How Will Our Civilization Deal with Hundreds of Millions of Climate Refugees?
It’s amazing that the heartbreaking stories of the Syrian refugees haven’t prompted more discussion of the ultimate tragedy associated with people being forced to flee their homes, which will be playing itself out in spades over the coming decades: climate refugees, driven to distant lands that aren’t flooded or parched and barren with drought. This is a point that is certainly not lost on billionaire Elon Musk (pictured), who claims that the current scene in the Middle East and Europe is just a “a glimpse” of what’s about to occur if we fail to address climate change.
One thing you have to admit about Musk: he hasn’t gotten to many things wrong so far.
I do respect Musk for his ability to help others identify major problems in the world.
Of course, I have no respect for the whole “EV” concept, and other than hype the actual performance of the company is bearing out largely as expected… But I respect Musk for his ability to identify a problem, and in some cases – like solarcity and spaceX – his ability to progress us toward solutions.
The problem with climate refugees is they are indistiguishable from poverty refugees… which our society has proven quite adept at ignoring for years.
The first “canary in the coal mine” on climate refugees is increased migration away from the expanding Sahara… But that has been occurring for 30 years, and it hasn’t mobilized much interest or effort in the West.
The second “canary” is going to be the India/Bangladesh border… Most people in the West aren’t even aware that there is a border crisis there, and hence they will not recognize it as that border crisis escalates… and indeed much of that current crisis revolves around overpopulation and too-high-fertility issues.
I suspect that Americans won’t really take notice until we start seeing Florida and Louisiana threatened, that’s far down the list, and won’t be a major factor for another generation at least… but that’s when we’ll be concerned about climate refugees. Europe may take longer than that to really wake up to the problem… It will be poor people being displaced in poor countries, and sadly we don’t really care until it shows up on our shores or the shores of European nations.