In honor of the day commemorating Christopher Columbus’s noble “discovery” of a land where millions of people had already been living for millennia, last week the WSJ opinion page ran a piece defending European imperialism. Seems Columbus doesn’t deserve the bad rap he’s been getting because Europeans were once enslaved too, and because colonizers imposed on conquered groups the idea that “one group of people didn’t have the right to impose its will on another group.”
Apparently thinking non-Europeans needed yet another slap in the face, the Journal then published a second offensively white-privileged piece on Friday, this time by handsomely paid, serial deceiver Bjorn Lomborg. In the past, he’s misled Bangladeshis on sea level rise, and now he turned his lopsided sights on the Marshall Islands.
Lomborg calls the many well-reported stories on how residents of the Marshall Islands and other Pacific Islanders are struggling to cope with rising waters merely “hype and exaggeration.” Which must surely be comforting to Nuatambu, where half of the village’s houses have sunk since 2011. How pleased these people will be to find out that the salt water killing their crops and rendering drinking wells unusable is just “hype.”
The basis for his claim is a study that suggests that through the 20th century to 2010, not all of the Marshall Islands sunk, and some grew. In true Columbus fashion, this is a “discovery” that is of course already well-known. Coral reefs are living things that, like all living things, grow over time, so islands built on them will always grow as quickly as the coral colonies expand.
But what Lomborg doesn’t mention is that the rate at which islands expanded slowed significantly in the post-1970 period, suggesting that in the future the shoreline growth will be overcome by the sea’s rise. He also points to a second study looking at more islands and finding again that many are growing. But just because some parts of some islands are growing doesn’t mean that those that are sinking will remain habitable.
Then, grinding (white) salt into the wound, Lomborg nastily suggests that the real reason for Marshallese immigration to the US isn’t climate change, but instead people are fleeing their ancestral homes because their country is poor, corrupt and violent. (And of course he didn’t bother to mention the still-unresolved displacement issues from the US using the Marshall Islands to test atomic bombs, which was discussed in the report he cited to highlight the country’s problems.)
After effectively telling Pacific Islanders the loss of their homeland is just exaggeration, Lomborg pivots back to his trusty talking point that action on climate is a poor use of resources. He predictably relies on his study which real experts said “appears to have no basis in fact.”
But of course that doesn’t stop Lomborg from trying to impose his billionaire-funded, pro-corporate agenda on the developing world. Perhaps someone should tell him that thanks to his ever-benevolent imperialist European forefathers, the world now knows “one group of people [don’t] have the right to impose its will on another group.”
Unless, apparently, they are writing for the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page.