Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Tech are Forcing Migration
Migration, or more specifically immigration, is a topic that is getting louder in our society. Seldom do we ask ourselves, what is driving people to risk life and limb, traveling 1000s of kilometers, resettling in a different region?
A crisis of inconceivable proportions is in the making. As summarized in the United Nations’ Climate Report Spells Disaster in this Newsletter,[1] the fossil fuel giants have neither slowed nor drawn back from producing fossil fuels. Extreme drought, century floods, rising sea levels, and ever more powerful extreme weather events will continue, choking lives and livelihoods. Seeking stable jobs and safe havens to raise and feed their families, millions must relocate. Often, they will as well flee violence, authoritarian governments, corrupt officials, and corporations focused on land acquisition, profiteering, and domination.
In essence, serving as a misery multiplier, climate change and its consequences — unprecedented flooding, warming, drought, food shortages, higher fossil fuel costs, cooling costs — are coming together as a cluster, causing an explosive increase of regional migration spilling over into global migration.
The boatloads fleeing Africa to Europe, the Africans swimming in thousands to Spain, Burundians being sent out of Kenya, and the swelling anger towards migrants out of Zimbabwe and Malawi in South Africa, desperate Latin American migrants stuck or turned back at US borders are all signs of a chilling prelude of more to come.
Between 2008 and 2016, the International Displacement Monitoring Centre concluded that an annual average of 21.5 million people were forcibly displaced each year by weather-related events such as floods, storms, wildfires, and droughts.[2] In 2018, the World Bank projected there would be 216 million long-term refugees every year by 2050.[3]
In 2020, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) projected that up to 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050, driven by water risk, food insecurity, impact of natural events, and demographic pressure. The IEP measured these environmental threats against resilience (the ability to deal with these threats), factors such as a well-functioning government, a sound business environment, equitable distribution of resources, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbors, free flow of information, and high levels of human capital. Imagine one in ten humans being displaced. As climate extremes dominate over resilience, climate migration is on an accelerating trajectory in numbers and territory.
How so? In the IEP breakdown of threat versus resiliency, one major pathway is conspicuously absent: fossil fuel mitigation, or quitting fossil fuels. Fossil fuel giants continue to explore for, extract, and sell fuels, and will emit massive amounts of CO2 for decades.
First, accelerating fossil fuel production is continuing. Preceding the UN Report, the reputable 2023 U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) warned, “Our projections highlight a key global insight—global energy-related CO2 emissions will increase through 2050 in all IEO2023 cases, except our Low Economic Growth case.” Investors are still bent on more extraction or pipelines, be it in Canada, the US, Greenland, numerous countries of Africa including Uganda, or coastal areas near Gaza.
Second, worsening this acceleration is a growing inability to absorb the emissions compared to the past. Prof. Johan Rockström hypothesizes that the buffering capacity of oceans to absorb atmospheric heat is diminishing, exacerbated by the fossil fuel giants. This will raise air temperature and thus the earth's rising surface temperature even more quickly.
Oddly, even the current reduction of coal, a most polluting fossil fuel, will mean emitting less particulate matter into the atmosphere and in turn, more sunlight and thus more heat.
Economic factors, such as the collapse of the property insurance system, seeing the risks of climate impacts as too high, will also contribute to migration.
The continued, churning propaganda of climate denial and procrastination obscures what is behind this all, Big Oil and Gas. The oligarchs of related industries, such as artificial intelligence, the airlines, the plastics industries, the defense industries, and fossil fuel-guzzling auto manufacturers have all downplayed the fossil fuel impacts on displacement. Kowtowing, voter-hungry politicians who welcome lucrative donations have joined in, too. Denial and obscurantism of this forced displacement have been going on for years.
Now comes the twist. Barred from or unwelcome where they flee, climate migrants in flight are considered a burden and therefore should leave. Migrants fleeing the effects of climate change at home are being pushed back to their homelands, or out of the places they seek to resettle, like bouncing balls. The dominant global messaging has not become, what is causing the rising displacement, but what do the displaced appear to be causing: we hear, “look at all those damn immigrants pouring over our statelines, our borders, taking our jobs, driving up housing prices, pushing murder and narcotics.” Fueling this bigotry are fossil fuel allies, particularly political demagogues, on the grounds that migrants eat dogs and cats, look different, don’t speak the same language, etc. Well-meaning citizens are being goaded into feeling relief when nationalist political leaders say, “send ‘em back”.
Such portrayals have inflamed hate and racism, justifying chilling responses such as the USA Immigration and Customs Enforcement deporting, even killing, immigrants, in this case from Latin America. Feeling xenophobic pressure, EU politicians recently voted to allow individual countries, such as Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, and Greece, to make plans for “return hubs”, third countries that receive the “illegals”.[4] For those migrants not easily returned, or are not willing to return to their home countries, US leaders have signed deportation agreements with some 20 foreign nations, including the afflicted countries of Panama, Liberia, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, South Sudan, and Congo,. Some migrants, now being returned to where their ancestors came from, are US- or European-born!
Leaders of the global north, like the US, have reduced giving foreign aid, however small, worsening the exodus.
The climate victims have been made the objects of hate in the receiving countries as fossil fuel giants keep fossil fuel production rolling.
The overall strategy, driven in cooperation with political allies, amounts to a win-win for fossil fuel interests. The ‘heads, I win’ is their profit in continued fossil fuel production for years to come, turning a blind eye to the mass displacement they are causing. In the ‘tails, I win’, those fossil fuel interests and allies exploit what they cause, fanning racism, bigotry, and hate of foreigners. The exceptions, like the fearless appeals of departing U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, confirms this fossil fuel win-win strategy still has the upper hand.
Climate activists must expose this strategy of driving mass migration and then exploiting xenophobic reactions. How should we respond? Our argument must be sharp and well-reasoned, pointing directly at the fossil fuel complex responsible for this growing displacement. We must equally expose how demagogues collaborate with these corporate interests to exploit growing migration while burying the root cause. In the pursuit of climate justice, fossil fuel companies should pay dearly for this strategy, substituting fossil fuels with renewables. Perhaps the Palisades high school students who lost their homes and school with their petition Make the Polluters Pay (https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/make-polluters-pay-3/) or the forgotten victims of Congo with their petition for compensation for climate loss and damage (https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/justice-climatique-et-compensation-des-pertes-et-dommages-en-faveur-des-victimes-des-catastrophes-climatiques-a-uvira-baraka-et-fizi-en-rdc/) are shining examples of such pleas rising from below.
FFF has also called for politicians and many others to listen to the science and the years-old, real warnings from climate scientists. Much of what the science says is reconfirmed by this mounting migration. Should we not also expose how science is being twisted and ignored to allow this sinister strategy to flourish?
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