The amount of hand-wringing from the left seems to be hitting new highs. It's not just the American left, mind you. The left in Europe, including the once-Great Britain, is reaching epic proportions over a variety of issues. Some of those issues include, of course, climate change; another is the temerity the United States shows in presuming that we can actually enforce our immigration laws.
That last one is particularly onerous, as the late, unlamented Biden administration left us with one heck of a mess to clean up. President Trump and his administration have set out to do just that, with repatriation flights running many of these illegal aliens back to where they rightly belong. But now, in a sort of rhetorical lateral arabesque, the UK Guardian is now combining two different panic-mongering causes: They are now concerned that the repatriation flights are emitting too much CO2 and causing more climate change.
US immigration enforcement flights are producing hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes of climate-damaging carbon emissions as officials shuttle unprecedented numbers of people to detention centers far from home and deport them to countries across the world.
Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has spurred at least an 80% increase in such flights year over year, accelerating the climate crisis by emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide, according to data analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian.
I see what you're doing there, Guardian. Note that there isn't any denominator given here. So let's have a look; if we take the higher estimate, the United States is conducting about 250 repatriation flights per month. That's the numerator. The denominator? There are about 3.9 to 4.1 million total commercial airline flights in the world every month. That means that the United States' repatriation flights are about 0.006 percent of all total airline flights.
Come on, Guardian. That's not even a rounding error. The number of repatriation flights, compared to the total number of airline flights, is the very definition of "insignificant." But that's not what they're after.
“We’ve seen a staggering increase of all US immigration [enforcement] flights,” including “the number of flights as well as the locations that the flights are going to,” said Savitri Arvey, director of research and analysis for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First (HRF), the US advocacy group.
Ah, there's the kicker. A director of research and analysis for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First. These people aren't a climate watch group. They aren't scientists. They certainly aren't mathematicians. They are an advocacy group pushing to have every illegal immigrant in the United States remain here, no matter who they are or where they come from. And the Guardian never mentions that the percentage of repatriation flights compared to all air travel has a long way to go before it gets up to the level of insignificant.
Watts Up With That's Eric Worral makes an interesting point:
Its tempting to say something snarky about how much more CO2 would be emitted if the illegals were granted amnesty and were able to live comfortable energy rich lives in the USA rather than being deported to whatever energy poor hellhole they came from, but the claim that immigration flights are impacting climate change is just too ridiculous.
The impact of such flights on CO2 emissions is a blip, an accounting error on last year’s expansion of China’s coal capacity. The impact of those flights would not be measurable, by any instrument which could be devised by known technology.
Ay, that's the rub. But these people aren't scientists; they are pearl-clutching activists, and this credulous acceptance of their claims doesn't do the Guardian any credit. I mean, the Guardian is supposed to be a serious news organization, and not one person on the editorial staff thought to ask, "Oy, chaps, what percentage of airline flights are these deportation flights, anyway? If the United States stopped doing this tomorrow, how much difference would it make?"
The answer, of course, is "none." But that doesn't fit the narrative.
Read More: About That Airline That Terminated Its Contract for ICE Deportation Flights
Trump Admin Deports Barbaric Criminals to a Tiny African Country You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
Eric Worral makes another good point: How much CO2 would these illegal aliens emit if they stayed here, living in our high-energy, high-technology country, rather than what they would produce back in whatever third-world place they came from? I suspect that this, too, would be less than a rounding error, but, interestingly, nobody asked.
The Guardian, in this piece, engaged in pure propagandizing. They took the word of an unapologetic activist group, with zero expertise in climatology. Worse, they couldn't be arsed to do the most elementary fact-checking. That's not journalism. That's just the distribution of the stuff I routinely shoveled out of my uncle's livestock auction barn when I was a kid.
If anything is causing the climate to warm, it's the heat from the friction of all the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching coming from leftists the world over. Maybe they should look to their own actions before wagging their fingers at the rest of us.
