Monday 30 January 2017

Trump’s Mexico wall ‘could emit 2m tonnes of CO2’

Donald Trump's proposed border wall with Mexico could have catastrophic environmental consequences.

That's according to research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), which has calculated the vast amount of concrete that would need to be produced would result in up to two million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide being emitted.

It adds the wall would also be likely to cut off a number of endangered animals from sections of their territory, including wolves, ocelots and even jaguars, as well as disrupting water flows.

President Trump has so far remained vague about the details of the wall - the BNEF calculations assume it would be 1,000 miles long, 46 centimetres thick and 10 metres high.

Nonprofit organisation the Center for Biological Diversity says existing border fences weren't well planned and as a result caused soil erosion and flooding in local communities.

Kierán Suckling, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the group, said: "Donald Trump continues to cling to his paranoid fantasy of walling off the US-Mexico border, regardless of the harm it would do to border communities and wildlife.

"Like many of Trump's ideas, this one has nothing to do with reality. There is no reason to sacrifice the health of border communities and wildlife for such political grandstanding."

In recent weeks President Trump has opened re-applications for proposed oil pipelines and reportedly frozen environmental grants.