Climate refugees or overpopulation escapees?
"Climate refugees" is the latest globalist tactic to promote unlimited mass migration into Western nations. The rationale is that developed Western nations caused purported climate change, so they should pay the price of climate-displaced mass migration.
The following article discusses the issue of climate refugees in the context of the fundamental driving issue: overpopulation.
Climate refugees or overpopulation escapees? by Philip Cafaro, Overpopulation Project, 3 August 2020. Here are a few excerpts:
... many Americans have grown tired of accepting a seemingly endless stream of migrants. Some have begun to connect the dots between mass immigration, relentless population growth and environmental deterioration in the U.S.; and between mass immigration, flooded labor markets and stagnant working-class wages...
Enter a new moral argument for more immigration built around the concept of "climate refugees." A common version goes like this:
1) Excessive consumption and fossil fuel use in wealthy developed countries, particularly the U.S., has caused climate change.
2) Climate change is creating millions of climate refugees - people who through no fault of their own can no longer live in their home countries - and in the coming decades their ranks could swell into the hundreds of millions.
3) "They" are desperate because of what "we" have done.
Conclusion: Americans, western Europeans and citizens of other developed countries are morally obligated to open their borders to anyone and everyone from the developing world.
Corporations will still get cheap workers and ever more consumers...
First, very little global immigration is currently driven by climate change and it isn't clear that this will change much in the future. It might, but so far the evidence isn't there...
According to the Times‘ own model, at most 5% of Central American migration during the next three decades might be driven primarily by climate change. In other words, at least 95% will be driven primarily by other causes...
Guatemala, the focus of the [Times] article, had 3 million people in 1950; it numbers 18 million people today - a six-fold increase - and continues to grow rapidly as a result of a fertility rate way above replacement level. Guatemala was never going to create enough jobs and economic opportunity for that many people in so short a time...
This illustrates a second problem with the "climate refugee" argument for open borders: it will make climate change worse. For a start, moving hundreds of millions of people from developing to developed countries will increase those people's greenhouse gas emissions. The evidence for this is clear and unambiguous...
Ever the Unacknowledged Elephant in the Room - Shoehorning Every Crisis into a Climate Box - All While Ignoring Population, Of Course, by Madeline Weld, Ph.D., Population Institute Canada, 30 November 2022:
... Somalia's population has increased from 2.8 million in 1960 to 17 million today. This greater than 6-fold increase in 62 years has occurred despite its large diasporaof refugees fleeing Somalia's endless conflicts. Relative to climate change over the last 62 years, how much did massive population growth and the resultingdeforestationand soil erosion, not to mention so many more people to feed, contribute toSomalia's woes?
Nobody seems to be asking that question although there are two and a half times as many people in danger of starvation now as the total population in 1960...
Ignoring the population connection at our own peril
Ninety percent of global deforestation is caused by agricultural expansion, which is caused by population growth, essentially all of which is occurring in poor countries...
Professor Al Bartlett famously challenged anyone to name even one environmental problem that was not driven or exacerbated by population growth...
In his recent article, The human eco-predicament: Overshoot and the population conundrum, (available online and to be published in print in 2023), University of British Columbia Professor Emeritus and PIC patron Dr. William Rees calculates that population growth accounted for about 80% of the increase in the total human ecological footprint between 1961 and 2016, despite the much larger average per capita consumption levels of rich countries...
The fact is, the human population is in overshoot; that is to say, it has exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth...
Immigration to the United States and World-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions, by Leon Kolankiewicz and Steven A. Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies, August 2008:
The findings of this study indicate that future levels of immigration will have a significant impact on efforts to
reduce global CO 2 emissions. Immigration to the United States significantly increases world-wide CO 2 emissions
because it transfers population from lower-polluting parts of the world to the United States, which is a higher-polluting country. On average immigrants increase their emissions four-fold by coming to America.
Among the findings:
- The estimated CO 2 emissions of the average immigrant (legal or illegal) in the United States are 18 percent less than those of the average native-born American.
- However, immigrants in the United States produce an estimated four times more CO2 in the United States as they would have in their countries of origin.
- U.S. immigrants produce an estimated 637 million metric tons of CO 2 emissions annually - equal to Great Britain and Sweden combined.
- The estimated 637 tons of CO2 U.S. immigrants produce annually is 482 million tons more than they would have produced had they remained in their home countries...
- In recent years, increases in U.S. CO 2 emissions have been driven entirely by population increases as per capita emissions have stabilized.
