New research from Cornell, published in PNAS this week, finds that the public vastly underestimates how concerned minority and low-income Americans are about climate change, likely due to the widespread stereotype of environmental concerns being something for wealthy white people who don’t have more pressing problems.
But extreme events like Hurricanes Harvey and Maria have increasingly made it clear that those underserved communities are hit hardest by climate change, and their high level of concern reflects that reality. Importantly, the study found that when subjects were shown a mock-up photo of a diverse (hypothetical) green group, the perception gap between how much they thought people cared and how much people actually do care shrunk, offering yet more evidence that diversity is important to climate action.
Moving from the lab to field work, Alex Harris at the Miami Herald reported Tuesday on Public Citizen’s new report, coproduced with an Emory University researcher and the Farmworker Association of Florida, showing that rising temperatures are putting more and more of Florida’s farm workers in danger. They documented that outdoor workers regularly faced dangerously hot conditions this past summer, with those doing very heavy labor working in dangerous conditions 76% of the time.
Since heavy agriculture work in the US largely relies on undocumented immigrants, it’s likely that dangerous conditions and impacts go underreported.
For those not in denial, the fact that the people working to feed us are doing so in dangerous conditions should be both upsetting and motivating. For those in denial, any connection of climate change and immigration issues is an unwelcome thought that must be rationalized away or flatly rejected.
For example, in response to a piece in the Guardian detailing how climate change is one of the drivers of the migrant caravan, Anthony Watts goes full FoxNews Grandpa. He described the story, which documents how repeated (climate amplified) droughts that cause crop failures are sending farmers in search of a better way to feed their family, as “journalistic bullhockey.”
He then said the “‘climate driver’ idea is just as stupid as the idea that these people are making the trek of over 2000 miles on their own, walking the entire way, without assistance, timing the arrival to coincide with just before the U.S. elections, so they can be front page news, and used to elicit sympathy for one party while being used to attack the other.”
Yes, according to Watts, poor, starving immigrants have uprooted their entire lives and begun walking thousands of miles in order influence the US midterms. Because everything, everywhere, around the world, is always about how those pesky liberals are pulling the strings to make conservatives look bad.
This, to deniers, is a sensible sentiment. And even the relatively sane ones are apparently finding the climate connection hard to believe. “As best I can tell,” Ryan Maue tweeted, the caravan-climate angle is “completely made up” and “#FakeNews is everywhere especially in weather & climate.” (Yes, the “relatively” in “relatively sane” is doing a lot of work...)
But the climate-carvan-connection news is certainly not fake. As Alex Kaufman at HuffPo writes this week, how we respond to these immigration issues is going to matter a whole lot as the climate continues to change. Deniers clearly aren’t going to see that this obvious climate impact is causing what they consider to be a major problem (aka people who aren’t Norwegian White coming to America) and aren’t going to respond by addressing a root cause: fossil fuel emissions.
Instead, they’ll do what authoritarians do, and send in the troops to use military force to enforce the (white) nationalist status quo.
Sad as Watts’s and Maue’s mental contortions are, they’re hardly the only climate deniers with conspiratorial mindsets. As Scott Waldman at E&E reported on Tuesday, a raft of climate-change-denying conservative pundits have spent the last week as “bomb deniers,” casting doubt on the reality of and perpetrator behind the string of mail bomb terrorist attacks. They doubted whether the bombs were real at all, or whether they were actually sent by “some progressive psycho” in the words of Steve Milloy.
Whether you want to deny the reality of climate change, or how it can be a trigger or driver of immigration, or that your President’s constant attacks on the press and politicians found fertile ground in a fevered mind, the playbook is the same.
Call the problem a hoax and blame it on a shadowy elite using “fake news” to achieve their own nefarious goals at the expense of an unwitting public. Whether the cabal is communist climate scientists, progressives mailing themselves bombs or wealthy Jewish liberals supposedly funding migrant caravans, it doesn’t matter how crazy it sounds so long as it gives aggrieved and entitled white men a scapegoat to attack.
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