% From the Article by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine, November 28, 2022

>>> One of climate change’s many compounding injustices is that the highest costs will be borne by those who have contributed the least to the problem. Several low-lying island nations, including Tuvalu and Kiribati, are destined simply to disappear. In Bangladesh, some two thousand people arrive every day in the capital, Dhaka, many driven by storms or rising seas that have made village life difficult. In Pakistan, this past summer, flooding caused by supercharged monsoon rains killed a thousand people and forced six hundred thousand more into relief camps.

In 2016, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that, globally, an average of twenty-one million people were being displaced by weather-related events every year. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration has projected that by 2050 as many as a billion people may be on the move.

>>> In the coming decades, “huge populations will need to seek new homes,” Gaia Vince, a British journalist, has written. Either “you will be among them, or you will be receiving them.”

>>> Almost as much as climate change itself, this great displacement will test national and international institutions. One possibility is that climate refugees will be welcomed. This could happen because it’s the right thing to do, or it could happen for less high-minded reasons.

>>> As Akka Rimon, a former foreign secretary of Kiribati, has observed, “Countries like Australia need workers,” while the citizens of countries such as Kiribati will soon need a different place to live. These needs are complementary. The E.U., too, faces a labor shortage. A communiqué issued by the European Commission in April noted that there’s a strong “economic case” for allowing in more legal immigrants, especially since “the transition to a climate-neutral economy” will require “additional labour and new skills.” Climate migrants could play a key role in decarbonization, providing a new kind of win-win narrative.

>>> Another possibility is that climate migrants, like millions of migrants before them, will be despised. Rich countries —including those in the E.U. — will try to keep refugees out, and those who manage to slip in will be herded into camps. In an effort to gain power, right-wing politicians will vilify them, and this will encourage yet more racism and xenophobia — a social feedback loop.

>>> Giorgia Meloni, who recently became Italy’s Prime Minister, has said that her country ought to “repatriate the migrants back to their countries, and then sink the boats that rescued them.”

>>> Both the effort to limit climate change (by replacing the world’s energy systems) and the effort to adapt to climate change (by erecting dikes and seawalls) will take place in the context of climate change, which is to say as cyclones, drought, fire, and sea-level rise force millions of people to flee. It’s possible that cascading crises will accomplish what thirty years of climate negotiations have not, and unite the world to seek the best way forward.

>>> Or it’s possible that the same forces that have prevented coöperation in the past — nationalism, corporatism, sectarianism, fear — will, under the stress of climate change, only intensify.