Authoritarianism is on the rise. Is climate change to blame?
There's evidence that global warming creates fertile ground for political strongmen to come to power.
L.V. Anderson
Senior Editor
Published
Oct 29, 2024
This story is part of State of Emergency, a Grist series exploring how climate disasters are impacting voting and politics. It is published with support from the CO2 Foundation.
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.
https://grist.org/politics/authoritarian-democracy-climate-change-global-warming-causation-research/
