Supervillains of the Enviro-Verse

🏴‍☠️ For your amusement: a rogues gallery of anti-Green villainy. 🏴‍☠️

Movements are defined as much by who and what they oppose as what they favor. To understand environmentalism, you have to know how it defines its opponents.  Reality, of course, is always nuanced, but nuance isn’t much fun.

Although I was originally going to provide a more serious treatment, I decided instead to have a little fun.  It’s summer-movie time when Marvel Comics rules the big screen.  I’m going to present these negative figures as if they were characters in Marvel’s cartoon-like world. POW! WHAAM! KABOOOM!

Even though I’ll describe them in crude terms, the adversaries I’ll be discussing do form a kind of anti-canon that helps define environmentalism. Here are The Worst of the Worst👹 , The Enemies of the Planet 👽, and The Deadly Denialists 🕷, presented in bold colors with no shades of gray.

Name: Donald J. Trump ™️

• Aliases: “TRUMP!™, “The Greatest President of All Times™”, “The Real Donald Trump™”
• Crimes Against the Planet: Wholesale slaughter of environmental regulations, spreading of climate change denial.
• Evil superpowers: Mass hypnosis, disinformation, character assassination.

Name: Exxon. 

• Aliases: “Big Oil,” “ExxonMobil”
• Crimes Against the Planet: Climate change denial, blocking climate action, mass production of carbon, obfuscation.
• Superpowers: Political manipulation, unimagined wealth, backroom influence.

Name: Antonin Scalia 

• Aliases: “The Only Principled Judge in the Room,” “Nino,” “Mr. Unitary Executive”
• Crimes Against the Planet: A one-man killing spree of anti-environmental court rulings
• Evil superpowers: Reductive theories, slashing words 🔪

Name: The Koch Brothers  

• Aliases: “Dark Money,” “Conservative Oligarchs”
• Crimes Against the Planet: Funding anti-environmentalist political activities, climate denialism, and think tanks
• Superpowers: Covert activities, crushing of progress

Name: Mitch McConnell  

Aliases: “The Turtle,” “Minority Leader”

• Crimes Against the Planet: Stealing a Supreme Court seat, killing every hope of climate legislation
• Superpowers: Backroom politics, gridlock creation, devious plots

* * *

Don’t bother telling me these are distorted caricatures. I ALREADY KNOW THAT. Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. But I do already know that.  We’re talking Marvel movies and comic books here, not Tennessee Williams and Leo Tolstoy. If they weren’t caricatures, they wouldn’t fit the theme.

Besides which, I’m trying to get in tune with the zeitgeist here. After all, nuances don’t get clicks.

→ No animals, humans, or non-corporeal entities were harmed in the making of this blog post ←

environmental politics, lame jokes about Tennesse Williams, misguided humor