Greens Deputy Leader Mehreen Faruqi has ignited a political backlash after invoking colonialism, race and billionaire wealth while discussing the climate crisis in the wake of Nepal’s catastrophic floods.
The NSW senator told the Senate that the impacts of climate change were inseparable from global inequalities created through colonialism and racism, arguing that wealthy elites were increasingly insulated from disasters devastating poorer communities.
In the most controversial section of her remarks, Faruqi said billionaire lists were dominated by white men who continued to become wealthier while black and brown communities across the Global South were being flooded, burned, displaced, starved and buried.
The comments quickly generated criticism, with 2GB host Ben Fordham and other conservative commentators characterising the speech as Faruqi blaming “rich white men” for the Nepal disaster.
That description captures the racial language at the centre of her argument, but it also compresses a more complicated claim.
Faruqi did not say that white billionaires physically caused the mountain to collapse in Nepal.
She was making a broader climate-justice argument: that wealthy countries, corporations and individuals have contributed disproportionately to global warming while poorer populations that contributed relatively little frequently suffer its most severe consequences.
Whether race is a useful or defensible way to describe that inequality is now at the centre of the Australian political dispute.
What Faruqi actually said
Faruqi linked climate change with the historical structures of colonialism, arguing that racism remained visible in the distribution of climate impacts.
She then contrasted billionaire wealth — which she said was concentrated heavily among white men — with the suffering of black and brown communities across the Global South.
The language was consistent with arguments Faruqi has made for years.
She has repeatedly described climate change as a racial and economic justice issue, argued wealthy industrialised countries owe greater assistance to poorer countries, and advocated treating international climate finance partly as a question of responsibility rather than charity.
Following Pakistan’s catastrophic 2022 floods, for example, Faruqi argued that wealthy countries including Australia bore greater responsibility because of their historical fossil-fuel use and called for greater climate finance for the Global South.
The Nepal speech therefore did not represent a sudden change in her politics.
What changed was the immediacy of the disaster against which those arguments were being made — and the explicit reference to the race and gender of wealthy people.
The physical cause of the Nepal disaster was a collapsing mountain
Any assessment of the controversy has to distinguish the political argument about responsibility for climate change from the immediate mechanics of the flood.
On August 26, a massive collapse involving rock and glacial ice high on Langtang Lirung sent an enormous mass down into the river system near the Nepal–Tibet border.
The resulting cascade of ice, rock, sediment, mud and water tore through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river corridors.
Entire settlements were destroyed.
Bridges, roads and hydropower installations disappeared beneath debris.
More than 1,300 people have been reported dead across Nepal and Tibet and thousands remain missing, with the toll still being revised as bodies are recovered and missing people are identified.
Early reports raised the possibility that an earthquake had triggered the collapse.
Subsequent analysis indicated that seismic signals recorded at the time were likely generated by the enormous rock-and-ice collapse itself rather than a conventional earthquake causing the event.
Scientists studying satellite imagery say a huge section of glacier and underlying mountain material failed before falling more than a kilometre into the valley below.
That is the direct physical chain that produced the disaster.
No credible scientific explanation attributes that individual mechanical failure to the race of particular people.
Climate change is still relevant
Rejecting a racialised shorthand does not mean climate change can be removed from the story.
Scientists have warned that global warming is creating precisely the conditions that can make high-mountain environments less stable.
As temperatures rise, glaciers retreat.
Snow and ice melt.
Permafrost — permanently frozen ground that can help bind mountain slopes together — thaws.
Those changes can increase the probability of rock falls, glacier collapses and complex cascading disasters.
Researchers examining the Nepal event have pointed to unusually warm conditions, rapid glacier retreat and the possible destabilisation of bedrock beneath the ice.
But responsible attribution requires caution.
Experts have said climate change likely increased the broader risk environment while the precise combination of factors that caused this particular slope to fail is still being reconstructed.
It is therefore too simplistic to say either that climate change had nothing to do with the disaster or that scientists have proved global warming alone triggered the exact collapse at that exact moment.
Nepal itself is making a climate-justice argument
Faruqi is far from alone in arguing that the catastrophe raises questions about who should pay for climate damage.
Nepal’s government is now placing climate justice at the centre of its international appeal for billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance.
Nepali officials argue their country has contributed very little to the greenhouse gases driving global warming yet faces immense exposure to melting glaciers, unstable mountains, floods and landslides.
The numbers support that imbalance.
Global Carbon Budget data compiled by Our World in Data puts Nepal’s fossil-fuel and industrial carbon dioxide emissions at about 18.8 million tonnes in 2024 — roughly 0.05 per cent of the global total.
Its cumulative contribution since the beginning of the industrial era is around 0.01 per cent.
That is negligible beside the emissions of the world’s major industrial economies.
Nepal is therefore asking wealthier and higher-emitting countries to accept greater responsibility for adaptation, recovery and loss-and-damage funding.
But Nepali officials have framed that responsibility principally through emissions and national economic capacity rather than race.
The major emitters they have cited include China, the United States and India.
That point complicates Faruqi’s racial framing.
China cannot be left out of the emissions equation
If the argument is about who has contributed to global warming, responsibility depends heavily on the metric being used.
Historically, Western industrial powers dominate.
The United States remains the largest national contributor to cumulative fossil-fuel and industrial CO₂ emissions, having produced about 435 billion tonnes by 2024.
Europe also bears a large historical responsibility because industrialisation and large-scale coal use began there.
That history supports part of Faruqi’s argument about wealthy Western countries benefiting from carbon-intensive development before many poorer countries industrialised.
But the current emissions map is different.
China emitted about 31.8 per cent of global fossil-fuel and industrial CO₂ in 2024, making it by far the world’s largest annual emitter.
It has also become the second-largest national contributor to cumulative CO₂ emissions, at more than 15 per cent of the historical total.
India is another major current emitter.
Those realities make “white men” an imprecise category for allocating present-day responsibility for global warming.
Climate physics responds to greenhouse gases, not the ethnicity of the person or government producing them.
Wealth inequality is a stronger part of Faruqi’s argument
The economic component of Faruqi’s criticism has more direct empirical support.
Research repeatedly shows that greenhouse-gas emissions are highly unequal by income.
Oxfam, using research conducted with the Stockholm Environment Institute, estimated the richest one per cent of the global population accounted for about 16 per cent of global consumption emissions in 2019 — roughly equivalent to the emissions of the poorest two-thirds of humanity.
High-income households generally consume more energy, fly more frequently, live in larger homes and purchase more carbon-intensive goods and services.
Billionaires can have particularly extreme individual footprints through private aviation, yachts, multiple properties and investment holdings.
That makes economic inequality relevant to climate responsibility.
It does not automatically make race the most useful proxy for that responsibility.
The global billionaire class now includes wealthy individuals across North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
And many ordinary white Australians or Europeans have nowhere near the emissions, wealth or political influence of a billionaire in Beijing, Mumbai, Dubai or Silicon Valley.
Those distinctions are lost when economic and national responsibility is condensed into skin colour.
Why the wording produced such a strong reaction
Faruqi’s defenders would argue she was describing structures, not accusing every white man of causing a flood.
Her target was concentrated wealth, colonial history and unequal exposure to climate damage.
Critics heard something different.
They saw a senator identifying the race and sex of a wealthy group while contrasting that group with suffering black and brown people.
For them, the question is whether the same racial generalisation would be tolerated if the groups were reversed.
That argument has particular resonance because Faruqi is one of Australia’s most prominent anti-racism advocates.
She successfully brought Federal Court proceedings against Pauline Hanson over a social media post the court found racially discriminatory after Hanson told her to return to Pakistan.
Faruqi has frequently argued that political language about race has consequences and that people should not be judged or excluded on the basis of their ethnicity.
Her critics therefore accuse her of applying different standards depending on who is being racially described.
That is a political and ethical criticism rather than a scientific one, but it is not answered simply by pointing to the reality of climate inequality.
Climate responsibility is real — but it can be measured more precisely
The strongest version of the climate-justice argument does not require racial shorthand.
Historical emissions can be measured.
Current emissions can be measured.
Per-capita emissions can be measured.
Consumption emissions can be estimated.
Corporate fossil-fuel production can be traced.
Household emissions can be compared by income.
Countries’ financial capacity to fund climate adaptation can also be compared.
Each measure produces a different distribution of responsibility.
Using historical emissions places greater responsibility on the United States and Europe.
Using current annual emissions makes China central.
Using emissions per person places affluent societies under greater pressure.
Using income highlights the enormous climate footprint of the richest households regardless of nationality or race.
That complexity is inconvenient for political slogans but essential for serious climate policy.
The disaster also exposed failures closer to Nepal
Global emissions are only one part of what determined the scale of the tragedy.
Nepal’s geography leaves communities exceptionally vulnerable to sudden Himalayan hazards.
The flood destroyed monitoring equipment and moved through narrow valleys with extraordinary speed.
Scientists and disaster specialists have also raised questions about the location and resilience of hydropower infrastructure, warning systems and the ability to evacuate communities downstream from high-altitude hazards.
In other words, climate change can increase the danger while local infrastructure, preparedness and development decisions influence how many people ultimately die.
Reducing the tragedy to a contest over racial guilt risks obscuring those practical lessons.
Better glacier monitoring, stronger cross-border warning systems, safer infrastructure and greater adaptation funding could determine whether the next Himalayan collapse kills thousands or whether communities have enough warning to escape.
A political argument wrapped around a scientific disaster
There are therefore two claims embedded in the controversy around Faruqi.
The first is that climate change is disproportionately harming poorer countries that contributed relatively little to the atmospheric accumulation causing warming.
There is substantial evidence for that argument, and Nepal itself is now making it internationally.
The second is that the responsibility is usefully characterised through “white men” dominating billionaire wealth.
That is a political framing, not a scientific attribution of the Nepal flood.
It highlights genuine historical and economic inequalities but also risks implying collective racial responsibility where emissions data tell a more complicated story.
Ben Fordham and other critics went too far if their claim is understood literally to mean Faruqi said rich white men physically caused the glacier to collapse.
Faruqi went further than necessary when she inserted race into an argument that can be made more accurately through emissions, wealth, fossil-fuel production and historical responsibility.
Meanwhile, Nepal is left with the reality beneath the rhetoric.
More than a thousand people are dead.
Thousands remain missing.
Communities have disappeared beneath mud and rock.
A country responsible for a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions faces reconstruction costs measured in billions of dollars.
That inequity deserves serious debate.
The challenge for politicians is to conduct it in a way that clarifies who is responsible for emissions and who can help pay for the damage — rather than replacing one complicated global problem with another argument about race.
