As climate collapse accelerates, the world faces intensifying droughts, wildfires, floods, and resource conflicts. Yet, rather than address the root cause—namely, capitalist overproduction and imperialist resource theft—Western nations, led by the United States, have responded by fortifying their borders. The imperial core, historically responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse emissions, is actively preparing for a world that it has made uninhabitable through militarization, surveillance, and the expansion of carceral border regimes.
In place of transformative climate justice what we are witnessing instead is a violent system of climate apartheid. And just as border walls militarize migration from hotter, poorer regions, internal disasters like the recent flooding in Texas cause involuntary displacement within the US. These floods uproot families, compel relocations, and create climate refugees in situ. Instead of coherent policy changes which would allow for restorative assistance and systematic care, people—especially the poor—are made to deal with a patchwork of volunteer aid and emergency services. Still, climate change is not a universal phenomenon experienced equally.
According to a 2020 Oxfam report, the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population were responsible for 52 percent of global emissions between 1990 and 2015, while the poorest half contributed just seven percent. The United States alone, with less than five percent of the global population, accounts for an estimated 25 percent of historical CO² emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. This carbon colonialism continues today as Western countries extract fossil fuels, minerals, and agricultural commodities from the Global South, while also outsourcing environmental destruction and labor exploitation that are needed to sustain their consumer economies.
In other words, the climate crisis is not simply the result of human activity in general but a consequence of capitalist accumulation, driven by imperialist centers of power. As Naomi Klein explains in “This Changes Everything”, climate change “pits what the planet needs against what our economic model needs.” This contradiction is not incidental but structural, as capitalism cannot solve the crisis it created because endless growth is incompatible with the limits of our planet. Rather than reining in production, corporations and wealthy elites are choosing to harden borders in preparation for collapse.
The UN estimates that over 1.2 billion people could be displaced by climate-related events by 2050. From Central America to South Asia, climate-induced droughts and floods are already contributing to food insecurity, violence, and displacement, all while the United States and EU escalate their war on migrants. In the US, border militarization has surged over the past two decades. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now receives over $100 billion annually, more than all federal climate-related spending combined.
In 2022, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) deployed drones, heat sensors, and AI surveillance technologies across the US-Mexico borderlands, all of which are technologies originally developed for military use in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, the US is funding “buffer states” like Mexico and Guatemala to detain and deport migrants before they even reach the US border, thereby outsourcing its cruelty while maintaining the image of legal neutrality. These policies are intended to work as preemptive strikes against any potential climate refugees, and Europe is following the same playbook.
Frontex, the EU border agency, has ballooned in size and budget, all while refugees drown in the Mediterranean Sea or languish in Greek detention camps. In 2020, the Guardian revealed that Frontex ships were directly involved in illegal pushbacks of migrants at sea, in clear violation of international law. What makes this especially insidious is the way climate change is being reframed as an issue of security.
In 2019, a US Army War College report warned that climate collapse could lead to the “failure of critical infrastructure”, domestic unrest, and the need for “mass migration control” as part of what the Pentagon has called a “threat multiplier”, not due to climate change itself but because of the threat it poses to US empire. This is what author Nick Buxton calls the “climate-security nexus”.
In his 2015 report for the Transnational Institute, Buxton details how fossil-fueled militaries are now using climate change to justify expanded budgets and authoritarian surveillance, all while continuing to be among the world’s top polluters. For example, the US military is the single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on earth. For the United States, climate change doesn’t require cutting emissions or ending extractions, but justifies drone patrols, biometric border walls, and militarized refugee camps; the state is not collapsing—it is adapting. But adapting to maintain control. The climate crisis is being weaponized to reinforce and expand imperial hierarchies, not dismantle them, and this marks class war on a planetary scale.
Climate apartheid is the insulation of capital from the consequences of its own destruction, and as the world’s working classes and indigenous peoples face flooding, famine, and fire, the ruling class is building bunkers, buying up water rights, and turning the Global South into a large-scale kill zone. Furthermore, migration itself has become increasingly criminalized, not as a threat to local communities but as a threat to capitalist order. Migrants are not fleeing “natural disasters”, they are escaping a world that has become systematically destabilized by capitalist land grabs, extractivism, IMF-imposed austerity, and imperial wars. To lock migrants out is to commit a second kind of violence: first they destroy their homelands, then deny them any method of escape. The only future worth fighting for is one where the world’s resources are collectively owned, and where survival is not a privilege, but a right.
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