Fossil Fascism and Glacial Indifference
“Stop complaining. Always more people die in the winter than die in the summer, because cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is.”
These are the words of US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright from Saturday, June 27, sent in a video message to a conference of climate skeptics: the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), where Nigel Farage was also present. He made these remarks just as a record-breaking heatwave is suffocating and killing people across Western Europe.
Wright is a white man, a billionaire and a fracking industry lobbyist on loan to Donald Trump’s White House. He embodies the absolute cynicism of the sociopathic right wing in power. His rhetoric is as aggressive as it is mendacious. In countries where temperatures are skyrocketing, heat-related deaths have been rising at a terrifying rate for years, far exceeding historical winter averages. The link between extreme heat and mortality is direct, acute and immediate. This is also happening in the United States, where Trump continues to cut funding for climate emergencies.
The attitude of Wright and his cronies is not driven by ignorance. This is an ideological strategy dubbed “fossil fascism” by the Zetkin Collective. It is an organic alliance between the political far right and extractive capital, united to defend – using all means offered by the state and the market – the privileges of a capitalism based on fossil fuels, first and foremost gas and oil, the primary drivers of climate change on the planet.
Wright also attacked the European Union at its most vulnerable moment. He did so after Trump threatened 100% tariffs if Brussels imposes taxes on large US tech companies. To him, the goals of reducing polluting emissions to net zero are “ridiculous.” This idea is shared by all forces that are part of the fossil-fuel right.
The Italian government thinks so too, having butted heads with Brussels over weakening the Emissions Trading System (ETS). For Trumpian politicians of all stripes, Europe must abandon the ecological transition and transform into a market for US liquefied natural gas (LNG), of which Wright himself is a producer. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni echoes this goal when she says she wants to transform Italy into a “gas hub.” She made this official in Washington when she called herself an ally of Trump, and she has doubled down on it repeatedly since.
Climate indifference and the denialism currently in power in Washington are showing up in more diluted forms in Europe as well. We have seen it during these days of “peak” temperatures. Governments are clearing their throats with empty statements of little credibility and passing botched decrees that will only take effect with predictable delays. No strategy, just a lot of indifference. It is hot. It will pass. The rest is left to the “meme wars” over the air conditioners that the left supposedly hates.
This is the new moralistic skirmish that has invaded the fascist-adjacent online sphere in recent hours – in Italy and elsewhere. To dismantle it, it’s enough to point out that if air conditioners were powered by rooftop solar panels instead, they would be more useful, cheaper and more effective.
Fossil fascism and climate indifference are the two faces of a strategy aimed at getting the citizen-consumer to adapt to a hellish reality. Since people are suffering anyway, and we must leave them to it, the goal is to find palliatives that allow for the temporary management of the heatwave without altering the underlying contradiction: capitalism, fossil-fueled or otherwise, is incompatible with the preservation of the planet.
What remains is apathy, exhaustion and bewilderment. Some will announce strikes; for others, half-measures will not be enough. We are moved by the plight of the delivery riders rushing from one order to the next. But let's go to the beach. Tomorrow we can talk more about class violence.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/fascismo-fossile-indifferenza-climatica on 2026-06-28
Il manifesto was founded in 1969 on the idea that truth and freethinking are more important than everything else, including profit. The paper pays for its editorial idealism in the form of lost advertising. But we more than make up for this in the support of tens of thousands of subscribers who believe a better world is possible. There are no owners (il manifesto is a cooperative), and the editor and managers are elected every four years by the employees. We maintain a newsroom in Rome and correspondents around the world, filing dispatches from Paris, London, Berlin, Jerusalem, Havana, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.