The left has concocted a lucrative category of politically correct victims: “climate refugees.” It’s the new Green racket.
U.S. taxpayers will now be forking over untold billions to ease the pain allegedly inflicted on “carbon’s casualties” by industrial activity. By contrast, those who have suffered as a direct result of government incompetence by federal environmental bureaucrats continue to get the shaft.
Consider the plight of two tribes: the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Louisiana and the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.
The New York Times splashed a viral story on its pages this week spotlighting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s $48 million grant to Native-Americans who live in the flood-ravaged coastal community of Isle de Jean Charles. About 60 residents, the majority of whom belong to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, will be resettled to drier land.
That’s a whopping $800,000 per “climate refugee!”
Never mind that the Times’ propagandists themselves admit that erosion on the island began in 1955 as a result of land-use and land-management factors that had nothing to do with climate change.
“Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island,” the paper reported, “and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands’ sediments.”
Never mind that there are conflicting scientific analyses on the extent to which man-made greenhouses gases have caused sea levels to rise; whether the rate is accelerating; and how much, if any, reducing carbon emissions would actually mitigate purportedly rising sea levels.
Never mind that enviro-alarmists have conveniently changed their tune from blaming global warming for causing sea level rises to blaming global warming for causing sea level drops.
Oh, and never mind that many of the inhabitants of Isle de Jean Charles — whose forefathers originally moved there to escape forced government relocation under the 1830 Indian Removal Act — don’t even want to leave and have fought resettlement efforts for decades.
