Renowned linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky believes that global processes in light of the Donald Trump presidency point to a very grim future that tilts to nuclear war and a global environmental catastrophe.
Chomsky said the COP22 Marrakech climate summit in Morocco, which began on November 7, ceased on November 9 after the news that Trump was elected to be the next US president.
"The question that was left was whether it would be possible to carry forward this global effort to deal with the highly critical problem of environmental catastrophe, if the leader of the free world, the richest and most powerful country in history, would pull out completely, as appeared to be the case. That's the stated goal of the president-elect, who regards climate change as a hoax and whose policy, if he pursues it, is to maximise the use of fossil fuels, end environmental regulations, dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency—established by Richard Nixon, which is a measure of where politics has shifted to the right in the past generation—and, in other ways, accelerate the race to destruction. Well, that was essentially the end of the Marrakech conference," said Chomsky.
In a few years, the devastating effect that the melting of Antarctic glacial bodies would have on countries with low-lying coastal planes such as Bangladesh and others would create a migration crisis that would make the European migration crisis seem like "a footnote to a tragedy." And these countries have already argued principally that the fact that countries such as the US that are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are guilty in bringing about this new global epoch of Anthropocene should be sufficient reason for the victims like the 10 million Bangladeshis to migrate there.
The threat of climate change, according to Chomsky, converges with the threat of a nuclear war as he illustrates a scenario where the Himalayan Glaciers have melted and water scarcity could easily trigger a nuclear winter.
"India and Pakistan are nuclear states. They were already almost at war. Any kind of real war would immediately turn into a nuclear war. That might happen very easily over water—over struggles over diminishing water supplies. A nuclear war would not only devastate the region but might actually be terminal for the species, if indeed it leads to nuclear winter and global famine, as many scientists predict," warns Chomsky.
