Bookforum * White Skin, Black Fuels is a beautifully written, passionate, richly researched warning about fossil fascism - and its mutant offspring, ecofascism. With acute sensitivity, it traces the surprising connections between racist, nationalist ideology and climate denialism. And it persuasively explains why climate disaster only reinforces denialism on the Right. An essential insight into an emerging threat. * Richard Seymour * This bold and richly detailed study of far-Right approaches to climate change is a revelation. With well-grounded historical depth and challenging theoretical reach, it brings disparate contemporary developments onto a much-needed common canvas. Its admirably transnational reading of urgent political priorities could not be more timely -- Geoff Eley, University of Michigan, author of Nazism as Fascism In this highly engaging study, full of startling anecdotes and witty reflections, Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective take us on a whirlwind tour of ascendant far-right movements and their anti-climate politics in Europe, the US, and Brazil. White Skin, Black Fuel is analytically rich, getting to the heart of fascism's long-standing entanglement with white supremacy, fossil fuels, machinist fetishism, and capitalist cruelty. If you want to understand the political obstacles that will face climate action in the coming decades, this book is a must-read -- Cara Daggett, author of The Birth of Energy [Malm is] the hardest-working intellectual on the climate left. -- Wen Stephenson * The Nation * A firm foundation for antifascist understandings of fascism. If the name of the game is to know our enemy, this is a crucial first step. -- Alex King * Spectre * Compelling. -- Paul Mason * New Statesman * A critically needed analysis for movement thinkers and organisers seeking to understand the resurgence of fascism in the midst of climate breakdown. -- Basav Sen * Antipode * [White Skin, Black Fuel] shows how, in the political arena, arguments about economic rationality get woven together with hierarchical structures and the pursuit of domination, portending what it calls fossil fascism. -- Olufemi O. Taiwo * New Yorker * White Skin, Black Fuel charts many of the risks facing progressive politics in a post-carbon era, but it would be foolish to dismiss such a politics as utopian. It is on utopia that we now depend. -- James Butler * London Review of Books * A sustained challenge to [the] complacent historical framing of our present condition ... attempts to set out the ways in which gas-guzzling consumerism, fossil fuel addiction, settler colonialism and structures of racial power are historically entwined. -- Adam Tooze * London Review of Books * This rich study of the far right's role in the climate crisis presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, revealing its deep historical roots. -- Adele Walton * gal-dem * Fascinating. -- Joseph Maggs * Race & Class * Malm and the Zetkin Collective lead us through the first systematic inquiry into the political ecology of the Far Right in the climate crisis, covering thirteen European countries along with the United States and Brazil. -- James Mumm * Social Policy magazine *