We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon

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We Can’t Confront Climate Change While Lavishly Funding the Pentagon
BY: JP Scottile, Truthout 8-18-19
RE: https://truthout.org/articles/we-can...-the-pentagon/

Photo link: https://truthout.org/wp-content/uplo...g-1200x710.jpg
U.S. Marine Corps recruits complete obstacles during the Crucible at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, February 21, 2019. The total number of heat-strokes and cases of heat exhaustion suffered by active-duty service members rose by 60 percent between 2008 and 2018. By: WARRANT OFFICER BOBBY J. YARBROUGH / U.S. MARINE CORPS

The Pentagon is staring down the barrel of what could become the longest, hottest war in U.S. history. This titanic clash pits the largest military the world has ever seen against an omnipresent opponent that can marshal resources like no enemy it has ever encountered.

That opponent is climate change, and according to a joint investigation by NBC News and InsideClimate News, the extreme heat it brings is already generating military casualties. But soldiers like Sgt. Sylvester Cline are not dying where you might expect, such as scorching, oil-rich targets like Iraq, where Cline served during a lie-tainted war. Unlike the overwhelming majority of Uncle Sam’s long list of military conflicts, this war is also being waged on U.S. soil. Sadly, the Arkansas-based sergeant was just one of “at least 17 troops to die of heat exposure during training exercises at U.S. military bases since 2008.”

In fact, the total number of heat-strokes and cases of heat exhaustion suffered by active-duty service members rose by 60 percent between 2008 and 2018 (from 1,766 to 2,792). Forty percent of these incidents occurred in the Southeastern United States in places like Fort Benning (Georgia), Camp Lejeune (North Carolina) and Fort Polk (Louisiana). Over that same period, the Southeast region has experienced average summer temperatures that were the nation’s hottest on record, and a staggering 61 percent of major Southeast cities show the effects of these worsening heat waves, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment released in 2018.

Although the Pentagon both believes in climate change and is actively planning for it, the Defense Department has been criticized for failing to properly adjust to these new, climate-stoked “black flag” conditions. It’s perplexing because the sun-baked Southeast is home to many of the 46 bases the Defense Department currently identifies as “threatened by climate change.” But, as the NBC News/InsideClimate News collaboration pointed out, the inadequate response often reflects the fact that “many U.S. military leaders fought in the intense heat of Iraq and Afghanistan and want their troops to be able to do the same.” As former Army captain Augusto Giacoman explained, “ … if you want to be prepared for a fight in the heat, you have to train in the heat under the same conditions you’ll encounter.”

Obviously, he’s referring to the sweltering conditions U.S. troops “encounter” in the Middle East. And when we talk about fighting in the Middle East, we’re really talking about the central organizing principle of U.S. empire — and that’s oil. Ironically, the Pentagon’s regional command for the Middle East was aptly dubbed CENTCOM (Central Command) when it was created under President Ronald Reagan in 1983. The oil-dominated region has been the literal and figurative “center” of a globe-spanning empire largely built on the production and transmission of oil. That’s the same oil now catalyzing the climate-based “counter-attack” threatening U.S. troops and bases. And like so many of the United States’s recent foes, it is an enemy of its own making.

As Brown University’s Costs of War research project recently pointed out, the Defense Department “remains the world’s single largest consumer of oil – and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.” British researchers at Durham University and Lancaster University published a corroborating report detailing the profuse use of hydrocarbons to fuel U.S. military adventurism. They astutely pointed out the dilemma of attempting to confront “the effects of climate change while remaining the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world.” They see the Pentagon “locked into” this situation “for years to come because of its dependence on existing aircraft and warships for open-ended operations around the globe.” But that’s not the only catch-22 bedeviling an empire comprised of 800 military bases and installations that cost over a trillion dollars per year to maintain. Far more vexing is the fact that the climate crisis is itself a byproduct of 70 years of U.S. interventionism and empire.

How Empire Brought the Heat
Since President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended the United States’s nascent post-World War II protectorate over Saudi Arabia in a 1945 deal with King Saud, U.S. empire has been devoted to securing and protecting transmission routes for oil, creating oil-based client states through intervention and coups, protecting and selling arms to client petro-states, and punishing non-compliant petro-states that run askance of the U.S.’s oil-based imperium. In essence, the petroleum-fueled global economy has been underwritten by the full faith and credit of the U.S. military since the end of World War II.

Note: The climate crisis is itself a byproduct of 70 years of U.S. interventionism and empire.

When we talk about the U.S. as the “world’s policeman,” much of the beat Uncle Sam walks is paved with oil. The Persian Gulf, the Niger River Basin Region of Africa, the Horn of Africa, the South China Sea, Central Asia, Venezuela and Libya are all places of U.S. “national interest” because U.S. policymakers are really interested in preserving the dominant role of hydrocarbons in the global economy.

Why else would the U.S. Navy base its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain? Or how about the U.S. base in Djibouti or the increasing tempo of deadly kinetic operations in Somalia? Both have everything to do with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, strategically located between Djibouti and war-torn Yemen. Along with the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal, it’s one of the Middle East’s three major oil transmission points.

Now, just imagine if ExxonMobil or Chevron was forced to sustain a private fleet of warships to keep these two straits open? What would happen if Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates couldn’t rely on U.S. patrols of the Persian Gulf or continued U.S. support for its bloody war to control Yemen and, therefore, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait? Or, imagine that the Suez wasn’t controlled by Egypt, a dutiful, dictatorial client of the United States?

The climate crisis is not only a byproduct of empire, but it’s becoming a rationale for even more empire.

It’s hard to imagine, because every year the U.S. political system reflexively funds a world-dominating defense budget that directly benefits the oil industry, client states and the entire hydrocarbon-based economy. Basically, it’s a global protection racket that generates huge profits for defense companies that sell weapons to the Pentagon. And the U.S. government also pushes arms sales abroad, particularly to oil-rich clients like those in the Middle East. All of those arms sales sustain thousands of jobs in states and congressional districts around the U.S. That, in turn, creates constituencies for members of Congress who collect millions in campaign contributions from both the defense and oil industries to make sure they can maintain de facto subsides for their weapons and their oil. Taxpayers and consumers complete the circuit through their “contributions” to the empire’s public-private partnership: They get to keep on buying oil, gas and plastic, while paying taxes for the military. It’s a perpetual ATM fueled by oil.

Meanwhile, U.S. citizens fill the ranks of the military services that guarantee the continuation of a hydrocarbon system that’s now cooking them alive as they train on U.S. soil. It’s the ghoulish internal logic of the oil-driven imperium, one that generates its rationale for being through its continued existence.

Funding the Pentagon, Fueling the Fallout

Now this self-perpetuating system threatens to engulf the thawing Arctic, which is becoming a new frontier for untapped oil and gas. Of course, there’d be no scramble for the Arctic’s once-impenetrable hydrocarbon resources without the unprecedented melting caused by our hydrocarbon-driven climate crisis. But that sad irony was purposefully ignored by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a recent meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council in Finland. Unsurprisingly, the Rapture-ready Pompeo refused to sign the meeting’s joint accord because it mentioned the climate crisis now devastating the Arctic’s ecosystems. Instead, Secretary Pompeo extolled the supposed benefits of the big melt that’s rapidly altering the pristine landscape of the ever-less frozen frontier:

The Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30 percent of its undiscovered gas, an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources, fisheries galore.

It’s a predictable statement from an oil-obsessed administration that salivates at the prospect of drilling, baby, drilling in the Arctic. At the same time, Secretary Pompeo put the world on notice, stating that the region has become an “arena of global power and competition.” Without irony, he warned Russia and “non-Arctic” nations like China against “aggressive” behavior. Actually, China is already there and drilling in cooperation with Russia in a de facto alliance around the issue of the opening Arctic, a fact that is likely to become budgetary catnip for U.S. empire. Competition for this new frontier is quickly becoming the latest oily justification to pour money into yet another theatre of operations. In other words, the climate crisis is not only a byproduct of empire, but it’s becoming a rationale for even more empire.

Actually, it’s already started.

If we are not careful, the same forever war mentality that has continually shifted from one enemy to another will find yet another reason to exist.

The troops sent to the border to “assist” U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and to “build” Trump’s wall are, like Sergeant Cline’s heat-related death, a harbinger of things to come. They are not only seeing firsthand the desperation of people willing to walk up to 2,000 miles to flee the fallout from decades of U.S. interventionism in Central America, they are witnessing the start of a widely predicted climate migration crisis. A brutal mix of prolonged drought, water scarcity and deforestation is exacerbating the suffering in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. As InsideClimate News noted, Honduras typifies the unfair paradox of the climate crisis because “like so many developing countries” it “has contributed relatively little to the greenhouse gas emissions,” but “projections suggest it is especially imperiled by climate change.”

Low-emission countries like Bangladesh, Mozambique and Fiji are already feeling the heat of the climate crisis. And, as U.S. troops suffer from heat waves in the Southeast, the impact of climate crisis is also being felt acutely in the U.S. in places like the Alaskan village of Newtok, which requested and was finally granted Federal Emergency Management Agency money to flee the relentless march of climate-caused erosion. Obviously, the crisis is not 50-75 years away, as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator and former hydrocarbon lobbyist Andrew Wheeler smugly proclaimed — and the Pentagon knows it.

Unfortunately, the longer the U.S. continues to garishly fund the Pentagon and its oil-based protection racket, the harder it will be to deal with the massive ecological and human fallout caused by the hydrocarbon economy. Ultimately, it might be impossible to halt or even mitigate the climate crisis without also ending empire. And if we are not careful, the same forever war mentality that has continually shifted from one enemy to another will find yet another reason to exist — this time as a bulwark against the escalating impacts of a climate crisis it helped to create in the first place.

The U.S. could become a garrison state, pulling back to within its borders like a paranoid survivalist, armed to the teeth with high-tech weapons and ready to gun down anyone and everyone fleeing their storm-ravaged homes and collapsing ecosystems. In many ways, this transition has already begun.

About this writer: JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, published historian, radio co-host and documentary filmmaker (The Warning, 2008). His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN and as newsmagazine producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington. His weekly show, ‘Inside the Headlines With The Newsvandal,’ co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa. He blogs under the pseudonym ‘the Newsvandal.’

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At 4°C of warming, would a billion people survive? What scientists say.
By: David Spratt - Climatecodered - 8-18-19
RE: http://www.climatecodered.org/2019/0...on-people.html

Map link: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KJWl4WBN5...4c%2Bimage.png

In a way it’s an obscene question: if the planet warms by 4 degress Celsius (°C), would only a billion
people survive and many billions perish? Obscene in the sense of the obscenity of arguing about the exact body count from a genocide. In the end it’s about the immorality, the crime, the responsibility, not the precise numbers.

But it’s a relevant question, in that Earth is heading towards 4°C of warming, based on emission reduction commitments so far. The Paris commitments are a path of warming of around 3.3°C, but that does not include some carbon cycle feedbacks that have already become active (e.g. permafrost, Amazon, other declines in carbon store efficiency) which would push that warming towards 5°C. So saying we are presently on a 4°C path is about right.

It’s also a relevant question because there has been some controversy about comments made by Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam to the BBC HARDtalk programme three days ago: “Teenagers are shitting themselves about what’s happening for the future, they’ve got another 50, 60, 70 years to live on this planet, by that time there could only be a billion people left. I mean that’s six billion people that have died from starvation or slaughtered in war.” The BBC accused Hallam of “going too far” and there was some social media flutter about it.

Video link: https://youtu.be/9HyaxctatdA

There’s no science to support such statements was a frequent refrain. But there is. In May this year, Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian that in a 4°C-warmer world: “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that… There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world.” Rockström is one of the world’s leading researchers on climate “tipping points” and “safe boundaries” for humanity.

And there are other scientists with similar views. But before I get to them, let’s take a moment to understand what a 4°C-warmer world would look like. That same Guardian article, by Vince Gaia, sketches a dramatic picture. And eight years ago I wrote a primer, “4 degrees hotter”, available here.

And just two months before the fifteenth meeting of the Coalition of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen, “4 degrees and beyond” was the focus of a September 2009 International Climate Conference at Oxford. The proceedings were published by the Royal Society. 4 degrees was also the focus of a conference in Melbourne in 2011, with the proceedings published as a book.

The 4°C story goes like this:

On the present path, we may well exceed 4°C this century. At the moment Earth appears to be heading towards 1.5°C by 2030 and 2°C before 2050, and if the feedbacks kick in, 4°C some 30-50 years after that.


- Whilst it would take several centuries to a millenia or so to melt all the ice, sea levels could be up by 2–3 metres by 2100, and in the end a 4°C-warmer world would have no large ice sheets at either of the poles, or on the Himalayas; sea-levels would eventually rise by 70 metres. This we learn from the planet’s climate history. Almost two billion people in Asia rely to some extent on rivers which are fed in part by Himalayan snow melt.


- Ocean acidification renders many calcium-shelled organisms at the base of the ocean food chain artefacts of history. There would be no coral reefs of note. Ocean ecosystems and food chains collapse. The world is full flight into the sixth mass extinction in history. If the rate of warming consistently exceeds 0.4°C per decade, all ecosystems are likely to be quickly destroyed, opportunistic species dominate, and break-down of biological material will lead to even greater emissions of carbon dioxide.


- Warmer ocean waters decrease the photosynthetic productivity of phytoplankton, and a warm ocean surface layer stays unmixed with the cooler, nutrient-rich waters below, severely reducing the algae population. Algae, which comprise most of the ocean’s plant life, are the world’s greatest carbon dioxide sink, pumping down the gas, as well as contributing to cloud cover by releasing dimethyl sulphide (DMS) into the atmosphere, a gas connected with the formation of clouds, so that warmer seas and less algae will likely reduce cloud formation and further enhance positive feedback. Severe disruption of the algae/DMS relation would signal spiralling and irreversible climate change.


- Hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon locked up in Arctic permafrost – particularly in Siberia – enter the melt zone, releasing globally warming methane and carbon dioxide in immense quantities. The Amazon would no longer be a rainforest, but savannah. 


- Aridification emerges over more than 30 percent of the world’s land surface. Desertification is severe in southern Africa, the southern Mediterranean, west Asia, the Middle East, inland Australia and across the south-western United States. Agriculture becomes nonviable in the dry subtropics.


- Vince Gaia in his Guardian article reports: “A wide equatorial belt of high humidity will cause intolerable heat stress across most of tropical Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, rendering them uninhabitable for much of the year… To the south and north of this humid zone, bands of expansive desert will also rule out agriculture and human habitation. Some models predict that desert conditions will stretch from the Sahara right up through south and central Europe, drying rivers including the Danube and the Rhine… by 2100, most of the low and mid latitudes will be uninhabitable because of heat stress or drought; despite stronger precipitation, the hotter soils will lead to faster evaporation and most populations will struggle for fresh water.”


- Food production tumbles as a consequence of a greater than one-fifth decline in crop yields, a decline in the nutritional content of food crops, a catastrophic decline in insect populations, desertification, monsoon failure and chronic water shortages, and conditions too hot for human habitation in significant food-growing regions.


- The destabilisation of the Jet Stream very significantly affects the intensity and geographical distribution of the Asian and West African monsoons and, together with the further slowing of the Gulf Stream, impinges on life support systems in Europe, where new deserts spreading in Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey: the Sahara has effectively leapt the Straits of Gibraltar. In Switzerland, summer temperatures hit 48°C, more reminiscent of Baghdad than Basel.. The sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech will be experienced in southern England, with summer temperatures in the home counties reaching a searing 45°C. Europe’s population may be forced into a “great trek” north.


Another map link: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xkv3gvMW8...001%2Bcopy.jpg
“Most of Australia” can expect extreme temperatures of more than 50 degrees by end of century.

Johan Rockström’s view that a 4°C world might only support one billion people is not a figure plucked out of the air. A decade ago, considerable research was done on the food production and carrying capacity of a hotter planet. As a result of this work, in March 2009, at the Copenhagen science conference, Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, then director of the Potsdam Institute, and one of Europe’s most eminent climate scientists, told his audience: “In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something –- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet [at 4°C], namely below one billion people”, as reported by the New York Times.

Schellnhuber was viciously attacked for the comment, accused of advocating genocide and expressing support for reducing the world's population to one billion. When he spoke at the 4°C conference in Melbourne in 2011, an audience member held up a noose. It was very ugly.

Speaking in 2015 to ABC Radio National, Schellnhuber said that this was a false interpretation of what he said, spread by enemies of climate action to discredit him. He explained:

In the world of Google you can raise any myth and you can raise any lie… Here is what I really said. It was a scientific conference, preceding the infamous Copenhagen conference in 2009, and actually I talked about the carrying capacity of the Earth, which is an interesting issue. What I said is, if global warming is not in any way mitigated, and we go into a six or eight degrees warmer world, then our planet will probably only be able to support a billion people.

On 29 September 2009, at the conclusion of the “4 degrees and beyond” conference, The Scotsman reported:

Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only around 10 per cent of the planet’s population – around half a billion people – will survive if global temperatures rise by 4°C...

Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were “terrifying”.

“For humanity it’s a matter of life or death,” he said. “We will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the
right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4°C. If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4°C, 5°C or 6°C, you might have half a billion people surviving.”

This story is archived here. Anderson may have corrected what was reported, but I have so far not located it. The previous day, the Scotsman reported Anderson as saying:

The other thing to remember is that 4C is a global average. It's probably nearer 5C on land, and would be up to 15C in some areas.

There's no evidence to suggest that humanity can actually survive at this sort of temperature. Small pockets of human beings might continue to exist but I don't consider that to be a success.

Three years earlier, in 2006, James Lovelock — scientist extraordinaire, inventor of the microwave oven and propounder of the Gaia thesis — told an audience that the Earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by up to 8°C, making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples’ lives. He said a traumatised Earth might only be able to support less than a tenth of its six billion people: “We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don’t see the species dying out... A hot Earth couldn’t support much over 500 million.” This was reported by The Scotsman as “Scientist says global warming will ‘kill billions'” (http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1768202006) but is no longer available online. Lovelock made similar comments in at one of his books, as I remember, The Revenge of Gaia, published in 2006.

So did Roger Hallam “go too far”? Not at all, there is serious research and eminent voices in support of his statements. The gross error in all of this are all those who cannot countenance this conversation.