Why Europe’s right-wing nationalists should have climate change mitigation as their top priority
You rarely here nationalist parties talk about international challenges such as climate change. When in fact — by any conceivable logic — this is the only thing they should talk about if their ideals are what they say they are.
To make it obscenely obvious: I do not sympathise with any of the ideologies or politics driven by the numerous right-wing nationalist parties on the rise across Europe. But to make this discussion possible I need to try and put myself into their shoes.
So we should limit (or even stop) immigration? Let us for the moment accept that yes, it costs money, and yes, it causes tension in society. Foreign cultures pressed uncomfortably close to each other and us that claim Europe as ours. People coming here to seek help for free and take resources from other Europeans that might need them.
If we assume that these arguments have merit and that Europe must prevent this — and I mean really prevent it in the long term, then every party identifying with them and with some self-evident idea of patriotism — be it Front National, UKIP, Fidesz and their Scandinavian counterparts — ought to be putting climate change at the top of their political agenda.
According to the UN about 60 million people were displaced in 2014, 1% of the World’s population. The amount refugees seeking asylum has not grown more than 20% since 2004, but the largest increase coming from the so-called IDPs (“internally displaced persons”), which have increased by more than 300% during the same period. Of all the people fleeing from violence only about one-third cross their own countries’ borders.
But even the 60 million figure is an underestimate as it only counts people who flee from violence and conflict. In Asia, for example, 42 million people were forced from their homes between 2010 and 2011 due to extreme weather events, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Scientists have estimated that the number of “climate refugees” amounted to 25 million already in 1995, and estimates of what climate change can cause varies between 150 and 250 million by 2050.
250 million people fleeing from their homes. 3 out of 100 persons with the projected 2050 population (9 billion). Even assuming that the majority will continue to be IDPs, it is a staggering figure that makes the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe shrink in comparison. And what happens when these IDPs can no longer go anywhere within their country’s borders? This increases the risk of conflict significantly, and at worst, we get an exponential increase in war and international refugees. Refugees who will seek out regions that still have relatively stable climate, such as Northern Europe.
The IPCC wrote in 1990 that migration is probably the biggest single consequence of global warming. This migration is enormously expensive and politically destabilising. It should be in all nations’ interest to limit it.
So why are Europe’s most anti-immigrant parties so quiet about the threat of climate change? Why seeking so desperately to shut out families, children — and lots of resourceful, talented people that could actually add great value to Europe’s economy — and not to prevent the causes of an increasingly likely crisis with 5 to 10 times more people from Bangladesh and North Africa within a couple of decades.
If the right wing nationalists are serious about limiting immigration for socio-economic reasons, you should here them talking more often about preventing global warming. In fact you should hear them talking about little else. It is the only reasonable thing to do, the single most important measure to limit the number of refugees in the long term.
Yet they aren’t. Have they just failed to understand the correlation? Or is the alternative conclusion more likely: that there are older and darker reasons for wanting to shut the door on immigrants?
