https://grist.org/politics/authoritarian-democracy-climate-change-global-warming-causation-research/
Excerpt:
In November 2013, one of the strongest tropical cyclones in history made landfall in the Philippines. Known locally as Super Typhoon Yolanda, the storm pummeled the island country with 235-mile-per-hour gusts and a 17-foot storm surge; picked up limousine-sized boulders as easily as plastic bottles and deposited them hundreds of feet away; and officially killed 6,300 people, although the true death toll was likely much higher.
Rodrigo Duterte, then the longtime mayor of Davao City, made headlines for traveling some 400 miles to one of the worst-ravaged areas of the country, along with a convoy of medical and relief workers and roughly $150,000 in cash. He announced that he’d told security forces to shoot any looters who might try to intercept the convoy. (He went on to clarify, “I told them to just shoot at the feet. … They can have prosthetics after, anyway.”) As a presidential candidate in 2016, Duterte slammed his opponent, the former interior secretary, for allegedly misspending Yolanda recovery funds. He won in a landslide.
Over the next six years, Duterte proved that his foul-mouthed maverick shtick wasn’t harmless posturing. He presided over a brutal war on drugs in which police and vigilantes — emboldened by the president — killed as many as 30,000 people, imposed martial law on an island home to 22 million for two and a half years, and signed a law that gave law enforcement broad authority to arrest and detain suspects without warrants.
Typhoon Yolanda “offered the Philippines’ presidential hopeful Rodrigo Duterte an avenue to exploit people’s helplessness to secure their support,” according to an economist who studies the ways storms affect democracy.
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Over the next six years, Duterte proved that his foul-mouthed maverick shtick wasn’t harmless posturing. He presided over a brutal war on drugs in which police and vigilantes — emboldened by the president — killed as many as 30,000 people, imposed martial law on an island home to 22 million for two and a half years, and signed a law that gave law enforcement broad authority to arrest and detain suspects without warrants.
Typhoon Yolanda “offered the Philippines’ presidential hopeful Rodrigo Duterte an avenue to exploit people’s helplessness to secure their support,” according to an economist who studies the ways storms affect democracy.
The past decade or so has given rise to a grim parade of Duterte-like candidates around the world — politicians who have obliterated the bounds of acceptable political discourse, scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities, dismissed journalism as fake news, sought to imprison their rivals, and undermined democratic checks and balances. In India, commonly referred to as “the world’s largest democracy,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vilified Muslims and carried out a campaign promise to build a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque razed by Hindu mobs. In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro promoted a bill that would strip Indigenous tribes of control of their lands and unsuccessfully plotted a coup to remain in power after losing reelection. And in the United States, former President Donald Trump — currently running for reelection — separated immigrant children from their parents and incited a horde of supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol.
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None of these candidates rose to power after a natural disaster quite as singular as Typhoon Yolanda, but they’ve advanced at a time when climate change has become increasingly visible and harmful as worsening storms, droughts, and wildfires affect more and more people. This might not be a coincidence. Although it’s difficult to prove that climate change contributed to the ascent of these strongmen, political scientists, economists, and psychologists have found evidence that the dangers of global warming can push individuals, and nations, in an authoritarian direction.
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Political scientists have theorized that, in the face of physical, economic, and social vulnerability, voters seek safety in the form of leaders who promise to take decisive action to deliver relief. One study of elections in India found that voters punish incumbents when it floods — unless the incumbents respond vigorously to the disaster.
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A causal relationship between climate change and authoritarian attitudes has also been demonstrated on a much smaller scale in psychology studies.
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\McCarthy, who edited a special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers on authoritarianism, populism, and the environment in 2019, thinks the alarming proliferation of dictators and aspiring dictators in recent years shows that it’s a hypothesis worth taking seriously. “I think you have accelerating climate change contributing incredibly strongly to a growing sense of insecurity and inequality: fear about the future, fears that the future is going to be less stable and secure than the past, fears that the world is increasingly going to be divided into winners and losers, and you can’t trust society or collective institutions,” he said.
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McCarthy believes this is true even though supporters of many strongmen — including a third of Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 — deny that climate change is real. “I think that people are reacting to manifestations of climate change or effects of climate change without always or often recognizing them as such,” he said.
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