climate

Patrick Crusius worried that Texas — hot and dry and facing climate calamity — was being overrun by immigrants.

In his manifesto, which he titled “The Inconvenient Truth” — a seeming nod to Al Gore’s documentary about the climate crisis — he wrote that “water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted.”

I had been investigating climate change as a new driver of both large-scale migration around the world and of potential conflict.

Crusius’ manifesto was striking because he considered the crushing squeeze of environmental degradation — the very changes that would be amplified by climate change — on communities, but from the opposite perspective.

But there was something even more significant: For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society.