The administration’s COVID-19 response has been all about borders and China. The same dynamic could play out with climate.
by a bitter dispute over whether to advocate tough immigration restrictions to protect the environment.that by 2050, three regions—Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia—will generate an additional 143 million climate migrants. These are both people forced to relocate by extreme weather events and by humanitarian crises exacerbated by climate change. Already there is compelling evidence thatdriving the recent surge of Central American migration to the United States.
It’s not hard to imagine a future U.S. administration, rather than denying the increasingly obvious reality of climate change, using it to argue that the country needs tougher immigration controls and fewer refugees. The alternative, they will argue, is to be overwhelmed by the human invaders and see our own natural resources depleted in the way other countries already have.
The same will be true on foreign policy. The coronavirus has shown how a crisis that clearly necessitates a globally coordinated response can instead pit countries against one another in a competition for resources and a rush to assign blame.
Trump may be a climate change denier, but that hasn’t stopped him from blaming other countries. Claiming that the U.S. has “some of the cleanest air” in a British TV interview last year,countries: “China, India, Russia, many other nations, they have not very good air, not very good water in the sense of pollution and cleanliness. They don’t do the responsibility.”
The coronavirus has little respect for national borders. Similarly, border security certainly can’t hold back unlivable concentrations of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. But scapegoating foreigners offers ideologues an easier maneuver than denying reality, let alone addressing the real problem. If Trump gets away with making this crisis about immigration, the end of climate denial may not be far off.Readers like you make our work possible.
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