The Climate Crisis and Mass Migration: Trump is Marching Us Towards a Dystopian Final Solution
". . . the very migration that Trump and company are seeking to crack down on is increasingly fueled by climate change, extreme heat and weather, crop failures, and conflict . . ."
Amid the deluge of shock and awe executive orders and the slashing and burning of federal agencies and funding across the board, climate has received little notice from the public, but the efforts to defund research and attack climate science have been a central focus of the Trump administration. As I noted in my column on the LA fires in this space, the attack on climate science is essentially a war on reality that Trump needs to win to prevent public knowledge of the catastrophic impacts of his agenda.
But climate change doesn’t care about political reality. It is a harsh task master that will relentlessly punish us no matter how hard we try to deny its existence. We can pull out of the Paris Accord, fire climate scientists, and purge universities, yet the hard edges of our new climate reality will continue to cut through the veil of self-imposed ignorance.
As we watched the devastation in Los Angeles unfold, one of the most important climate scientists in the world delivered sobering news that the emerging truth about our situation is worse than we had thought. According to the Guardian:
The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is “dead”.
A new analysis by Hansen and colleagues concludes that both the impact of recent cuts in sun-blocking shipping pollution, which has raised temperatures, and the sensitivity of the climate to increasing fossil fuels emissions are greater than thought . . .
The world’s nations pledged in Paris in 2015 to keep global temperature rise below 2C above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C. The climate crisis has already supercharged extreme weather across the world with just 1.3C of heating on average in recent years destroying lives and livelihoods – 2C would be far worse.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is busy flooding the Environmental Protection Agency with fossil fuel industry executives, putting another in as head of the Department of Energy, and placing a key ally of the coal, gas, and oil lobby in to lead the Interior Department. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists are being told to make lists of offensive research and climate-related grants, and the prominent corporate-funded climate denial group, the Heartland Institute, is developing plans to substitute their work for serious science on climate.
Like Winston Smith in 1984, these folks and their minions will surely be eager to eliminate any thought crime that seeks to verify the existence of a climate crisis by simply putting the bad ideas we must not think down the memory hole while we drill ourselves closer and closer to the point of no return. Hanson argues that such a fate can be avoided but for the fact that “Special interests have assumed far too much power in our political systems. In democratic countries the power should be with the voter, not with the people who have the money. That requires fixing some of our democracies, including the US.”
From his mouth to God’s ear.
Sadly, at present, rather than moving towards democratic reform, we are closer to the midpoint of the dystopian novel that is contemporary American and global politics with another painfully ironic twist in the plot being that the very migrationthat Trump and company are seeking to crack down on is increasingly fueled by climate change, extreme heat and weather, crop failures, and conflict that will, more and more, come with global warming. In fact, with some experts predicting that the world will see 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050, the current resources that we have deployed will simply be unable to address such a surge.
Barring a dramatic turn in our politics, the current rightward trajectory would then point us toward the ever further militarization of our borders and more intrusive law enforcement interventions in our cities, workplaces, schools, and other social spaces along with even more vicious attacks on immigrants and their defenders with an accompanying assault on the civil and legal rights of all Americans.
On that note, Tennessee legislators penned another chapter in our apocalyptic tale with a bill criminalizing lawmakerswho don’t support Trump immigration policies:
Tennessee state senator told Newsweek Thursday that representatives were afraid to vote against immigration policies, even if they could be deemed unconstitutional.
Democratic state Senator Heidi Campbell, whose 20th District covers Nashville's inner suburbs, was speaking after state legislators approved a bill Tuesday that would make it illegal for lawmakers to vote for policies perceived as opposing President Donald Trump's agenda—namely sanctuary procedure.
The bill, which includes provision for a state-based immigration enforcement agency, was passed in the state's Republican-led Senate, despite opposition from both GOP and Democratic Party members.
"You don't have to spend a lot of time up at the legislature to see that we are living in a totalitarian state," Campbell told Newsweek.
The dystopian political reality being created by Trump is one where, among many other evils, we are forced to live in a world where those who are trying to save us from rushing down the road to mass extinction are defunded and/or fired, those profiting from our demise are elevated to power, and the desperate poor who come to cross our border are punished for fleeing a climate-induced reality of our making. And if you dare to object to this deranged new normal, you risk grave peril for exercising what used to be a guaranteed legal right in our democracy.
Of course, Trump is failing to achieve mass deportations and likely will continue to do so, but all the while, he will use the issue to inflict trauma and fear on an epic scale. In that way, this is all useful for him, and it is fair to ask whether keeping us in a permanent “war” on immigration is itself part of the plan. It divides us, diverts our attention from the planned redistribution of wealth to the very rich and the climate catastrophe at our door, and helps undercut and erode the infrastructure of democracy and any political resistance.
How far do we have to go until we reach the final chapter? Nobody knows, but only we can write a better story if we can summon the courage to do so.