Nowhere to Run - TomDispatch.com

Nowhere to Run - TomDispatch.com Think of Donald Trump as, in his own fashion, a creature of climate change. After all, in 2015, he descended that escalator into the election race denouncing immigrants at the southern border (those "Mexican rapists") and calling for a "big, fat, beautiful wall" to be built along those very lands. As 2024 begins, his people are already preparing for a Trumpian future of vast detention camps (or, if you prefer, "concentration camps") for staggering numbers of immigrants (and god knows who else), many of whom will head for the U.S. because of the devastation that climate change is already delivering elsewhere on Earth. And it's a phenomenon that will only grow so much worse in the decades to come. After all, as the New York Times recently reported, "The number of asylum cases pending in U.S. immigration courts has surpassed one million, up from about 750,000 in 2022, and from barely 110,000 a decade ago. Another one million cases being assessed by asylum officers are also pending, more than double the number two years ago." And increasing numbers of them are climate refugees. We are, in other words, entering a new world. Just imagine that, according to the experts on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, over the next three decades, up to 143 million people globally could be turned into climate refugees, "uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures and other climate catastrophes." And mind you, that isn't by any means the largest number of climate refugees predicted. Try, for instance, the 1.2 billion by 2050 suggested by the Institute for Economics and Peace. Sadly, should Donald Trump win the presidency again in 2024, he will have done so by campaigning on his own fantastic, mocking version of "climate change," which goes like this: “The world is going to be destroyed because the oceans are going to rise 1/100 of an inch within the next 300 years. It’s going to kill everybody.” Yes, indeed, only 1/100th of an inch! And to ensure that unreality, the man who has sworn from day one of his next presidency that he will "drill, drill, drill" will undoubtedly lend quite a hand to making so many of the rest of us climate refugees on this wounded planet of ours (not to speak of putting Mar-a-Lago underwater). And with that, take a moment with TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon to consider just what it means to be a refugee on Planet Earth in these grim years and those to come. Tom