As the great big ginormous huge climate march gets underway in NYC today, there is an underlying anxiety about what to call those millions of migrants who marchers claim will be displaced as the ice caps melt and oceans rise and gobble up all the land and homes and send the people running for their lives.
Climate refugees coming to a town near you? I love this illustration! It comes from Diplo (http://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/climate-refugees-new-concept-move)
We have followed the controversy on and off over the years (see our climate refugees category), but the gist of it is: will these new migrant hordes (the Left is predicting) be refugees in the full sense of the word and thus be eligible to be treated on par with refugees fleeing marauding Muslims like ISIS and be “welcomed” into the West (to be taken care of by taxpayers)?
The word “refugee” is a powerful word in the PR world:
To put it bluntly, those who are helping the “humanitarian” refugees (as originally defined by the UN Refugee Convention) are reluctant to let the “climate refugee” agitators dilute the PR message and horn in on their lucrative territory.
And, the climate justice people are loath to get into a battle with their fellow Leftists, thus the wrangling continues.
As you know, NNIRR has been striving to make the connections between climate change, migration and human rights. It is an intersection that is finally beginning to emerge in more popular discussions in the broad climate change movement, although understandings are still uneven and often uninformed. There is even an important question of “definition”, as we note in the attached fact sheet:
There is a growing, unresolved debate on defining “climate migrant” or “climate/environmental refugee“:
~Some argue that there is a need to define a new class of climate refugees who have been forcibly displaced by the effects of climate change and that they be given special protections and status (such as refugee status under the Refugee Convention) and even redress for this injustice.
~Others suggest that defining a special class of climate refugees would create a hierarchy of immigrants, and would split and differentiate climate refugees from economic refugees, who are all affected by the same global economic and political system.
The issue has been emerging for a number of years on the international level, and has become part of the global program of advocacy work that NNIRR and partners are involved in under the broad umbrella of “migrants in crisis.”
Learn more about “climate justice” if you feel like it, here.
For the first time, New Zealand officials have accepted a refugee application by a family from Tuvalu that cites global warming as the reason they can’t return to their sinking Pacific island nation. Although there are other reasons why their application was accepted, including their previous time spent living in New Zealand, it is a significant first step towards countries dealing with climate change refugees. “I do see the decision as being quite significant,” Environmental law expert Vernon Rive told the New Zealand Herald .
The International Refugee Convention still does not recognize climate change as a legitimate cause for displacement, though some have seen the Tuvalu family’s acceptance as a sign that things might be about to change.
We have 36 previous posts in our ‘climate refugee’ categoryfor your further reading pleasure. You should know that environmentalists are at loggerheads with the “humanitarians” on the issue of changing international refugee law to add the weather as an excuse for the creation of more refugees in need of placement in the first world.
Climate refugees coming to a town near you? I love this illustration! It comes from Diplo (http://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/climate-refugees-new-concept-move)
Just when you thought the hysteria had cooled, here we go again!
Back in 2009, it was 200 million climate refugees according to this article in the NYT:
There could be 200 million of these climate refugees by 2050, according to a new policy paper by the International Organization for Migration, depending on the degree of climate disturbances.
Now the claim is up to 5 times that by 2050 in the space of five years, at this rate of increase, the entire world population will be ‘climate refugees’ by 2050.
The above is ‘Watts up’s’ lead-in to the Smithsonian article.
The International Organization for Migration is another US State Department contractor which presently plays a large role in getting refugees prepped to come to the US.
We have a whole category on ‘climate refugees’ here.
And, consequently more civil wars and more refugees.
The article is illustrated with this photo of Syrians on the move.
Just when I thought they had gone away, the previously discredited IPCC is back finishing up a new report that for the first time says world conflicts will be exacerbated by global warming.
For new readers we have a whole category on ‘climate refugees’ but haven’t seen much lately in the news on the subject, so let’s catch up.
This will be one more reason why you will be told to “welcome” refugees to your cities and towns.
In an authoritative report due out Monday a United Nations climate panel for the first time is connecting hotter global temperatures to hotter global tempers. Top scientists are saying that climate change will complicate and worsen existing global security problems, such as civil wars, strife between nations and refugees.
They’re not saying it will cause violence, but will be an added factor making things even more dangerous. Fights over resources, like water and energy, hunger and extreme weather will all go into the mix to destabilize the world a bit more, says the report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The summary of the report is being finalized this weekend by the panel in Yokohama.
That’s a big change from seven years ago, the last time the IPCC addressed how warming affected Earth, said report lead author Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Science in California. The summary that political leaders read in early 2007 didn’t mention security issues will, he said, because of advances in research.
“There’s enough smoke there that we really need to pay attention to this,” said Ohio University security and environment professor Geoff Dabelko, one of the lead authors of the report’s chapter on security and climate change.
For the past seven years, research in social science has found more links between climate and conflict, study authors say, with the full report referencing hundreds of studies on climate change and conflict.
Read it alland watch for the report which should be available today.
By the way, when you check out our ‘climate refugee’ category, note that there is a conflict among the Leftists (scroll to earlier posts in the category). One side (the humanitarians) doesn’t want the water muddied by changing (broadening) the original definition of “refugee” as someone persecuted due to politics/religion etc, while the enviro-lefties like the word “refugee” because it is catchy (read emotional) for their PR purposes. ‘Climate refugees‘ sure beats ‘people who moved when the climate changed!’ when you are writing press releases.
Normally an article about a Refugee lobbying group in Washington coming out to a rural area to show a “climate refugee” film wouldn’t be of much interest. However, this one caught my eye because the film was being promoted in Wyoming.
New readers need to know that Wyoming is the only state in the union that does not participate in refugee resettlement; and I have no idea how they got out of it in the first place. My suspicions have always centered around the fact that former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson argued against the bill when it was first introduced by Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden in 1979 and perhaps he was able to keep his home state free of the costly-to-taxpayers program.
Refugees may arrive as secondary migrants to Wyoming, but I suspect the number is very small. That is why it was amusing to me to see the rich people in Jackson Hole being ‘educated’ by Refugees International. Refugees International (RI) is NOT a resettlement agency/contractor, yet they travel around the world looking at refugees, writing reports and mucking around in the refugee lobbying scene in Washington. Perhaps they are involved with intelligence gathering (don’t laugh, some of these NGOs have a good cover for doing just that!).
Linda Tripp sued Kenneth Bacon and won.
We wrote about RI a lot a few years ago when they were headed by the now deceased Ken Bacon. ‘Old heads’ will remember that Bacon’s claim to fame was that he illegally released Linda Tripp’s personnel file at the Pentagon in 1998 during Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.
This brings me to the article that caught my eye at Public News Service where we are told RI board memberand Jackson resident, Tatiana Maxwell, showed the film and talked to the press. (Emphasis below is mine)
JACKSON, Wyo. – There’s a warning about a new kind of refugee crisis – one connected to a changing climate. Stories about how climate-related disasters are displacing people around the world are featured in a new film that was shown in Jackson on Sunday. The documentary comes from Refugees International, a nonprofit that works to end displacement crises worldwide.
Refugees International board member Tatiana Maxwell lives in Wyoming, which she admits feels far away from the natural disasters documented by the film – disasters increasing in force and frequency around the world.
“Wyoming has had its own share of refugees coming from different places,” she said. “There will be 250 million people who are going to have to find someplace else to live by 2050.
Really? Wyoming has had its own share??? And, then this, we are going to clear out West Africa and bring them to the rich communities in the west—like Jackson Hole? Not! Just a reminder Kennedy didn’t bring them to Hyannis either, and Biden’s Delaware gets only a tiny handful of refugees!
“This is affecting 20 million people, for instance, in West Africa,” she said. “It’s highly unlikely they’re going to be able to continue to live there. They don’t want to move, but it’s become increasingly impossible for them to live there.”
[….]
Maxwell added that their goal is to make sure people have safe places to live, not to debate the politics of climate change.
So who is Tatiana Maxwell? I didn’t find much, but she and her husband Paul (it appears he may be an energy company executive) are big donors to RI (here).
Their very own special refugee—-the American Taliban!
Do you remember not long after 911, a Taliban spokesman was traveling America to defend the Taliban in Afghanistan? He became known as the American Taliban and got a slot at Yale! His name is Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi and he was here as a representative of Mullah Omar. I don’t know what happened to him after his highly publicized admission to Yale, but guess who helped fund him—Paul and Tatiana Maxwell of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
How is it that people like Hashemi ‘find their way’ to elite neighborhoods?
See this very informative piece from 2006 at Greater Yellowstone entitled ‘Taliban in Jackson Hole’. Author Daryl Hunter is not very kind to Maxwell. Hashemi may be one of the few “refugees” to pass through Wyoming in many years!
By now most Americans have heard about Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the Taliban’s former ambassador-at-large, who is now attending Yale, his education funded by the International Education Foundation, which was created for Hashemi by Jackson Hole residents Mike Hoover, an adventure film maker, Paul and Tatiana Maxwell, and Jackson Attorney Bob Schuster.
Hunter reports that John Fund wrote about Hashemi’s special treatment by Yale:
In his article “Jihadi Turns Bulldog,” printed in the Feb. 26 Wall Street Journal, John Fund wrote about how, during Hashemi’s spring 2001 Taliban public relations blitz, Hashemi visited the Wall Street Journal and told Fund that Osama bin Laden was a “guest” of his government and it hadn’t been proven that bin Laden was linked to any terrorist acts. Hashemi said that if the embassy bombings were terrorist acts, then so was the Clinton administration’s cruise missiles attack in his country in an attempt to kill bin Laden. “You killed 19 innocent people.”
“I felt I had looked into the face of evil,” Fund wrote after Rahmatullah defended the Taliban’s treatment of women and said he hadn’t seen any evidence that their “guest” Osama bin Laden was a terrorist.
In the spring of 2004, Hoover proposed to Hashemi the possibility of attending college in the United States. Hashemi jumped at the opportunity to leave Pakistan to attend school in the U.S.
The Times reported that Bob Schuster, a Yale alum, “called the [Yale] provost’s office to ask how an ex-Taliban envoy with a fourth-grade education and a high-school equivalency degree might go about applying to one of the world’s top universities.” Richard Shaw, dean at Yale, was intrigued and suggested that Rahmatullah come to New Haven for an interview. Shaw said the admissions office once had another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status. “We lost him to Harvard,” he says in the Times. “I didn’t want that to happen again.”
[….]
Fund summarizes: “I don’t believe Mr. Rahmatullah had direct knowledge of the 9/11 plot, and I don’t think he has ever killed anyone. I can appreciate that he is trying to rebuild his life. But he willingly and cheerfully served an evil regime in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud. That he was 22 at the time is little of an excuse. There are many poor, bright students American and foreign alike who would jump at the opportunity to attend Yale. Why should Mr. Rahmatullah go to the line ahead of all of them? That’s a question Yale alumni should ask when their alma mater comes looking for contributions.”
There is a lot more, especially read about the author’s speculation about how it is that western women could possibly support anything the Taliban does in light of how they treat women in Afghanistan which really is the whole point Hunter makes in his piece.
See our Climate Refugees category for more on how the Left is pushing this newest excuse to open borders worldwide.
The international Left is jumping for joy because New Zealand has recognized a first “refugee” family to escape global warming.
Normally an article about a Refugee lobbying group in Washington coming out to a rural area to show a “climate refugee” film wouldn’t be of much interest. However, this one caught my eye because the film was being promoted in Wyoming.
