Stoking anti-immigrant sentiment is a key plank of Nigel Farage’s politics and he says he’ll bring down immigration. But his party Reform’s climate crisis-denying proposals would actually contribute to the opposite and risk greatly increasing immigration.
Oh the irony for Nigel Farage
Nigel Farage has outright questioned the science behind the climate crisis. On GB News in 2021, he said:
What annoys me… is this complete obsession with carbon dioxide almost to the exclusion of everything else, the alarmism that comes with it, based on dodgy predictions and science.
Yet 97% of publishing scientists agree that man made climate change is happening, primarily because of burning fossil fuels. There has been a steady increase in global temperature since the industrial revolution.
Farage also says he’d re-open the coal mines in government, taking us back to more fossil fuel use.
The thing is, climate change risks dramatically increasing immigration and it looks like Nigel Farage would make it worse.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that the Persian Gulf, parts of India and the southern Gulf of Mexico are “already experiencing heat stress conditions approaching the upper limits of labour productivity and human survivability”. And around 50-75% of the entire global population could face life threatening climate conditions by the end of the century, meaning immigration to the global north would go through the roof.
Extreme weather and sea level rises
And man-made climate change is already driving extreme weather events, causing crop failures and rising sea levels, bringing particularly global south countries into peril. Between 1970 and 2019, climate related extreme weather events including floods, droughts and fires increased five fold. The steady increase in disasters and uninhabitable conditions risks becoming the key driver of immigration.
Yet DeSmog research shows Nigel Farage’s party has accepted £2.3 million from fossil fuel interests, big polluters and climate deniers since 2019. They clearly do not take even the issue of immigration seriously.
At the 1.5C level of warming we are already experiencing, sea level rises will become unmanageable and lead to “catastrophic inland migration” according to a recent study by scientists at Durham University. But the scientists behind the study emphasised that any reductions in the incoming sea rises, however small, will make a huge difference.
That’s why Farage is childish to assert that:
I think we should scrap the net zero targets… they’re going to make zero difference to the world…you better go and talk to the Chinese… we make no difference whatsoever
Nigel Farage’s drifting between pro-fossil fuel use and outright climate denialism actually risks increasing immigration to the UK in the long term. His policies would only backfire in government.
Featured image via the Canary
