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Caribbean leaders beg Trump to act on climate change

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Caribbean states and territories have rounded on the Trump administration for dismantling the United States’ response to climate change, warning that greenhouse gas emissions must be sharply cut to avoid hurricanes and sea-level rise threatening the future of their island idylls.

The onset of this year’s hurricane season has seen leaders in the region tell the Guardian that President Trump needs to grasp the existential threat they face. Rising temperatures and increased precipitation caused by climate change is strengthening hurricanes, researchers have found, even as the overall number of storms remains steady.

“In 2017 we saw some of the most devastating and destructive hurricanes we’ve seen in our history,” said Selwin Hart, Barbados’ ambassador to the United States. “This needs to be recognized.

“This isn’t some scientific debate, it’s a reality with loss of life implications. We need the U.S. to be back at the table and engage. It’s imperative. We wouldn’t have a Paris climate agreement without the U.S. and we need them back now.”

Hurricane Irma strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane before slamming into the Caribbean and the United States in September, causing more than 130 deaths in places such as Barbuda, Saint Martin, Barbados, and the United States. This storm was swiftly followed by Hurricane Maria, which obliterated much of Dominica and caused a widespread, ongoing disaster in Puerto Rico, leaving thousands dead.

“Even before the passage of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, we could already see the effects of coastal erosion, and even the loss of some islands,” said Ricardo Rosselló, governor of Puerto Rico. The U.S. territory is part of an alliance with several states, including New York and California, that have committed to addressing climate change absent the federal government. “Puerto Rico remains in a more vulnerable situation than other states. It is expected that some of the initial effects of climate change will be seen in Puerto Rico,” said Rosselló, who called Trump’s climate policies “a mistake.”

During the 2015 Paris climate talks, Caribbean nations were among the loose coalition of low-lying countries that successfully pushed the international community to aim to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7F) beyond pre-industrial levels.

This aspiration, which would provide many island states the hope of remaining viable in the face of sea-level rise, drought, and powerful storms, is currently far from likely, with a recent U.N. report warning the picture would be “even bleaker” if the Trump administration follows through with its vow to remove the United States from the Paris deal.

The withdrawal from Paris would take three years, but in the meantime the Trump administration is working to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era strategy to cut carbon dioxide, delay new vehicle emissions standards, open up new land and ocean to oil and gas drilling, and even put in place a set of subsidies that would prop up the ailing coal industry.

“The U.S. is a major player in the world and it needs to lead — we depend on it to be a moral voice on issues where people are vulnerable,” said Darren Henfield, foreign minister of the Bahamas. “We really hope the U.S. readjusts its position. It seems there will be doubters until we start completely losing islands.”

Henfield said Bahamians have become “dramatically aware” of climate change following a series of hurricanes that have hit or brushed the archipelago in recent years. The country has attempted to accelerate its transition to renewable energy although it faces the conundrum of relying economically upon tourists, borne on huge cruise ships that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide.

“We are being forced to put up sea walls to push back the rising tides,” Henfield said. “We are very exposed and we could see the swallowing of the Bahamas by sea-level rise. We don’t have much room for people, there’s nowhere for people to move. Climate change will exacerbate the issue of refugees.

“I don’t know what influences the mind of President Trump but the world will be negatively impacted by not dealing with climate change. We always talk to our neighbors in the North and part of our foreign policy is to sensitize them and the international community to the threat we face.”

But while Caribbean states plead for climate assistance, particularly from the United States, they are also looking at how to adapt to a new environment. The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, a coalition of island countries that spread in an arc south of the British Virgin Islands, has turned its attention to looming challenges such as food security, coastal village relocation, and new building designs in order to deal with rising temperatures and seas.

“Dominica was a real wake-up call for us, it virtually got washed away,” said Didacus Jules, director general of the OECS. “We know the impacts are going to be increasingly catastrophic and we need to plan for that. We need to do things completely differently in order to protect life and limb.”

Didacus said he was alarmed by the U.S. reversal on climate change. “We are very disturbed by what is going on, it’s a matter we’ll deal with aggressively in terms of diplomacy,” he said. “We will work with other island nations to make ourselves heard.”

However, many in the Caribbean fear the window of time to avert the worst is rapidly closing. Roosevelt Skerrit, prime minister of Dominica, addressed the U.N. last September in strikingly bleak terms, describing himself as coming “straight from the front line of the war on climate change.”

“Heat is the fuel that takes ordinary storms — storms we could normally master in our sleep — and supercharges them into a devastating force,” Skerrit said. “Now, thousands of storms form on a breeze in the mid-Atlantic and line up to pound us with maximum force and fury. We as a country and as a region did not start this war against nature. We did not provoke it. The war has come to us.”

Skerrit said the hurricane left Dominica with flattened homes, smashed water pipes, hospitals without power, wrecked schools, and ruined crops. “The desolation is beyond imagination,” he said. “The stars have fallen. Eden is broken. We are shouldering the consequences of the actions of others.

“There is little time left for action. While the big countries talk, the small island nations suffer. We need action and we need it now.”

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Caribbean leaders beg Trump to act on climate change

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2015 Saw a Record Number of Attacks on US Mosques

Mother Jones

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The past three years have been difficult for Muslim-Americans, according to a new report tracking increasing Islamophobia issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the UC-Berkeley Center for Race and Gender. Among the most eye-catching findings: the researchers recorded 78 attacks on mosques last year, the highest since CAIR began monitoring such incidents in 2009.

The report highlights the growth of many other forms of discrimination. Self-declared “Muslim-free” businesses have cropped up across the country, and bullying of Muslim students, even by teachers, is on the rise. One piece of good news is a decrease in law enforcement anti-terrorism trainings led by purported experts who spread fear and misinformation about Muslims.

The report suggests that anti-Muslim incidents spike in the wake of terrorist events, noting an uptick in violent anti-Muslim rhetoric that took place after Islamic State militants beheaded two Americans in Syria in August 2014. Additional armed anti-Islam demonstrations sprouted up in the wake of an attempted terror attack on a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas last year, where illustrators had been invited to submit caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. And after November’s Paris attacks, there was a marked increase in attacks on American mosques.

The study comes after a Republican primary season that repeatedly featured anti-Muslim rhetoric. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim migration to the United States. Sen. Ted Cruz spoke at summits hosted by the Center for Security Policy, a group which has been declared an extremist anti-Muslim group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ben Carson told Meet the Press that he believed Islam was inconsistent with the Constitution and said he wouldn’t vote for a Muslim to be president. Two-thirds of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire favored banning Muslims from entering the United States, and last September, a survey of Republican voters in Iowa found that almost a third think Islam should be illegal.

Here are some key developments highlighted in the report:

Mosque Attacks

Last year saw a spike in attacks on Muslim places of worship.

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Thirty-four mosques were targeted in just the final two months of 2015—more incidents than typically occur across an entire year. Only two of November’s attacks took place before the Paris terror attacks.

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September 2015: Three young men burned three crosses on a New York’s mosque’s lawn.
November 2015: Vandals targeted a Texas mosque, covering the door in feces and throwing torn Korans on the ground.
December 2015: A severed pig’s head was left outside a Philadelphia mosque.
December 2015: A mosque in California was firebombed shortly before a prayer service.
December 2015: Raw bacon was wrapped around the door handles of a Las Vegas mosque.

Anti-Sharia movement

Since 2010, many state legislatures have seen bills introduced to prevent the influence of Sharia law on US courts, an effort which critics say has no purpose other than to vilify Muslims. As even a writer in the conservative National Review noted, “this ‘creeping Sharia’ phenomenon supposedly going on in American courts is not even happening.” Nonetheless, anti-Sharia and anti-foreign law bills have been popular among Republican state lawmakers.

Anti-foreign law bills have been enacted in ten states.
Over 80 similar bills and amendments were introduced between 2013-2015â&#128;¨. All but one were solely sponsored by Republicans.
To date, none of these laws have been invoked in legal proceedings.

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The Islamophobia network

The report identified 33 groups whose “primary purpose” is to spread fear and hatred of Islam. Financial information collected by CAIR suggests that the following organizations had the highest average annual revenue between 2008 and 2013.

  1. David Horowitz Freedom Center
  2. Middle East Media and Research Institute
  3. Clarion Project
  4. Middle East Forum
  5. Center for Security Policy
  6. Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
  7. Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation
  8. Christian Action Network
  9. Abstraction Fund
  10. ACT for America

Textbooks

After a firestorm of complaints that school textbooks were too pro-Islam, Florida and Tennessee passed laws giving parents more power to reject certain course materials.

Muslim-free businesses

Since 2014, businesses in Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire have publicly declared themselves “Muslim-free.”

Media Bias

A 2014 study of national TV news published in the Journal of Communication found that “among those described as domestic terrorists in the news reports, 81 percent were identifiable as Muslims. Yet in FBI reports from those years, only 6 percent of domestic terror suspects were Muslim.”

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2015 Saw a Record Number of Attacks on US Mosques

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