It Took Us a While to Start Saying 'Climate Change.' Now We'll Start Saying 'Climate Refugees.'

From Esquire

While the Republican presidential nomination process crashed clamorously to earth like a planeload of pots and pans, the nation was distracted from noticing that The New York Times took a deep dive into the fact that the Great Climate Change Hoax-which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has called a hoax designed by those clever Chinese-is beginning to cost the United States the countless billions it is going to cost the United States when all is said and drowned. From the Times:

Ms. Bourg, a custodian at a sporting goods store on the mainland, lives with her two sisters, 82-year-old mother, son and niece on land where her ancestors, members of the Native American tribes of southeastern Louisiana, have lived for generations. That earth is now dying, drowning in salt and sinking into the sea, and she is ready to leave. With a first-of-its-kind "climate resilience" grant to resettle the island's native residents, Washington is ready to help. "Yes, this is our grandpa's land," Ms. Bourg said. "But it's going under one way or another."

The people of this small place now have a $48 million HUD grant to move their entire town to some place less likely to be devoured by the rising sea. Regular visitors to this shebeen know of my affection for the people of Shishmaref, the settlement on a barrier island in Arctic Alaska facing the same climate-related dilemma now facing the citizens of Ile de Jean Charles. And, as you can imagine, they are not alone, either.

Around the globe, governments are confronting the reality that as human-caused climate change warms the planet, rising sea levels, stronger storms, increased flooding, harsher droughts and dwindling freshwater supplies could drive the world's most vulnerable people from their homes. Between 50 million and 200 million people-mainly subsistence farmers and fishermen-could be displaced by 2050 because of climate change, according to estimates by the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security and the International Organization for Migration. "The changes are underway and they are very rapid," Interior Secretary Sally Jewell warned last week in Ottawa. "We will have climate refugees."

I'm already nauseated by how this is going to be handled in a political system in which He, Trump will soon be briefed on the most sensitive data that the intelligence community has. The early returns are not promising at all.

But since 1955, more than 90 percent of the island's original land mass has washed away. Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island, and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands' sediments. Some of the island was swept away by hurricanes. What little remains will eventually be inundated as burning fossil fuels melt polar ice sheets and drive up sea levels, projected the National Climate Assessment, a report of 13 federal agencies that highlighted the Isle de Jean Charles and its tribal residents as among the nation's most vulnerable. Already, the homes and trailers bear the mildewed, rusting scars of increasing floods. The fruit trees are mostly gone or dying thanks to saltwater in the soil. Few animals are left to hunt or trap.

How do we make the necessary adjustments given the fact that half our political system doesn't think that anything is happening at all, or that it's happening but that it's too expensive to fight or too much of a sacrifice to resist? Once again, it doesn't matter who wins the day-to-day political argument, the seas are still going to rise.

Whether to leave is only the first of the hard questions: Where does everyone go? What claim do they have to what is left behind? Will they be welcomed by their new neighbors? Will there be work nearby? Who will be allowed to join them? "This is not just a simple matter of writing a check and moving happily to a place where they are embraced by their new neighbors," said Mark Davis, the director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy. "If you have a hard time moving dozens of people," he continued, "it becomes impossible in any kind of organized or fair way to move thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or, if you look at the forecast for South Florida, maybe even millions."

I get the awful feeling that, somewhere in a very nice office, judgments are being made as to which people are worthy of being saved and which people should be left to fend for themselves, and that, as the years go by, these decisions are going to become easier for some people to make.

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