by Quentin Borges-Silva
Doublethink, as articulated by George Orwell in 1984, “means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Unfortunately, the modern left takes Orwell’s book not as the warning it was intended to be, but as an instruction manual. Perhaps nowhere else is doublethink more readily apparent than in the absurdly conflicted intersection of leftist environmentalism – think of it as ecological conservation with a pagan streak – and support for mass immigration.
Climate change true believers have perfect faith in the notion that the human contribution of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is the primary driver of global warming, and that only by drastically reducing that contribution can we avoid apocalyptic climate tragedy on a global scale. But when a grand imam of the Climate Change faith, Michael Mann, is called “A Disgrace to the Profession” and many other unflattering things by dozens of his equally credentialed peers, perhaps they are onto something.
When recipients of tens of millions of dollars in federal climate research grants ask the Department of Justice to arrest, prosecute, and imprison those who question their data quality, analysis, and conclusions, it’s a fair bet they’re up to something, but whatever it is, it’s not science. The peer review process has been a disaster for a long time. It would not be improved by deep state prosecutors going after scientific peers who are more interested in homing in on the truth than in advancing a political agenda.
Climate change skepticism should also be informed by headlines proclaiming that a particular year was the Hottest in Recorded History. That headline piqued my interest, but my willingness to believe was affected when I later learned that the “hottest year ever” part was based on a statistical analysis that was less robust than a coin toss.
But setting all that aside, let’s stipulate purely for the sake of discussion that Anthropogenic Climate Change theory is true. Just for the sake of debate, let’s agree (for now) with the warm-mongers that climate change, specifically, global warming, will wreak havoc on agriculture, lead to millions getting sick, have devastating impacts on the economy, cause tens of thousands of people to commit suicide and otherwise die if we don’t act now. That would be awful. Only real monsters would want that!
Now, having stipulated the veracity of climate change theory, we can finally begin drilling into its nexus with U.S. population growth, which since the 1970s has been driven primarily by legal and illegal immigration.
According to the World Bank, the United States is ranked 15th in annual CO2 emissions, with 16.5 metric tons per capita. Some nerds over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology broke the data down even further, concluding that “even the people [in America] with the lowest usage of energy are still producing, on average, more than double the global per-capita average” of CO2. If the most progressive, mass transit-riding, fair trade soy latte-sipping person of the left is contributing such an obnoxiously privileged amount of carbon to the atmosphere and turbocharging climate change (murderer!), what might we expect of recent arrivals from Central and South America or African refugees?
The same World Bank data tells us that Hondurans in Honduras produce only 1.1 metric tons of CO2. Guatemalans in their home land produce 1.2, and Mexicans come in at 3.9. Germans in Deutschland produce 8.9 metric tons, the Japanese produce 9.5, and even our friends to the north come in lower than the U.S. with 15.1 metric tons of CO2 per Canuck. For true believers in the environmentalist faith, especially the elitists who saw a decrease in U.S. CO2 emissions due to the recession as proof their de-industrializing policy preferences work, Pakistanis in their native land are to be exalted for their paltry climate footprint of only .9 metric tons per capita. But the most noble of all are perhaps Somalis in Somalia, who manage to get by and live presumably fulfilling lives while producing only 0.05 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person per year.
Alas, while immigrant and refugee cultural assimilation is a notion championed only by bigots, racists, and other deplorables these days, the fact of the matter is that newcomers to America, Pakistanis and Somalis, for example, quickly adapt to our energy rich ways.
The doublethink problem for true believers in climate change and open borders becomes apparent when you consider that letting anybody from those countries into the United States inevitably results in higher carbon releases than if they’d stayed in their homelands. Letting in a Canadian doesn’t add that much since our per capita releases are already similar, but the average German immigrant would double his CO2 output upon reaching these shores. Each Mexican immigrant quadruples what she would have produced if she’d stayed home. The Central Americans produce 16x as much, on average, after coming to the United States, and Somali refugees produce a whopping 366 times as much CO2 after coming to America than they would have done if they’d stayed home and worked things out there.
As a [stipulated] believer in Anthropogenic Climate Change who is not under the spell of doublethink, I must conclude that global warming is made worse with each new immigrant to the United States. Immigration must, therefore, be halted immediately. Yet the Left insists it is immoral to build walls that would drastically cut illegal immigration, and for decades they have opposed limiting legal immigration.
Through their preference for open borders immigration from countries with low energy consumption to energy rich ones, the Left is driving up carbon contributions to the atmosphere while simultaneously claiming that the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change. If not for this doublethink, the left would see that funding President Trump’s wall and ending open borders immigration is a relatively cheap and easy way to forestall their predicted climate catastrophe that’s accelerated by each new immigrant to this energy-rich country.
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Quentin Borges-Silva is a native of Portland, Oregon, who works for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. The views expressed by the author are his own and do not reflect policies or positions of the U.S. EPA.
