“Obviously the drought is an opportunity,” he said, sitting in his spartan office in the center of the regional capital. But more than that, he added, “We see it as a confirmation of everything we are saying.”
No one — not the farmers, the mayor, Cortés, nor the scientists — disagrees that climate change is drying out Spain. But Vox is telling the farmers what they want to hear: that scarcity can be beaten by investing in technology and a national hydrological plan that would see huge transfers of water across the country.
“Half of Spain is overflowing, the other half is thirsty,” said Cortés.
Água Solidária — water solidarity — justified a program to unify Spain with Europe’s largest network of reservoirs and canals, built largely during Franco’s time. So it’s unsurprising to hear Cortés, who joined Vox in 2014 when it was a Spanish nationalist response to the “terrorism” of the Basque independence movement, advocating for other regions to share their water.
But in reality, even before you factor in warming, Spain’s water resources are wildly overstretched. There may be as much as five times more water allocated through annual drawing rights than has ever fallen in the country in a single year, said Annelies Broekman at the Center for Research on Forest Ecology and Applications which is based at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, although “nobody knows exactly” as there is no central register. And that’s before counting the illegal wells.
“The only solution to save Doñana is to reduce horticulture there,” she said of the wetlands at the heart of Vox’s fight with the EU.
Cortés dismissed the idea that, as climate change tightens its grip, reduced resources require reduced exploitation. He keeps a rhetorical toehold in outright climate denial by calling it “alleged human-induced.” But when challenged, he clarifies: “We are not in favor of CO2 emissions.”
The problem, as he sees it, is not climate change, but the set of solutions being offered by the U.N., “European bureaucrats” and the scientists they have co-opted. This, he said, was where climate change had been put into the service of a “globalist” assault by “cultural Marxists” on traditional Spanish values and the economic prosperity of rural communities.
“The religion of climate change,” he said, was “pitting Mother Earth against human beings … We say precisely the opposite, that an agreement must be reached so that the primary sector can be efficient, so that the primary sector can have its aspirations legitimized, and at the same time be respectful of the environment.”
It’s this argument that might be the most significant of all of Vox’s political innovations. Like their political cousins in France, Marine Le Pen’s
National Rally, Spain’s far right is forging its own brand of uncompromising environmentalism. Climate change is acknowledged but overcome using technology, which acts as a kind of magic word to dismiss any problem that can’t be foisted onto another group of people somewhere else.
www.explainxkcd.com
www.politico.eu
www.tv2.no
en.wikipedia.org
www.theguardian.com
english.elpais.com
www.iflscience.com
www.nrk.no
carbonrobotics.com
www.ft.com
i forhold, 
