Check for web archive captures
Climate Chaos: Recipe for Endless War
By maudeaster on 2018-10-19 09:30:03
When I came of age, the US was waging war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese and American deaths horrified me, so I joined
s any demonstrations calling for withdrawal. Eventually, efforts across the country to
protest and educate -- -to raise moral issues about the war -- helped bring about its end. Since then, through endless Pentagon
bombings and occupations — think Panama, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and more - I’ve joined with others to
try to end the repeated American reliance on war-making instead of diplomacy to resolve
conflicts. The Grannies for Peace vigil in September, demanding an End to Endless actionWar, spoke my mind. So, for
me, the recent rather terrifying climate report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change above all threatened
that, without urgent action, the world will face almost certain warfare on a scale unseen before. Conflicts over reduced
supplies of water and food, displacement from major coastal cities, uninhabitable zones are
what lead to military confrontations. We have already seen drought pressures help trigger conflicts in Syria and in Sudan.
The US is all too likely to get pulled into these conflicts, either through greed for arms sales or through its own military
action. An editorial in The Guardian described the scenario if governments allow the present climate trajectory to proceed
unchecked: “Hundreds of millions of people may die through droughts on the land and flooding at the coasts... and probably
through disruption of the long-term weather patterns around which the world’s agriculture has been shaped. These victims
will not passively await their fates. Amid the tipping points that we cannot foresee in any detail is the prospect of historically
unprecedented refugee migrations as whole populations who have no choice but to starve or move set put for land where
they can live.” Scientists at the non-profit Climate Central organization are predicting that 275 million people live in areas
which will be flooded if the current warming path is not changed. Think about the recent coastal devastation in Puerto Rico
and ih iF lorida, and then think of meeting the needs for shelter and food for 275
million people. The UN report stressed that governments have only 12 years to radically change economies to keep climate
warming to a more manageable level of 1.5 C. Encouragingly, last week’s two recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics
have messages of hope that the needed economic transformations can happen. William Nordhaus has long been an advocate
for policies that require climate polluters to pay the cost these impose on the rest of
us. The Nobel committee praised Professor Nordhaus for showing “the most efficient remedy for problems caused by
greenhouse gases is a global scheme of universally imposed carbon taxes.”
The second awardee, Paul Romer, who was cited for his insightful work on technological change, spoke encouragingly of
the needed economic transformation: “Once we start to try o reduce carbon emissions, we’ ll
be surprised that it wasn’t as hard as anticipated...One problem today is that people think protecting the environment will be
so costly and so hard that they want to ignore the problem and pretend it doesn’t exist,” Professor Romer said at a post-
announcement news conference. “Humans are capable of amazing accomplishments if we set our minds to it.”
Clearly the urgent challenge in the US is to make it politically necessary for our policy makers to make a U-turn on climate
policy: to de-carbonize our economy and to collaborate internationally to avoid a future of devastation and endless conflicts.
This is a far cry from the priorities of the Trump administration or our current Congress, so a stronger than ever climate
movement is needed. It seems to me that peace activists need to make climate advocacy a much stronger part of our agenda.
Women Against War is excited to be participating in this Saturday’s Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair:
October 20", 10-4 PM at the Doane Stuart School. This is a start, and I hope we find many more ways to collaborate with
environmental activists in the period ahead. Please drop by our table for more information.
