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Why Surround the White House?
By maudeaster on 2017-04-25 10:56:27
SuILLeM on
Why am I going to Washington, DC next Saturday? Why do I want to join with others in the People’s
Climate March to surround the White House? Why do I want to tell Trump to pay attention to the fires in Florida, the floods
in California, and -- far from our shores --- the drought across the Middle East that has spawned the conflicts in Syria, Iraq
and beyond? I’m going to join people from across the country converging on Washington because Trump’s
environmental policies need to be reversed. They are feeding a disastrous cycle:
e The carbon pollution from our accumulated use of oil and coal and gas is creating climate chaos including extreme
weather events...
e The extreme weather conditions are creating conflict over land and resources, leading to civil wars...
e The civil wars become markets for US and other countries’ arms sales and military intervention, spreading and
intensifying the conflict...
e The warfare’s enormous energy explosions accelerate the climate destruction...
e The fighting and the land left inhospitable due to the changing climate is destroying communities and creating large
scale human displacement...
e And the refugee flows created by this displacement require generosity and tolerance from societies less devastated by
the climate, which is so far is proving an adjustment challenging for many to make.
The US military’s own most recent National Security Strategy describes how climate change is “an urgent threat to our
national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows and conflicts over basic resources like food and
COMBAT
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CUMATE
water.” An important conclusion, but are the generals following their own i smmmadvice? Combat vs.
Climate, an excellent report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), points out that in fact, the Pentagon behavior and the
balance of US security spending ignores the budget implications of the National Security Strategy assessment. The mega-
ton Mother of All Bombs exploded by the US military in Afghanistan, with the blast yield of 11 tons of TNT, provides a
recent, vivid illustration of the carbon carnage inherent in weapons use. Not only did Trump applaud this Pentagon decision,
but his proposed $54 billion military budget increase would further rob funds needed at home and abroad for mitigating
climate disasters, while increasing the Pentagon’s climate destruction. The US military is already the largest single source of
carbon pollution endangering our planet. The IPS study provides excellent examples of the choices Trump and the budget-
makers in Congress need to consider:
e “If we cancelled the F-35, the most expensive weapon system ever envisioned, which cannot perform as well as the
systems it is designed to replace, we could build 15 more offshore wind projects like Block Island RI, generating
enough capacity to poser 320,000 US homes.”
e “If we shift the money currently being spent on the Air Launched Cruise Missile Follow-on, we could install 11.5
million square feet of solar panels on buildings, keeping 210,000 tons of CO2 out of the air annually.”
I'll also be joining with other marchers to protest Trump’s plan for MC rastic cuts in the budget of the
EPA and his attempts to roll back Obama’s policies to reduce the carbon the US oil, coal and gas corporations are pouring
into the atmosphere. Trump’s ignorance about the dangers of climate change must be challenged. We need to bring him the
serious message of Bill McKibben’s excellent April jgth piece in The Nation, We March for the Future, which details the
challenge facing us and ends with this message: “Trump is either the end of the fight for a working planet Earth—or the
moment when that fight turns truly serious. That choice is not up to him. It’s up to the rest of us. See you in DC.”
