I don’t think Mother Jones considered this when they reprinted a Slate screed
A $50,000-a-Night Underwater Hotel Room in the Maldives Shows How Oblivious We Are to Climate Change
In a tiny nation that will likely be underwater due to sea level rise within the next century, an American luxury hotel chain is constructing an underwater hotel roomthat the world’s wealthiest will be able to reserve for $50,000 a night. No one seems to have noticed the irony. But it’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of the way we think about climate change: a scary thing that will happen at some point in the future but not a problem worth mentioning in the present.
When you search for the Maldives, a country composed of 1,192 islands that speckle the Indian Ocean southwest of Sri Lanka, on Google Maps, the names of the biggest islands appear in a blank sea. You have to zoom in to identify the minute slivers of land that are home to a population of 400,000. Soon even these slivers will be gone. With an average elevation of about 4 feet, and with literally zero hills or mountains, the Maldives is the world’s lowest-lying country. It will not survive the sea level rise caused by anthropogenic climate change.
In 2009, then-President Mohamed Nasheed tried to broadcast the plight of the Maldives by holding what he called the world’s first underwater Cabinet meeting. Nasheed and several high-ranking government officials donned wetsuits and scuba gear, dove down 20 feet to the ocean floor, and, using hand signals and white boards to communicate, signed a document urging all of the world’s countries to cut carbon emissions. Should the world fail to control climate change, they implied, the Maldives would only be able to conduct its business underwater. This piece of political theater served as a metonym for the problem of climate change, a small and globally weak nation trying to publicize its environmental trauma in universally comprehensible terms.
What the Maldives want is some of that sweet, sweet, redistributed climate cash. Also, lots of tourists taking long fossil fueled trips to their 4 international airports and 8 domestic ones. They’re upgrading their international airports and constructing new runways to accommodate bigger passenger jets. And a new seaplane terminal. Does this look like a nation concerned about ‘climate change’ from fossil fuels?
Reading the article more, we see what a massive construction this hotel will be. Most of the material will have to be brought in by fossil fueled cargo ship. Why is the government allowing this? Some data suggests that the waters around the Maldives are rising at 3.5mm per year tide gauge/3.2 satellite. That’s .1377 inches per year. Other data shows 2.2mm per year. Some data shows no change. None are particularly long term to make a proper judgement.
What is known is that some of those pushing this issue the hardest are hypocrites. If the government of the Maldives really cared, they wouldn’t allow mega hotels to be built, nor new runways, and, really would shut down their airports and only allow sailing ships to bring people and stuff.
Our esteemed host concluded:
The government care about economic advancement for their people today.
That is, of course, what I have been saying all along: for most people, putting food on the table today outweighs concerns about what might happen fifty or a hundred years from now. President Abdulla Yameen is 58 years old; whatever
global warmingclimate change does in fifty years will see him long gone to his eternal reward.If they build the seaplane facilities 4 inches higher then it’s good for another 100 years.