Migration and Climate Change

6Climate and Religion in Protectionism

6.1. Climate change and protectionism

The climate changes of the last millennium have been small variations around a rather cold average position. Contemporary global warming is counteracting this long-term trend. The work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie [LER 09] on the last millennium leads us to speak of two small hot episodes since the year 1000, the beautiful 13th Century and the beautiful 16th Century, and of a marked cooling before the contemporary warming that began around 1846. This last period provides examples of protectionist tariffs in relation to a hot climate phase, as we are currently experiencing with Donald Trump’s protectionist and pro-carbon policy. The 1928 Smoot-Hawley Tariff had already declined as a protectionist response to a hot climate: in response to a drought on the plains of the American West, Smoot, a Mormon congressman responsible for the beet lobby and promoter of censorship of literary works such as that of D.H. Lawrence, imposed his prohibitionist tariff at the time of the financial crisis of 1929, a tariff that provoked a chain reaction of customs overbidding and caused the collapse of world trade. A hot phase situation was also witnessed for the Meline and McKinley tariffs just like for the 1907 wine crisis. The rise in temperatures led to exceptional harvests and cultivation, which caused a fall in prices and reinforced protectionist policies. However, the introduction of Free Trade in 1846 in England was ...