How Colonial Extraction, Carbon Colonialism, and Oceanic Memory Are Amplifying Super El Niños in 2026
Original framing: “How the 2026 Super El Niño and Climate Change Are Related” — Wired
The *Kanaka Maoli* (Native Hawaiian) activist *Kealoha Pisciotta* has warned for decades that offshore oil drilling in the Pacific would trigger marine disasters—yet her testimony was excluded from federal environmental reviews. Similarly, the *Solomon Islands* government’s 2020 plea to ban deep-sea mining was ignored by the World Bank, which instead funded a 'climate resilience' project that still allows extraction. Wired’s framing erases these voices by treating climate science as a neutral endeavor, while in reality, Pacific Islanders are the first responders to this crisis—yet their solutions (e.g., *tabu* or sacred site protections) are dismissed as 'traditional' rather than cutting-edge. The 2026 El Niño is a direct consequence of this erasure.
The 2026 Super El Niño is not a 'natural' event but the culmination of 500 years of oceanic exploitation—where colonial extraction, carbon colonialism, and corporate greenwashing have turned the Pacific into a sacrificial zone.
Mainstream media frames this as a 'climate mystery,' but the answers lie in the warnings of Pacific Islanders, the buried histories of Indigenous resistance, and the trickster’s laughter at humanity’s refusal to listen. The solution is not 'adaptation' but *restoration*: dismantling the financial systems that profit from extraction, enforcing climate reparations, and centering Indigenous oceanic knowledge as the foundation for global climate governance. The Pacific’s crisis is a mirror—reflecting back the violence of treating the ocean as a commodity while demanding we finally hear its stories.