Valencia: Floods, Dams and Lies

The Spanish far-right disaster feeding frenzy

There are many reasons to hope that we don’t wake up tomorrow with a Trump victory in the US presidential elections, and many reasons why the consequences of this election matter not just to America, but to the wider world.

But the terrible events that have taken place in Valencia over the last week should concentrate our minds on one of the least-discussed aspects of the presidential campaign. If Trump wins, extreme-right populist movements across the world that either deny or minimize the impact of climate change will be galvanised, and humanity’s diminishing prospects of limiting the calamitous effects of the climate emergency will be plunged into further chaos and disarray.

In pointing this out, I’m not suggesting that mainstream politicians are responding to the climate crisis with the urgency required.  The botched warning systems and early response of the Spanish authorities to the Valencia flash floods is one reminder, amongst so many others, that such urgency is too often lacking.

It is a bleak indictment of global environmental governance that even in our ongoing age of mass extinction, the COP16 summit in Columbia on global nature conservation has just ended without an agreement on how to fund further efforts to protect vulnerable species, and with no coherent forum for future decision-making.

It is a bitter and infuriating mockery that the forthcoming COP29 global climate summit is being held in Azerbaijan, a country that is currently ramping its production of oil and gas, and that some of its attendees are planning to do exactly the same thing.

At precisely the moment when our collective future is dependent on collective international action,  governments across the world lack the courage or the political will to communicate the urgency of our common predicament to their electorates, or are too beholden to fossil fuel companies to make the effort.

But in this, as in so many other things, a Trump victory always has the ability to make a bad situation worse. It is may be true that Trump once co-signed a full-page advert in the New York Times in 2009, with other business leaders, warning of ‘catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet’ without action on climate change.

In power, the Caligula of Mar-a-Lago actively sabotaged international attempts to take such action by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change.  According to one former aide, Trump once refused to give wildfire assistance to California until he knew how many people there had voted for him.  When Puerto Rico was devastated by a hurricane, Trump showed up to toss paper towels, like some pampered aristocrat throwing pieces of meat to his starving peons.

Such is the petty malevolence of the would-be leader of the most powerful democracy on earth.

Trump has also said that the concept of global warming was ‘created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.’ His Project 2025 backers have called for a ‘whole-of-government unwinding’ of US environmental laws and the curtailing of the Environmental Protection Agency.

All this suggests that a Trump victory would give a massive boost to the climate disinformation machinery that movements like MAGA have made their own.   In country after country, these movements either deny that climate change is real, or try to undermine any meaningful response to it, while at the same seeking to transform every climate-related disaster into a conspiracy.

We may well criticize centrist democratic governments for their ostrich-like refusal to recognize the enormity of the environmental crisis that is now staring us all in the face, but movements like MAGA will always oppose even the limited mitigating efforts that have been made.

These movements are congenitally incapable of responding to real disasters or emergencies. They have no practical policies, no concept of the common good, and no ability to think outside their shrunken nationalist ghettoes and conspiratorial fantasies. They will never be able to generate the levels of solidarity, internationalism and collective action that represents humanity’s only hope of navigating the calamity that humanity has created.

Enemies of good government, these movements have no interest in protecting anyone or improving anything, and can only respond to the real disasters and calamities that are part of the 21st century by using them as narrative fodder for morbid concocted conspiracies.

All these tendencies were on display last week in Valencia, where the extreme-right has accused successive governments of destroying dams built under the Franco dictatorship – a policy which they claim caused the floods.

These explanations are nonsensical on many levels - dams and reservoirs did not cause the floods. There is no such policy. Only three demolitions have taken place in Valencia in the last two decades, and they did not involve the destruction of dams, but culverts and instream barriers. Nor were these demolitions carried out by the Spanish or Valencian governments.

None of this has stopped extreme-right digital media outlets from blaming the Socialists and the left in general for supposedly promoting ‘globalist interests’ using the ‘ecological excuse’ to destroy the general’s dams. When Ursula von der Leyen described the floods as a manifestation of the ‘dramatic reality of climate change,’ Vox leader Santiago Abascal blamed the European Union for the ‘criminal destruction of dams’.

What kind of people would tell lies about floods that have killed more than 200 people, purely for political gain? The same kind of people who condemn the ‘Islamization of Spain’ and described immigrants as thieves and rapists. 

The same people who call the pandemic a ‘scamdemic’ and described face masks as ‘face diapers’; who claimed that ‘15 minute cities’ were a Davos-driven conspiracy by the ‘globalist’ elite to force people to live in ghettoes, who tell you that the Southport murders were carried out by a Muslim asylum-seeker. The same people who believe that climate change scientists manipulate data, or blame global warming on ‘the power of the sun or volcanoes’, as Reform’s Richard Tice did earlier this year.

Such ideas are the common everyday currency of the liars, grifters, charlatans, political snake-oil merchants, ethnonationalists, fascists and downright sociopaths who infest the 21st century at precisely the point when we need them least. These are not people you want to see on the deck of the Titanic - unless you believe that safety and salvation can be achieved by denying the existence of the iceberg.

It is no surprise to find the likes of Santiago Abascal amongst them. In March 2023, the Socialist/Compromís/Unidas Podemos coalition that ruled the Valencian regional government created a new organization called the Valencian Emergency Unite (UVE) to improve the government’s response to fires, floods and other natural disasters.

In November that same year, this agency was shut down by the new right-wing Partido Popular administration of Carlos Mazón, following pressure from Vox, as a quid pro quo for entering into coalition with the regional PP.

Vox, in its infinite wisdom, called the UVE an ‘agencia fantasma’ (ghost agency), and argued that the UVE merely duplicated powers that the regional government already possessed. We don’t know whether that agency could have saved lives, though the failings of the regional government’s emergency warning system make it clear that such an agency was required.

Needless to say, neither Vox nor the PP have accepted responsibility for the UVE’s dissolution.

Over the last week, thousands of Valencians have volunteered to help clear up the damage. These volunteers include the immigrants that Vox despises, and Muslims, who have taken time out from reconquering Spain to set up soup kitchens for the survivors and volunteers:

And what has Vox done in this situation?  It posts tweets like this:

It is almost beyond comprehension that any political party could see a disaster like this as an opportunity to generate hatred, but hatred is the driving emotion behind this disgusting movement. Devoid of any interests except its own, Vox feeds on the righteous fury and grief of Valencians entirely for its own purposes. It lionises Franco and invents dam destructions that, as El País’s Javier Salas has pointed out, never happened. 

This is where ‘post-truth’ politics can take you, and Vox is only one component of a vast, well-funded global network that includes the extreme-right and the psychotic libertarianism that we saw during the pandemic.   Many of them, like MAGA, have connections to fossil fuel companies, but it’s not necessary to seek such connections in order to comprehend the danger to society that such movements pose.

Just as there were many people who saw the COVID ‘China virus’ as a globalist conspiracy, there are those who will readily embrace the idea that climate change is a lefty/green plot to overthrow capitalism or stop you driving your SUV outside the confines of a 15-minute prison-city.

Such delusions mean that nothing needs to change, either at the societal or individual level. And when real disasters happen, and real people gasp their last breath in ICUs, lose their homes in forest fires, or drown when a year’s worth of rain falls in a few hours, there will always be movements that blame these things on a Wuhan lab, on ‘explosive trees’ or tell you that somehow, somewhere, immigrants are responsible.

But the lesson of Valencia is that we are all - every single one of us - in a predicament that we cannot ignore or lie our way out of. Both our survival as a species and the preservation of our common home depend on the action that we take – or don’t take – now.

If Valencia shows us that people can be selfless, brave and heroic, it also demonstrates the lethal danger of parasitic movements like Vox, that pretend to speak for the people, and have no interest in helping the victims of climate disasters, only in exploiting them.

The sinister malevolence of these movements is not just a threat to democracy; it is an expression of political decadence, and a moral and intellectual pestilence that threatens our common survival.

And that is one more reason why we need these movements gone, and we need Trump gone too.