Category: Climate refugees

Kiribati: let’s build an island for “climate refugees”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update:  Maybe not so soon!  Breaking News! Record cold temperatures increase thickness of polar ice caps, here.

Taking a break this morning from refugee crime stories, or stories on the Syrian refugee “crisis,” here is a report about how the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati is hoping to deal with a sea level rise that they say will gobble up their country.  If you are wondering who might pay for this expensive project, you can bet they will have their hands out to evil Capitalist nations.

From Stuff.co.nz:

Plans for a $2 billion floating island off Kiribati that would house 30,000 climate refugees and look “like a spaceship” are gaining traction, the island nation’s president, Anote Tong, says.

Kiribati is one of the countries worst affected by rising sea levels as more land is reclaimed, freshwater supplies spoiled and crops killed.

The country could reportedly be uninhabitable by 2030.

In case you were wondering where to find Kiribati!

The Kiribati Government is focused on reinforcing its shores and on resettling its people as it pleads with the world for action on climate change and funds to help combat it.

It has bought land in Fiji to settle and is training its young people so they can find jobs and homes elsewhere and relieve the population burden on the island.

The country cannot sustain its population of about 100,000 with only 800 square kilometres made up of coral atolls.

Land is in short supply and Tong said Kiribati has to try to come up with options, including something as far out as constructing a floating island.

[…..]

 “It’s like a spaceship. When I saw it it was like science fiction.”

No-one had offered to fund it yet and there was no time frame.

[…..]

Those seeking help from the world needed to come up with their own solutions then find funds for them, he said.

We have an entire category on ‘climate refugees.’  Click here for more.   If we run out of refugees from Africa and the Middle East due to Islamist agitation, this is the next big wave of so-called “refugees” we will be expected to resettle in America (because it’s all our fault anyway, don’t ya know!).

Academic: We will have to find new territory to move whole populations of climate refugees….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

….and to insist they have “collective governance” to maintain their cultures.

Professor Shuppert of Queens University Belfast. Maybe he could bring a few climate refugees to his home? Photo from his facebook page.

I can’t believe that anyone is spending time writing an academic paper like this one based on the phoney climate change (first called global warming!) science.  Professor Fabian Shuppert of Queens University Belfast is doing just that.

Haven’t people moved throughout time based on changes in climate and changing environmental factors?  Seems like one big fat excuse for the ‘great minds’ to re-order world governance to me.

His treatise reads like a Socialist wet dream!

You can read his entire 22-page draft, here,  but below are just a few snippets to pique your interest.

It is titled: Governing climate refugees: Self-determination, cultural integrity and finding new territory.  He is talking about moving whole Nations!

Introduction

Global climate change is going to lead to the displacement of millions of human beings.

[….]

The aim of this paper is to focus on a particularly drastic and challenging case of climate refugees, namely the forced migration of a complete nation, and to present a possible governance solution, which plays off both ethical and political considerations.

 The question I want to focus on is if the people of an entire nation have to relocate,where should they go and on the basis of which rights? In so doing, the paper hopes to offer a somewhat realistic picture of how the international community with its diverse array of political, economic and ethical viewpoints might react to the complex challenge of governing entire collectives of climate refugees.

[….]

The paper is divided into three sections. Section one sets out the preliminaries by explaining what kind of migrants the paper talks about and why the case of entire collectives needing a new place to live is a particularly interesting and challenging one,the solution to which might also help in devising appropriate governance in response to other cases of climate refugees. Section two takes a look at different rights all climate refugees might have, such as the right to (individual) free movement and the right to collective self-determination, arguing that future climate refugee governance should be based on collective rights, in conjunction with the protection of every refugee’s individual basic human rights.

Section three offers an account of a possible response to the problem set out in section one in light of the rights discussed in section two, while taking the issue of political interests into account. While the projected solution might not satisfy ideal ethical theory it hopefully offers a convincing account of a rights-based response in a non-ideal world.

So where do we move them?  Shuppert says there is lots of unused land, we must just convince the owners to “hand it over” to the refugees!

Finding territory in general is actually not such a big problem. While there is hardly any un-owned land, there certainly exists plenty of land on which nobody lives and which thus could theoretically be used as a new home for climate refugees. However, the task of finding uninhabited land which is good enough in order to sustain its new population, with the necessary features to satisfy the cultural life world condition is much more difficult. Moreover, and that seems to be possibly the largest obstacle, the current owner of the land would still have to agree to hand over the territory to the climate refugees.

Hey, good luck with that!  Come to think of it, there is a lot of unused land in Saudi Arabia!

For new readers, see our climate refugees category by clicking here.

“Climate refugees” recognized in Gang of Eight bill now before the full Senate

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is one more reason, you must call your Senators today and tomorrow and tell them NO on “comprehensive” immigration reform.  The word is that Janet Napolitano (or her successor) could decide that “climate-change refugees” are worthy of admitting to the US.

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)

For readers who have never heard the preposterous thesis on “climate refugees,” see our special category going back several years, here.

From Curtis Cartier of MSN News:

An amendment in the Senate’s immigration bill would address the flood of people fleeing countries affected by climate change.

TRUE:  Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz’s amendment would potentially give legal status to climate-change refugees

Last week, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) offered an amendment to the immigration-reform bill currently being debated in the U.S. Senate, which would allow certain people fleeing countries that have been made uninhabitable by climate change to obtain legal status to stay in the United States. And with an estimated 32 million people becoming so-called “climate-change refugees” last year, there may be no shortage of applicants.

Schatz’s office sent a statement to MSN News outlining his reasons for introducing the amendment:

“… the immigration bill recognizes that some people in the United States have lost their nationality and are living in the country in limbo. They are not allowed to stay in the United States but they no longer have a home country to which they can return. The immigration bill establishes a new process for someone already in the United States to come forward and apply to be recognized as a ‘stateless person’ so that he or she can remain in the United States legally.”

As for assurance that passing the bill with the amendment wouldn’t prompt an influx of millions of displaced refugees, Schatz’s statement continues:

“The amendment would not allow foreigners to move to the United States because their nation is affected by climate change. This amendment to the immigration bill gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the discretion, but not an obligation, to take into account situations in which a person cannot return to their country because it’s uninhabitable due to climate change.”

Amendment mocked by conservative websites

The very existence of man-made climate change has become a hot-button political topic among certain Republicans and Democrats, and Schatz’s bill has already sparked derision and mocking from right-wing websites. Breitbart.com demanded that Republicans “pull the plug” on the immigration bill over the amendment, and Weasel Zippers compared people fleeing climate change to “refugees who are being terrorized by the Abominable Snowman.

The whole concept is worthy of derision however, those pushing it are dead serious and have been at their mission for years.  Call the Senate!  Here is a good summary of where we are!

Please tweet this and follow me on twitter.  I’m AnnC@Refugee Watcher.

Not called climate refugees anymore! Get ready for the newest refugees!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

OMG!  Can you believe it!  The UN is pushing a new refugee meme that allows them to get around much of the criticism of the hokey idea of climate refugees!    The newest refugees will be:

Coming to a town near you?  Photo is from the Diplo story

Victims-of-disaster-induced-cross-border-displacement

When we wrote some time ago about the climate refugee propaganda campaign we noted that many of the traditional refugee groups (the NGOs), who have long been shuffling people around the globe for reasons of protecting them from an ever-growing list of persecutions, didn’t like the idea of watering-down (he! he!) the long-held definition of a humanitarian refugee by adding the word ‘climate’ in front of it.

Now comes word from Petru Dumitriu writing at Diplo that the climate refugee thesis is coming alive with a new name!

“A new seed has been planted in the fertile soil of the United Nations…”

I [Petru Dumitriu] mentioned en passant [to a group of students] the emergence of a new concept in the humanitarian area: climate change refugees. One of the participants asked me whether the legal status of those forcibly displaced due to climate change was not highly questionable. She was right. But so was I!

At the end of 2011, I noticed that high officials of both the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies invoked, on a few occasions, the existence of a new category of refugees: climate (change) refugees or environmental refugees.

Was that just a figure of speech or a rhetorical expression? Can this turn into a legal term one day?

Well, admittedly, ‘no man is a prophet in his own land’, but I cannot refrain from observing that many political and legal concepts that are now currently used in the United Nations system have been at the beginning just simple enunciations or associations of existing independent terms. Sustainable development, human development, human security, or responsibility to protect  [Samantha Power—ed] were just intellectual constructs trying to marry into a single expression notions that have not been associated as such before.

Enter the Nansen Initiative!

It seems that climate refugees falls into the same category of novel ideas, fragile and vulnerable to criticism about their meaning, be they legal, political or operational. But many of these ideas have the bad habit of making their own way and adapting and developing the same way as the surviving species in Darwin’s theory.

This is obviously happening with the concept of climate refugees. One year after I had heard about it in official meetings, Norway and Switzerland launched the so-called Nansen Initiative. The naked terminology of climate refugees put on new and sophisticated attire. The stage name of the improved version of climate refugees under the chapeau of the Nansen Initiative is A Protection Agenda for Disaster-induced Cross-border Displacement.

Read it all for more of the juicy details about the Nansen Initiative!    Mr. Dumitriu concludes with this:

A new seed has been planted in the fertile soil of the United Nations. Mark my words! We will hear more about the victims-of-disaster-induced-cross-border-displacement, or climate refugees.

For more be sure to see our Climate Refugee category which I began a while ago (end of 2008), but then let languish because I thought the notion so far-fetched.  I guess I better pay more attention now that we know about the Nansen Initiative.

Arab Spring agitators told to get with the green agenda

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The climate refugees are coming!  There needs to be a Green Arab Agenda!

I thought this little blog post at New Generation Consulting was very instructive.  Seems the fomenters of unrest in the Middle East/North Africa went to Europe for some training by the Lefties and got lectured about how they better get on the global warming bandwagon (or at least that’s how I read this post):

I remember witnessing a surreal scene during an international Forum in Northern Europe, in 2011. A group of young Arab pro-democracy actors, heroes of the day, had been gathered for lunch break to meet with one of the Forum leaders. They were duly reminded of the importance of protecting the environment and asked to start promoting ASAP a “green agenda” for their countries. The Arab heroes, slightly taken by surprise, promised politely to do so.

How can you be so disconnected from the realities and preoccupations of the Arab peoples and be so right at the same time?

The latest World Bank report on Adaptation to a changing climate in the Arab countries reminds us that war and peace are not the only matters of life or death in our region.

Assuming that few people in the Arab world would read this fascinating 441 page report, we have decided to select a few striking data about national impact of climate change (CC) at the environmental, social, economic and political levels (table below). This post is but a humble attempt at raising awareness about Climate Change and environmental degradation in the Arab  countries.  At the end of the day, the real missing link for political accountability and a “green Arab agenda” are informed citizens demanding serious change.

Check it out.

Why have I posted this?  Because it’s interesting to me on several levels—first, that the international Left is trying so hard to shoehorn its way into the Islamic supremacist crowd I think not fully understanding that in the long term the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with the Leftist/Marxist agenda.   But, the Arab agitators know that they have to, for the time-being anyway, work with the Lefties and thus, in this case “politely” agree with their collaborators, in the manufacture of chaos, that they are worried about global warming too!

And, the other reason I’m interested is that the drumbeat about “climate refugees” continues, and I want to keep our climate refugees category up to date after having let it languish for some time.