Environmental activist Bill McKibben, in an op-ed published by the Guardian on Tuesday, expresses alarm over the Trump administration’s “disastrous, linked policies on climate change and child refugee camps.”
“The Trump years are a fantasy land where we pretend we can go on living precisely as in the past [and] insist that the rest of the world stay locked in place as well. It’s impractical, it’s unfair, and when it ends up with camps for kids in the desert it’s downright evil.”
—Bill McKibben, activist
While much of the media for the past week has focused on the contentious confirmation process of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the women who have accused him of sexual assault, McKibben writes, “two new Trump initiatives slipped by with less notice than they deserve.”
A Washington Post report published Friday revealed a “startling assumption” buried in an environmental impact statement (pdf) recently produced by the Transportation Department to justify the administration’s rollback of vehicle emissions rules: that the planet could warm 7°F, or about 4°C, above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
“Were the world to actually warm that much, it would be a literal hell, unable to maintain civilizations as we have known them,” McKibben notes. “But that’s now our policy, and it apparently rules out any of the actions that might, in fact, limit that warming. You might as well argue that because you’re going to die eventually, there’s no reason not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day.”
On the heels of that revelation came a “horrific” report from the New York Times on Sunday that due to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, more than 1,600 unaccompanied migrant children at shelters and foster homes across the nation have been roused in the dead of night to be transported to, in the words of McKibben, “what can only be described as a concentration camp near the Mexican border.”
The “tent city” located in the border town of Tornillo, Texas opened in June as a temporary shelter for undocumented minors who entered the United States without parents or who were forcibly separated from their families under the “zero tolerance” policy. After a series of delayed closures, the administration announced last month that the detention center would triple its capacity to house the record number of migrant children in government custody.
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