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Volume 8, Issue 9 (Suppl) J Earth Sci Clim Change
ISSN: 2157-7617 JESCC, an open access journal Climate Congress 2017
October 16-17, 2017
Page 28
Notes:
conferenceseries.com
October 16-17, 2017 Dubai, UAE
3rd World Congress on
Climate Change and Global Warming
Climate catastrophe refugees and the political value of terrorism to climate change denial in the
United States
The aim of this study is to show how legislative processes ostensibly aimed at drafting laws that embody justice and equality
have become systemically co-opted and corrupted through the machinations of legislators beholden to a donor class whose
profit-objectives depend on the unfettered extraction of hydrocarbons. It’s thus no surprise that the denial of anthropogenic
climate change has come to inform not only energy-legislation, but potentially all law-making insofar it has become imperative
to insure against profit-suffocating regulation. Senator James Inhofe offers an apt example. In 2015, he sponsored two bills, one
acknowledging that climate change is real, but denying that it’s anthropogenic; another to make English the official language of
the US, the English Unity Act of 2015. While the first attempts to circumvent the debate concerning climate change, the second
aims to discourage border crossings are two apparently different issues until we realize that many migrants are climate change
refugees. Inhofe denies climate change but tacitly recognizes that it produces conditions for migration. He calls human-made
global warming a hoax, but sponsors a bill to deter migrants seeking to flee its consequences. Throughout Inhofe’s defense of
the two bills, he refers to illegal immigrants as drug-runners and terrorists, a narrative that offers just what he needs: it detracts
from the facts about climate change refugees and provides justification for policies like President Trump’s wall. It provides
apparent substance to the American president’s references to radical Islamic terrorists alleged to cross from the South and helps
to justify US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. In the world, according to climate change denial, drafting law is less
about social or environmental justice and more about insuring the hegemony of multinational energy interests. There are no
winners. But there are losers: A planet that can no longer support human life makes refugees of us all.
Biography
Wendy Lynne Lee is a Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania where she taught for over 25 years. She has published about 40 scholarly
essays in her areas of expertise which include philosophy of language, philosophy of mind/brain, feminist theory, theory of sexual identity, post-Marxian theory,
nonhuman animal welfare, ecological aesthetics, aesthetic phenomenology and philosophy of ecology. Her most recent book is Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical
Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.
Wendy Lynne Lee
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA
Wendy Lynne Lee, J Earth Sci Clim Change 2017, 8:9 (Suppl)
DOI: 10.4172/2157-7617-C1-032