Contribution short abstract

The extremities of climate inequality as byproducts of a colonial social relation predispose billions of people to immediate harm. Existing climate solutions proposed by the ruling class actively normalize genocidal acts on surplus populations, while reserving adaptation to a privileged few.

Contribution long abstract

When billionaire Bill Gates announced in an essay prior to the convening of the 30th Conference of the Parties of the UN climate deliberations in Belem, Brazil that climate change is not an existential risk to humanity, he makes a telling confession not only of who counts as "humanity" but also of a growing tendency towards what Ajay Singh Chaudhury (2024) calls "right wing climate realism." This stance characterizes a "cornucopia" of positions ranging from liberal and progressive social democrats to the conservative far-right, normalizing a status quo where the investments of the wealthiest 0.1% of humanity produce more emissions in a single day than the annual emissions of 50% of all of humanity (Oxfam International, 2025). On track towards 3 degrees Celsius of warming, right wing climate realism condemns billions of people to deadly climate-induced risk and social instability while restricting climate adaptation to a privileged few. In this intervention, we explore how sustainability discourses prop up a genocidal world ecology, dangerously inflated with the Malthusian longtermist agendas of the ruling class. We demonstrate how the meaning of existential risk is reserved to climate adaptation for a certain subset of humanity and has become a central framework for new environmental pragmatists (Spash, 2015). This requires creative strategies to justify not only eco-apartheid (Heron, 2024) but even mass murder more broadly, as evident in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Sudan to normalizing disposability from Haiti to the DR Congo and beyond, as central to the mainstream environmental agenda.