http://ecoethics.net/2014-ENVRE120/20190113-EV&N-297-Link.html
https://www.cctvcambridge.org/node/612818
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The Continuous “Perfect Storm:”
Climate Change, International Refugees and the Instability Syndrome
As climate change provokes economic hardship around the world and displacement of international climate refugees, governments — particularly in the industrial “North” — find they are shutting down in response to “immigration problems.”
Throughout Europe countries are preoccupied with the “migrant problem” from the Middle East and from the south across the Mediterranean. In England the political right-wing exploited fears of cross-channel immigration from European Union (EU) countries to fuel anxiety and public support for a “Brexit” referendum [promoting the British “exit” from the European Union] — even though, by all calculations this move, would prove a disaster for the average British worker.
In subsequent months, the tortuous and confusing “Brexit negotiations” between Britain and the EU have virtually shut down the British government and may yet topple the conservative party leadership. In the United States the fear of immigration has brought the government to its longest shutdown in history. The President has become obsessed with creating a “wall” to keep out migrants of all kinds fleeing deteriorating living conditions and repressive political regimes, largely brought to power or maintained in their dominant role with U.S. military support.
Beneath all the political instability is the driving force of climate chaos, extreme weather events, sea-level rise and crop failures from excessive rain or abnormal drought resulting from novel and unpredictable weather conditions provoked by a rapidly changing climate.
The re-doubling of the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels by fossil-fuel corporations favored and fostered by the Trump administration has lead to a spike in carbon dioxide emissions which, in turn, will further aggravates climate disruption for years, decades and centuries to come. This pattern of destabilization will continue to generate the grounds for political instability throughout Central and South America in the foreseeable future.
In short, the fossil-fueled industrialization largely imposed upon the global ecosystem by countries from the “global North” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has generated a perpetual “perfect storm” of climate induced desperation. Seeking merely to recover or replicate what made industrial nations “great” in the past will only serve to accentuate and amplify the global instability syndrome currently underway.
In the absence of visionary leadership to make the transition to renewable energy and recycled material systems around the world modern industrial civilization will simply collapse. It has come to depend on non-renewables, and soon it will not be renewed. It will instead be devoured increasingly in country after country by decades of internal civil unrest and heightened international political turmoil.
See related:
- The Collapse of Public Leadership and the Rise of a Citizen-Scientist Alliance for Climate Survival
- Heading Beyond the Point-of-No-Return: National Carbon Policies, “Hothouse Earth” and the Crying Need for Global Leadership
and - Needed: An Honest Cost-Benefit Analysis of Fossil Fuels to Avoid Extinction
Transition Studies 