"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," wrote Robert Frost in 1914.
I thought of this poem when I read a recent Esquire piece by Charles P. Pierce citing an Associated Press article about Big Oil asking for a sea wall to protect refineries from storms and higher tides due to climate change. Texas is seeking $12 billion for a coastal spine, to come from public funds. In July, the government fast-tracked $3.9 billion for three smaller storm-barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities.
Exxon and Shell knew at least by the 1970s that global warming would result from burning fossil fuels. In the '80s, the companies paid the same lobbyists who had worked to create doubt about the dangers of tobacco to create doubt about the science of climate change, according to Merchants of Doubt. Although in the last few years Exxon and Shell have professed support of a Carbon Tax, and have pledged to end support for climate science deniers, ExxonMobil gave $1.5 million last year to 11 think tanks and lobby groups that reject established climate science and openly oppose the oil and gas giant's professed climate policy preferences, according to the company's annual charitable giving report released last month.
President Trump also wants a wall built at someone else's expense to deter immigration from Latin America that is termed "illegal." This wall would be an attempt to shield the U.S. from the consequences of our incursions into Latin America that the U.S. didn't call illegal at the time. Mark Rosenfelder, in U.S. Interventions in Latin America, (1996), lists about 90, including:
• 1846--War with Mexico which ends up with the U.S. claiming a third of Mexico's territory.
• From 1921 to 1954--CIA military support for United Fruit, which toppled democratically elected governments and replaced them with military rule in Guatemala, leading to the killing of 100,000 citizens over 30 years.
• 1946--The U.S. Army opened the School of the Americas in Panama, which has trained over 64,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, "disappeared," massacred, and forced into exile by those trained at the SOA.
We must acknowledge that U.S.-backed military coups and corporate plundering has contributed to the instability and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. We must also acknowledge the role of climate change in driving people north.
Research published in the journal Climatic Change in March 2017 details the severe consequences of climate change in Central America. Senior scientist Lee Hannah writes, "These results show that climate change will have major impacts on crop productivity and smallholders in Central America. The effects of climate change are already evident in Central America, with changes in rainfall, temperature and water availability affecting the region's large population of smallholder farmers. Their crops reliant on rainfall, these farmers are especially vulnerable to changes in climatic conditions and often have limited financial resources and capacity to cope with climate stresses and shocks."
Todd Miller, in his book Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, writes that global projections for the number of people displaced by climate change by 2050 range from about 150 million to 1 billion.
There are many walls in our society: prison walls, gated communities, and unseen walls such as racism and policies like "red-lining" that have forced many poor and minority citizens to live in areas that are dominated by toxic dumps and, well, oil refineries.
Charles Pierce ends his Esquire piece by pointing out: "But, last year, I drove up the path of Hurricane Harvey, from the Gulf of Mexico to Houston, and I saw small towns and their small business in sticks and splinters. I saw people living in tents because their roofs were somewhere in the next county. And the fact remains that these companies go out of their way to put their facilities in some of the country's poorest neighborhoods."
To protect those neighborhoods, he concludes we should build the wall.
But I think these walls are futile. We can't wall out an ocean that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects will rise by 3-8 feet by 2100, nor all the refugees displaced by disappearing islands and coasts. We must acknowledge that U.S. exploitation of nature and people has contributed significantly to climate change and millions of desperate refugees, and take appropriate action to mitigate what effects we still can for the future: Enact a carbon fee and dividend, develop strategies to sequester CO2 already accumulated, fund projects that enable refugees to thrive in their native countries, and for those whose homelands have already or will disappear or become unlivable, create a respectful path to U.S. citizenship.
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Shelley Buonaiuto of Fayetteville is a member of Citizens' Climate Lobby.
Editorial on 09/15/2018