Could Feminism Be the Solution for Climate Change?

by James Murphy December 26, 2024 ( December 26, 2024 )

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The once prestigious science publication Scientific American may have officially jumped the shark. On December 21, the magazine published an opinion piece extolling the idea that the fake crisis known as climate change can be solved using the tenets of feminism.

Laura Turquet, Silke Staab, and Brianna Howell — “gender equality researchers” with the UN — authored the article.

Fearmongering

Using many of the normal fearmongering tactics of climate zealots — hottest year on record, unlivable planet etc. — the authors point out that “urgent, global cooperation” is needed, and that feminism offers us the “analysis, tools and movement” needed to wrestle with the problem.

The women lament that the recent COP29 had merely “upheld the status quo.” This is apparently firmly rooted in fossil fuels, at great cost to the unrealistic clean-energy future. They further feel that the needs of the climate are subservient to the wants of greedy corporations and uncaring governments.

In the eyes of the authors, the present global system “prioritizes the interests of corporations, governments and elites in positions of power and wealth, while destroying the natural environment that poor and marginalized people depend on the most.”

So, in their estimation, a new way of addressing the problem must be found:

We need a different tack to move the needle. As gender-equality researchers at the U.N., we see growing evidence that women, girls and gender-diverse people are bearing the brunt of climate change. And that raises a question: What if we approached climate from a feminist perspective?

Plus, the authors complain, women have a much tougher time in this age of the so-called climate crisis. This is due to many perceived inequalities:

Women worldwide have unequal access to economic resources, such as jobs, bank accounts, land and technology. This means that when weather patterns change, disrupting infrastructure and public services, they are less able to adapt, recover and rebuild.

The authors use guilt and questionable statistics to argue their point, claiming that

climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty, and 236 million more women and girls into food insecurity, by 2050 under a worst-case scenario.

Not a New Idea

This is hardly the first time climate change has been blamed on a male-centric society. “The climate crisis is not gender neutral,” said climate activist Katharine K. Wilkinson in 2021. “It grows out of a patriarchal system that is also entangled with racism and white supremacy and extractive capitalism. And the unequal impacts of climate change are making it harder to achieve a gender-equal world.”

It’s reminiscent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC) remarks back in 2018. She intimated that climate change could be used as a means to deliver social justice to America:

We can use the transition to 100-percent renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America.

“This is going to be the Great Society, the moonshot, the civil rights movement of our generation,” she said. “This is the mechanism through which we can really deliver justice to communities that have been underserved.”

Which is pretty much what the authors of the Scientific American piece are pointing out:

The feminist climate justice approach tries to address the interlinked challenges of climate change, gender inequality and social injustice. It is based on the recognition that women and girls who are poor, from “lower” castes or a marginalized ethnic group, or are disabled, are most affected by disasters and environmental degradation, while their knowledge and contributions to addressing them are consistently sidelined.

So, apparently, all we need to solve the “crisis” of climate change is a feminist eye.

Scientific American once printed articles written by Albert Einstein and Nicola Tesla. The magazine boasts of contributions made by more than 150 Nobel Prize winners. How sad that it’s been reduced to publishing feminist propaganda for the United Nations.