First, from the weekend: 

KATOWICE, Poland—The United States worked with Russia and Saudi Arabia on Saturday night to sideline climate science in U.N. negotiations, angering nations that say urgent action is needed for their survival.

The three countries and Kuwait blocked nearly 200 nations involved in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change from “welcoming” a U.N. report in October saying that “unprecedented” action is required to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and stave off worldwide hardship.

Vulnerable island nations and other developing countries tried to elevate the 1.5 C goals with the type of diplomatic subtlety these talks are known for. But welcoming the report was too strong a message for the United States and other nations that oppose climate action.

Scientific American

Then, from the week:

The first ever international deal on the migration crisis was signed on Monday by a majority of UN states, despite vociferous objections led by the United States.

The historic, non-binding global pact seeking to better manage migration was approved by delegates from 164 nations following 18 months of debate and negotiation. German chancellor Angela Merkel hailed it as an “important day”.

The UN’s global compact on safe, orderly and regular migration, signed in Marrakech, is aimed at coordinating action on migration around the world. It was rejected by President Donald Trump a year ago. Since then Austria, which holds the EU presidency, has pulled out of the process, along with Australia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and the Dominican Republic.

The Guardian

(Since then, Brazil has also rejected the migration pact, though that might not be too surprising)

Neither one of these moves should cause too many monocles to shatter in shock. Republicans reject climate science, even when it is our own government and our own scientists projecting, with certainty, catastrophic and possibly civilization-ending results unless we act literally right now.  The President himself has said he doesn’t believe that climate report, because who knows who is paying these scientists, and anyway, he’s like a real smart guy. His uncle taught at MIT! 

(One could point out that it is the US government paying these scientists, something Trump could maybe have found out, except that he is a dim, conspiracy-addled doofus. This isn’t incidental to the whole thing.)

The migration compact, while in the long-run less absolutely catastrophic, also isn’t a surprise given the current state of our politics (and honestly, all but a few bright and shining times in our history of Chinese Exclusions and Operations Wetback). But it is also head-in-the-sand ignorance. The migration and refugee crisis is breaking the world as we know it, as people flee war and climate change and war worsened by climate change and environmental catastrophe exacerbated by war. You can’t hide from it. You can’t wish it away. It’s remaking politics across the globe. 

So why are they doing this? Well, if you want to be archly-cynical, you could say that they are right-wing supranationalists, and know that refugees and migrants can be useful to right-wing politicians, as they have been in countries like Poland, France, the US, Hungary, and the UK (and others). So stoking the crisis by doing nothing to help it aids in the ushering in of those governments. 

There’s an element of that, to be sure, but that’s too neat. It’s almost too smart. What it comes down to is paranoia and greed and short-sightedness, and the selfish and Randian idea that doing anything to help others, that sacrificing anything at all, is anathema to hyperbolic and rock-stupid ideals of masculinity and self-sufficiency. 

Look at the US’s “reasons” for pulling out of this pact. 

On Friday, the US described the pact as “an effort by the United Nations to advance global governance at the expense of the sovereign right of states”

The Guardian

This is an official statement. That’s paranoid, and it is cynical, but also sort of accurate in its extreme plugheadedness. It is correct around the margins, in that the UN recognizes that international crises, like the collapse of nations and the melting of the ice caps, demand international solutions.

That’s not easy, and really no country likes that. It’s part of human insanity. After all, how many current borders existed in their current form even 100 years ago? The United Kingdom? Japan? Australia, for sure, but even then it was part of the Empire. All over, we hold to new lines as if they were sacred truths, even as those lines are shown time and time again as fiction.

But of course, it’s taken to another level in America. It has to be twisted in American politics to mean “global governance”, a phrase redolent with tin foil and the staccato bursts and blurbs of some desert pirate radio frequency. It’s a phrase that should be only heard in dim warrens in strange cities, or at least in less-visited parts of the internet. 

But that’s who is in charge now. It would be the same if it was any Republican, but it has reached its oafish apex in Donald Trump, whose vanities and empty insecurities are a perfect match for the moment. He doesn’t believe in climate change because he doesn’t understand it and doesn’t like when people show off by being smarter than him. He doesn’t want to help solve the migration crisis because that means being nice to non-white people who might not like him, personally. He doesn’t like international solutions to things because that means there were negotiations made without the solo force of his unique genius. 

Policy-wise, there is little difference between him and, say, Marco Rubio, who would have stuttered some nonsense about “waiting to see some scientific consensus, and also Bible.” But Trump’s raving paranoia and his absolute certainty that he has nothing to learn, coupled with his quivering fear of knowledge, lend this pivotal moment an absolute carny garishness. 

The world is burning and melting; it is flooding and desiccating. Jellyfish are taking over anoxic oceans. And we are being ruled by nitwits, whose corruption and illegitimacy are reduced to bitter punchlines in the face of such disaster. This is the worst possible moment to have such people in charge. Our last chance is here, and we’re running away from it.