On a recent episode of Bollywood actor Soha Ali Khan’s podcast, actor and UN Environment Programme goodwill ambassador Dia Mirza made a statement that immediately went viral and drew swift ridicule online.
Discussing climate change alongside environmental journalist Arati Kumar-Rao, Mirza said: “It is the men in this world. It is the men who have driven climate change, and they are totally responsible for the chaos.”
The backlash arrived within hours and followed a familiar script. Online commenters accused her of oversimplifying, of “ignoring the complexity of climate change,” of fake feminism dressed up as activism.
One widely shared response mocked her credibility entirely, dismissing the comment as celebrity virtue-signaling detached from “real” science. The viral clips, predictably, stripped her words of context.
Almost no one engaging with the outrage cycle noted that Mirza was speaking within the framework of ecofeminism – a scholarly discipline with decades of peer-reviewed literature examining the links between environmental exploitation and patriarchal domination.
Also it wasn’t noted that Kumar-Rao, sitting beside her, had clarified in the same breath that patriarchy is not simply about gender but “a broader system of values and power structures” that anyone can uphold.
This gap between what Mirza actually argued and how it was received is not incidental, rather it represents the entire story.
Mirza was not claiming that climate science simply reduces to gender politics, nor that individual men personally willed planetary catastrophe into being.
She was naming a structural reality that fifty years of climate diplomacy has been engineered to avoid: the institutions that built, financed, and continue to defend the fossil fuel economy are not gender-neutral abstractions.
They are concrete hierarchies of decision-making power, and those hierarchies have been overwhelmingly male for the entirety of the industrial era.
Look at the record without flinching.
The oil and gas executives who possessed internal research confirming catastrophic warming decades before the public did – and buried it – were men.
The shareholders who rewarded that concealment with record profits were, disproportionately, men.
The finance ministers who continue to funnel public subsidies into fossil fuel infrastructure, even as they sign climate accords with the other hand, are overwhelmingly men.
The architects of the global trade and debt systems that force resource-dependent nations in the Global South to keep extracting, regardless of ecological cost, have been men.
This is not a coincidence requiring elaborate theory to explain. It is the plainest possible reading of who has held the pen on every major decision that brought the planet to its current state.
Critics who call this reductive are, ironically, the ones flattening the argument.
Acknowledging that climate science involves atmospheric chemistry, ocean currents, and feedback loops does not somehow erase the prior question of who built the machine releasing the carbon in the first place.
These are not competing explanations. One is physical mechanism; the other is political cause.
Demanding that Mirza account for thermodynamics before she’s allowed to discuss power is a rhetorical trick – a way of using complexity as a shield against accountability, precisely the maneuver fossil fuel interests have deployed for decades to delay action.
And the “what about women who also pollute” rebuttal collapses under the slightest scrutiny.
Yes, women participate in economies built by others. A factory worker and a factory owner both have a “carbon footprint,” but only one of them designed the factory, lobbied against its regulation, and profited from its expansion.
Treating these as equivalent is not nuance. It is a deliberate erasure of agency and power—the same erasure that allows multinational executives to talk about “individual responsibility” and “personal carbon footprints” while their own industries account for the overwhelming share of global emissions.
The gendered distribution of climate consequences makes the cruelty of this erasure starker still.
Environmental justice research has repeatedly documented that women in the Global South – who had essentially zero input into the industrial decisions of the last two centuries – bear the heaviest burden of drought, displacement, and resource scarcity.
They walk further for water, absorb the shocks of failed harvests, and are first displaced when land becomes uninhabitable. The people least responsible for the crisis are paying its steepest price, while the people most responsible face, at most, a strongly worded UN report.
If that is not a story about power, what is it a story about?
Perhaps the most damning evidence in Mirza’s favour is the reaction itself. Within hours, a woman with over a decade of sustained environmental advocacy – UN ambassadorship, field reporting, years of public campaigning – was reduced online to a punchline, her analysis treated as too stupid to merit response.
Compare that to the silence reserved for the men actually running the institutions she was describing.
No oil executive faces this kind of viral pile-on for a single sentence. No finance minister gets mocked by millions for a comment made in passing on a podcast.
The asymmetry is the argument. Women who name power get ridiculed; the men who hold it get to keep operating undisturbed.
None of this requires hatred of men as individuals, and Mirza never suggested otherwise. It requires only the willingness to look at institutions as they actually are, staffed and led by whom they actually have been, and ask why that fact is treated as more controversial than the climate data itself.
A serious climate politics has to stop flinching at this question. It must name who built the systems, who profits from their continuation, and who is left to absorb the consequences.
Dia Mirza did exactly that, in one sentence, on a podcast. The backlash didn’t refute her. It demonstrated, in real time, precisely the dynamic she was describing.
Jannatul Naym Pieal is a writer, researcher and journalist. He can be reached at jn.pieal@gmail.com
