Elaine Browne Quits the U.S. Green Party
Editor’s note: For some time it has been an open secret in U.S. radical circles that the Green Party is dominated by a “Demogreen” current that believes the organization’s main role is to influence the Democratic Party, rather than to build an independent radical alternative. The conflict between the party’s “moderate” leadership and the its radical wing seems to be intensifying, as this statement by long-time civil rights activist Elaine Brown illustrates. It was issued on December 28, 2007.
OPEN STATEMENT TO THE GREEN PARTY
As of today, I am no longer a candidate for the Green Party nomination for president of the United States, and I hereby resign from all affiliation with the Green Party. I believe the leadership of the Green Party of the United States has been seized by neo-liberal men who entrench the Party in internecine antagonisms so as to compromise its stated principles and frustrate its electoral and other goals. They have made it impossible to advance any truly progressive ideals or objectives under the umbrella of the Green Party, and, thus, rendered it counterproductive for me to go forward as a Green Party candidate or member.
I believe this small clique that has captured control of the Party has transformed it into a repository for erstwhile, disgruntled Democrats, who would violate the Party’s own vision and sabotage the good will and genuine commitment of the general membership. Indeed, these usurpers foster a reactionary agenda, supporting partisans in and backers of the Bush wars and disavowing the Party’s more progressive tenets in favor of promoting high-profile participation in the politics of the establishment.
This became clear to me almost from the moment I announced my candidacy in February of 2007. I intended using my campaign to bring large numbers of blacks and browns into the Party, particularly from the hood and the barrio—as would come to be reflected in the lists of supporters and delegates I’ve submitted in connection with my candidacy. As I asserted I would use the respect I enjoyed as a former leader of the Black Panther Party to do so, some in the hierarchy seemed utterly fearful of the prospect of a massive influx of blacks and browns into the Green Party. Soon, there was wide circulation of false rumors that I was a one-time “government agent,” which was intended to discredit my history in the Black Panther Party so as to undermine my potential influence.—And, since then, I have had to devote significant time and energy to addressing these lies.—What this effort revealed, though, was how the Green Party, while advocating “diversity,” remains dominated by whites. Indeed, the Party is able to count less blacks, browns and natives in its membership than our national population percentages and certainly less than the Democrats themselves.
In effect, the present Green Party leadership promotes a kinder, gentler capitalism, a moderated racism, an environmentally-sustainable globalism, which I cannot support. They are dedicated to the underside of the Party’s platform, which falls short of repudiating the capitalist state, source of all the social ills the Party would address. They equivocate by promoting “an economic alternative to corporate capitalism and a socialist state,” advocate a “re-formulation” of the IMF, NAFTA, so forth, and advance the institution of “stakeholder capitalism.”
On the other hand, they demonstrate a willingness to override the best of the Party’s platform. My sharp criticism of high-profile Party members’ support for the “three-strikes” crime laws, the sole basis for the inhumane mass incarceration of people in the United States, particularly blacks—the repeal of which the Party’s platform advocates—has been met with outright enmity. And, to divert attention from this and other critical issues, the leadership has employed chicanery in their promulgation of defamatory lies about me—which they finally extended to character assaults on my supporters and critics of their unscrupulousness.
It is my sincere belief that the Green Party as it now exists has no intention of using the ballot to actualize real social progress, and will aggressively repel attempts to do so. To remain in the fray or in the Party, then, would require a betrayal of my lifelong and ongoing commitment to serving the interests of black and other oppressed people by advancing revolutionary change in America.
People’s Protocol on Climate Change (Draft)
Editor’s note: The document below seems to be a worthwhile initiative, but we have been unable to learn much about its authors and origins. Can any reader of Climate and Capitalism provide more background?
According to the limited information we’ve found on the web, it was adopted on December 10 at a meeting in Sumber Klampok, Indonesia. The organizers say they will seek input from people around the world, and present a final draft for adoption at a People’s Assembly in Poznan, Poland in 2008 during the 4th meeting of parties of the Kyoto Protocol.
There is an online petition in support of the People’s Protocol at http://www.petitiononline.com/ppcc/petition.html
UPDATE: More information about the Protocol here.
People’s Protocol on Climate Change (Draft)
Preamble
The planet is experiencing a climate crisis of catastrophic proportions. Drastic action is required to reverse the situation. Global temperatures have increased twice as fast in the last 50 years as over the last century and will rise even faster in the coming decades. Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) are among the 12 warmest years on record. This is disrupting weather patterns, severely damaging the environment, and destroying lives and livelihoods – especially of the poorest and most vulnerable.
This dangerous climatic change is driven by the unprecedented increase in human-generated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most dangerous increase is in CO2 emissions from the ever-mounting burning of fossil fuels for industry, commerce, transport and militarism. The planet’s capacity to process these emissions has also been crippled by widespread deforestation. As a result, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now far higher than its natural range over the last 650,000 years. Concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, again caused by human industry and agriculture have also increased dramatically and are also implicated in causing global warming.
Climate Change will be universally adverse for the world’s people with greater and more frequent extremes of heat and rainfall patterns as well as tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes. Africa, Asia and Latin America face shorter growing seasons, lower yields, lost or deteriorated agricultural land, decreased agricultural production and freshwater shortages. Droughts in Africa will bring widespread hunger and famine. Asia is already confronting flooding, avalanches and landslides, which will increase illness and death. In Latin America, higher temperatures and reduced biodiversity in tropical forests will devastate indigenous communities. Globally, rising sea levels will flood low-lying areas, increased storm surges will threaten coastal communities, and warmer sea waters will diminish fish stocks.
The last centuries have been heralded for great strides in technology, production and human progress – but these advances have precipitated global ecological and development disasters. On one hand a privileged global elite engages in reckless profit-driven production and grossly excessive consumption. On the other hand, the mass of humanity is mired in underdevelopment and poverty with merely survival and subsistence consumption, or even less. The world’s largest transnational corporations (TNCs) based mainly in the Northern countries and with expanding operations in the South, have long been at the forefront of these excesses. Indeed the powerful industrialized nations of today were built on the severe exploitation of the human and natural resources of the global South. The pursuit of growth and profit is at the core of exploitation, structural poverty and global warming.
There have already been high-profile schemes for concerted action and co-operation to combat global warming. This includes the landmark 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the succeeding Kyoto Agreement. Yet the problem has not been stemmed or much less reversed, indeed it has worsened as the limited targets and timelines set by the Kyoto Protocol have made no headway. Importantly, the Kyoto Protocol does not decisively acknowledge the real roots of climate change – globalization and the mad pursuit of TNCs for profits. Instead, Kyoto has diminished responsibility and accountability for the climate crisis through the marketization of energy resources and supply. The offsets and emissions trading system transfers adjustment costs from rich to poor, creates new dependencies, rewards corporations for polluting and increases their opportunities for profits. Northern TNCs and investors have sustained and even increased their energy intensive operations through relocation to Southern countries, capturing and co-opting local elites into the destructive process of capitalist-dominated production and consumption.
Significantly, the Kyoto Protocol does not truly involve grassroots communities and peoples who are worst-affected, especially in the South. It has grossly neglected the severe damage to their livelihoods, well-being and welfare. It does not consistently and coherently adhere to the vital developmental principles, especially people’s sovereignty over natural resources.
The gravity, scope and depth of the problem demand the greatest collective effort and cooperation. No peoples or state can succeed alone in addressing the root causes of the problem. At the same time, stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions today will not immediately impact on rising global temperatures since climate processes involve-long time scales and a global responsibility must be taken for the immediate and negative impacts that will be felt by the poor and marginalized.
This declaration articulates the values and principles that should guide international action and people’s struggles against climate change and its associated ecological and socioeconomic destruction.
Statement of values and principles
We, the people, are united behind certain core development values and principles of social justice, democracy, equality and equity, gender fairness, respect for human rights and dignity, respect for the environment, sovereignty, freedom, liberation and self-determination, stewardship, social solidarity, participation and empowerment. This statement further articulates these principles in the context of the global climate crisis.
1. Social Justice must be guaranteed, acknowledging the systemic roots of the climate crisis, the disproportionate responsibility of a narrow elite, the disproportionate vulnerability of the majority to the adverse effects, the grossly uneven capacity to confront and respond, and the legitimate aspirations to development of the people apart from the crisis.
1.1 We emphasize that Climate Change must be understood not merely as an environmental issue but as a question of social justice, its causes are rooted in the current capitalist-dominated global economy which is principally driven by the relentless drive for private profits and accumulation.
1.2 We stress that the current global economic order, driven by the Global North and their transnational corporations is the fundamental origin of over-exploitation and depletion of resources, of the gratuitous use of energy resources and the excessive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
1.3 We thus condemn “free market” policies of “globalization”, and its aggressive and intrusive expansion into every sector of the economy and into the global South, and the exploitation by TNCs of the people and the planet.
1.4 We firmly believe that these neoliberal policies are imposed particularly on the people of the global South by powerful foreign governments wielding influence through multilateral, regional and bilateral mechanisms such as World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements, regional and bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs), investment agreements and aid conditionalities.
1.5 We recognize that a very significant part of supposedly “Southern” emissions actually result from the energy-intensive operations of Northern TNCs located in the South for the purposes of exploiting local labor and natural resources. We further acknowledge that the severe deforestation across Latin America, Asia and Africa is most of all due to Northern TNC-driven commercial logging, plantation agriculture, mining activities and dam projects
2. Sovereignty means asserting the power of the people through their social movements and genuinely participatory structures as the foundation of the global response to the climate change issue.
2.1 We stress the vital importance and essential role of communities and peoples that will be most adversely affected by climate change in defining, guiding and determining the work of any and all major conferences and summits in the economic, social and related fields at the local, national, regional and global levels.
2.2 We commit to spare no efforts in strengthening civil society and social movements and, especially, the people’s organizations and struggles that are the indispensable foundations and most dynamic driving force of these. We affirm that people’s sovereignty of natural resources is indispensable to dealing with the problem of climate change and that this must be won in struggle.
2.3 We are aware that people in both the global North and, especially, the South are excluded from participation in governance with the unfortunate result that powerful private elite and corporate interests exert far greater influence over socioeconomic policy-making.
3. Respect for the Environment means a rejection of market mechanisms that impose the cash nexus on ecological priorities. The needs of the planet and its people must take precedent over the push for growth and profits.
3.1 We recognize that nature is vital for the survival of all and that natural resources and their use are essential for sustained economic growth, sustainable human development, and the elimination of poverty, ill-health and hunger. We are committed to building societies where the people enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms, and in a way that the world we create does not unjustly deny the same for future generations.
3.2 We assert that the needs of people and planet must be placed above those of global capital and the wholesale pursuit of private profits. The planet’s resources must never be reduced to being assigned property rights that can be bought, sold, accumulated and monopolized by a few for the sake of private gain.
3.3 We believe that population growth increases humanity’s demands on nature but that the resources of the planet are sufficient to meet these demands if only production, resource-use and consumption are organized to meet the needs of the people for life and not of a select few for profits.
4. Responsibility, expressed in the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, requires a mechanism for globally-inclusive equity. Northern countries share a disproportionate responsibility for historic emissions.
4.1. We acknowledge the greater vulnerability of poor and marginalized communities to the adverse effects of climate change.
4.2. We recognize that there are elite segments of society whose current levels of consumption are grossly excessive and cannot and should not be maintained, even as those large populations globally who are denied basic needs should have these met. These elite segments of society must bear the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis.
4.3 We recognize that there are large parts of humanity who are more dependent for their survival on their access to and use of natural resources, as well as on the state of the climate and the natural environment. We then stress that the specific needs of farming communities, indigenous peoples, coastal communities, fisherfolk, and other marginalized, poor and rural producers need to be given special attention in all adaptation efforts.
4.4 We acknowledge that adaptation is not acceptance of climate change but is necessary to provide temporary relief from the initial impacts of climate change until global mitigation efforts are sufficiently developed to halt global warming.
Statement of goals and purposes
1. We acknowledge climate change as a multifaceted issue and that the score of interlinked challenges and threats therefore need to be confronted in an integrated and coordinated manner if any real progress is to be achieved.
2. We declare our commitment to the significant and far-reaching reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in line with our core values and principles.
3. We further declare our willingness to work for and support any international climate change agreement that is consistent with these essential foundations.
4. We believe that the climate change crisis is not simply about adaptation and mitigation, but changing the whole economic framework into one of eco-sufficiency and sustainability.
5. We assert that Kyoto represents a false compromise and commit to redressing the fundamental weaknesses of the Kyoto agreement in any new protocol or post 2012 agreement.
a. We reject market-based mechanisms to address climate change as diversionary and designed to perpetuate current levels of economic activity and profits, if not brazen maneuvering by corporations to pass on the burden of dealing with the negative effects of their greenhouse gas emissions to the people of the global south.
b. We acknowledge that technological developments can play a role in addressing the climate change issue but are conscious that technological fixes in themselves are not just grossly insufficient but even used to divert from the need to address root causes.
6. We are convinced that human progress and the defense of the livelihoods, well-being and welfare of the people ultimately require an economic system that is socially just, democratic and ecologically sustainable. This includes people-oriented agricultural and industrial development.
7. We declare that in order to address the climate crisis, the people must have real stewardship, access and control over the natural resources on which they depend rather than TNCs, international financial institutions or even governments which represent the narrow private interests of a global elite and their local collaborators. In so-doing we assert people’s sovereignty over natural resources.
8. To this end, we shall work for:
a. National ownership over the nation’s resources and productive assets;
b. Community-level management and decision-making supported by national-level authority or public-community partnership in the utilization and conservation of these resources;
c. Transparency in decision-making and disposition of revenues raised from the extraction, processing and sale of products derived from nature;
d. A comprehensive national policy framework for economic diversification and for meeting the collective needs of the present and future generations, especially the poor and marginalized in society;
e. A national program for research and development on sustainable technologies including recycling methods, renewable energy and other alternatives to unsustainable means of production;
f. Education on ecology and socially responsible consumption; and
g. Cooperative arrangements with other countries in the stewardship of global commons or shared resources such as oceans, rivers, forests and the climate.
9. We affirm the importance of grassroots education, organizing and mobilizations to promote and realize our alternative vision and program for social transformation. We retain our vigilance even where governments have expressed support for a progressive agenda, and hold them accountable through popular participation and mobilization. We are ever critical of attempts to compromise the interests of the majority and the marginalized.
10. We commit to building on the powerful networks of movements for climate action that have emerged worldwide. Localized actions against greenhouse gas emissions have spread across the globe and deepened everyday development struggles.
11. We acknowledge the supportive role of adaptation funding for Southern countries to help deal with the problem climate change, affirm that the far greater responsibility of the North in the current climate crisis means that it must bear a far greater proportion of the funding responsibility. We decry the fiasco of the supposed global adaptation fund which was allotted insignificant funding, and criticize efforts such as those by the World Bank (WB) to use adaptation funding to distract from the overriding need to address the roots of the climate change problem. We stress that adaptation funding must be over and above traditional allotments for overseas development assistance (ODA).
12. We assert that restorative justice requires distribution of responsibility according to historical per capita emissions, not just on a by country basis but more significantly on a by polluter basis. The greatest burden of adjustment must be on the Northern countries and their TNCs (wherever these are located), as well as on Southern elites, who have caused and benefited the most from the damage. We further assert that this absolutely requires, at the very minimum, Northern commitments and concrete practice to:
a. Drastically reduce overall energy use and increase energy efficiency;
b. Increase unconditional financial compensation to directly address the climate crisis in the South; and
c. Overhaul international trade and investment rules towards sustainable development and improvements in the standard of living in the South, including also an end to the real or effective transfer of Northern polluting industries to the South.
13. We recognize the need for significant global GHG emissions reductions in both the Northern and Southern countries. We assert that action on climate change can only succeed if it addresses southern emissions, and this requires mechanisms for large scale compensatory financing from the global north to global south. Specifically this should entail the creation of a global mitigation fund, contributed to by the global north, and in particular northern TNCs.
U.S. Ethanol and Amazon Forests: Echoes of Engels
In The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, Friedrich Engels wrote:
“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. …”
That subject, the irony of history, comes up frequently in the writings of Marx and Engels, and even more frequently in real life. A letter published in the December 14 issue of Science magazine offers a case in point.
Subsidies to corn-based biofuel are supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many analysts have argued that the benefit is at best marginal, because growing corn and making ethanol is energy-intensive. But the problem goes beyond that, as the letter points out. The writer is William F. Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute:
“The United States is the world’s leading producer of soy. However, many U.S. farmers are shifting from soy to corn (maize) in order to qualify for generous government subsidies intended to promote biofuel production; since 2006, U.S. corn production has risen 19% while soy production has fallen by 15%. This in turn is helping to drive a major increase in global soy prices, which have nearly doubled in the past 14 months.
“The rising price for soy has important consequences for Amazonian forests and savanna-woodlands. In Brazil, the world’s second-leading soy producer, deforestation rates and especially fire incidence have increased sharply in recent months in the main soy- and beef-producing states in Amazonia (and not in states with little soy production). Although dry weather is a contributing factor, these increases are widely attributed to rising soy and beef prices, and studies suggest a strong link between Amazonian deforestation and soy demand.
“Some Amazonian forests are directly cleared for soy farms. Farmers also purchase large expanses of cattle pasture for soy production, effectively pushing the ranchers farther into the Amazonian frontier or onto lands unsuitable for soy production. In addition, higher soy costs tend to raise global beef prices because soy-based livestock feeds become more expensive, creating an indirect incentive for forest conversion to pasture. Finally, the powerful Brazilian soy lobby is a key driving force behind initiatives to expand Amazonian highways and transportation networks in order to transport soybeans to market, and this is greatly increasing access to forests for ranchers, loggers, and land speculators.
“In a globalized world, the impacts of local decisions about crop preferences can have far-reaching implications. As illustrated by an apparent “corn connection” to Amazonian deforestation, the environmental benefits of corn-based biofuel might be considerably reduced when its full and indirect costs are considered.”
To quote Engels once more …
“The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions…. and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be made on selling. … In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different.”
The Bali Conference on Climate Change: An Initial Balance Sheet
By Daniel Tanuro
Daniel Tanuro is the ecological correspondent of La Gauche, newspaper of the Belgian Socialist Workers Party. An earlier version of this article, in French, was published in Europe Solidaire sans frontières, Dec. 20, 2007. The translation of the expanded article was done by Climate and Capitalism. It has been reviewed by the author. Read more
Iraq and Climate Change
by Michael T. Clare
From Foreign Policy in Focus, December 7, 2007
When our grandchildren and more distant descendants assemble in such classrooms as may be available and ask their teachers, “Why did our ancestors not take effective action to prevent the catastrophic effects of climate change?” one of the answers will surely be, “The war in Iraq.”
Long after this war is over, its legacy will live on in terms of this nation’s abject failure to address the climate change challenge during the early years of the twenty-first century, when it was still possible to avert global warming’s most horrendous effects. When these effects became more widely apparent, in the decades ahead, humanity will no doubt take vigorous action to deal with the problem – but by then it will be too late to prevent some of its most damaging consequences, such as dramatic sea-level rise, widespread drought and desertification, increased severe storm activity, and the collapse of vulnerable societies.
Why is the Iraq War so closely tied to our failure in addressing climate change?
Let’s begin with the obvious: the war is primarily being fought by the United States, the world’s leading producer of climate-altering “greenhouse” gases and the one country whose leadership is required for genuine progress toward solving the climate change problem. But instead of providing such leadership, the United States has been totally embroiled in conducting a losing and debilitating war.
Transformation
Overcoming the global warming problem won’t be easy. In fact, it may prove the most difficult challenge humanity has ever faced. Its successful management will require a total transformation in the way we power and organize our cities, industries, farms, and transportation systems. This, in turn, will require the full attention, imagination, ingenuity, and determination of our leaders, scientists, engineers, farmers, and industrialists.
It’s not something you can successfully attend to in the rare few minutes between briefings on the war, visits to the war zone, consultations with top generals, endless discussion of a new winning strategy to replace all those that have failed, arm-twisting conversations with reluctant members of Congress to convince them to approve additional funds for war, visits to troops going off to battle, visits with troops returning from battle, meetings with the families of soldiers lost in battle, more meetings with generals, more arm-twisting, more strategy sessions, and so on. Yet every account of the Bush presidency since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has indicated that the conduct of the war has occupied almost all of President George W. Bush’s attention – and that of his senior staff – when it was not focused on getting re-elected or satisfying the purely venal interests of Republican insiders.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that the White House has devoted little sustained attention to the global warming issue and come up with few meaningful proposals for addressing it.
It’s the Oil
But, of course, this is just the beginning of the problem. What, after all, is the Iraq War all about? Pundits and historians will no doubt argue about this for decades to come, but few in the end will dispute the conclusion of former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan that, at root, it was about the control of Middle Eastern petroleum. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he wrote in his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence.
This fact is not unrelated to global warming: In essence, the war is intended to ensure America’s continued access to Middle Eastern oil, and access to Middle Eastern oil is essential to sustain America’s reliance on oil to fuel its economy, and this reliance, in turn, accounts for America’s largest share of greenhouse-gas emissions.
According to the latest Department of Energy figures, petroleum products accounted for 41% of total U.S. energy supplies in 2005, compared to 23% each for coal and natural gas. Even with all the emphasis being placed on the development of renewable sources of energy, oil is expected to remain the dominant source of the nation’s energy in 2030, accounting for an estimated 40% of the total supply. And because oil supplies so much of our energy, it also produces so much of our carbon dioxide emissions – 44% of the national total in 2005, a projected 42% (of a much higher level) in 2030.
Gulf Domination
Iraq matters in this calculation not because it (currently) supplies that much of our oil but because it represents the culmination of a 50-year U.S. effort to dominate the Persian Gulf region as way of ensuring that this country will have access to adequate supplies of petroleum to make up for any shortfall in domestic output. At one time the United States was self-sufficient in oil production but, as that fortunate era drew to a close in the years after World War II, American leaders concluded that it was necessary to ensure that the country controlled an alternative, overseas source – and the Persian Gulf (with two-thirds of the world’s known petroleum reserves) was selected for this purpose. Because the Gulf area is inherently unstable for a variety of historical, demographic, and political reasons, it has long been American policy to rely on military force to protect U.S. access to the region’s energy supplies. The Iraq War is only the most recent of a series of U.S. military interventions intended to achieve this objective.
When the Bush administration took office in January 2001 and conducted a thoroughgoing review of U.S. energy policy, it could have chosen to begin the shift from a petroleum-based economy to one based on alternative, climate-friendly fuels. Instead, it chose to reaffirm the nation’s reliance on petroleum and other fossil fuels, a decision embedded in the National Energy Policy of May 17, 2001. Once having made that decision, the administration also committed the nation to increased reliance on the Persian Gulf – and, therefore, to greater reliance on the use of military force to ensure access to the Gulf’s oil supplies. Because Saddam Hussein was seen in Washington as an impediment to such access, it ultimately became U.S. policy to remove him.
In the end, therefore, the Iraq War is the natural result of a White House effort to perpetuate the nation’s addiction to petroleum at any cost – an addiction that is responsible for an ever-increasing outflow of climate-altering greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Bangladesh
But the war also has other, more direct effects on climate change.
Among other things, the war itself is producing enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Because U.S. forces in Iraq are so reliant on combat planes, helicopters, and armored vehicles to conduct basic operations, they are using, on average, 16 gallons of oil per soldier per day – four times as much as soldiers in Operation Desert Storm and 16 times as much as those of World War II. Add up all the U.S. soldiers and sailors in Iraq and neighboring countries and aboard U.S. ships in the Gulf, and this works out to about 3 million gallons per day – equivalent to daily consumption by the entire population of Bangladesh. To this must be added the carbon dioxide released by pipeline and refinery explosions, the aircraft used to ferry U.S. troops in and out of Iraq, and other war-related activities.
The war’s biggest impact, however, will probably lie in all the money spent on fighting the war that will never be available to address the climate change dilemma. According to the most recent calculation by the National Priorities Project, the United States has already spent $475 billion on the war, with another $155 billion in supplemental funding pending before Congress. But even these prodigious sums do not include the hundreds of billions that must be added for the care of wounded and traumatized veterans of the war, interest on the Iraqi war debt, and the replacement of damaged or destroyed weapons and military hardware – expenses which will surely push the combined total well over $2 trillion (as Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have estimated), and probably much higher.
Compare this with the $1.5 billion earmarked by the administration in 2007 for the development of alternative, climate-friendly fuels. Let’s be realistic, folks: At this rate of investment, the planet will be an uninhabitable desert long before any real progress has been made in replacing fossil fuels on a meaningful scale. The administration might argue that it is possible to raise that amount substantially and still increase spending on the war, but this would quite correctly be viewed as economic lunacy. As long as we commit these grotesque sums on the Iraq war, there is no hope of devoting adequate funds to tackling the problem of climate change in this country.
Borrowing from the Future
But it gets worse from there. The administration is not really paying for the war in Iraq from existing funds – for example, from taxes on all the new wealth accumulated by the richest Americans during the Bush era. Rather, it is borrowing money to pay for the war. These debts will come due in the decades ahead when the cost of adjusting to global warming will really begin to mount. But when those days arrive, our descendants will need to devote all their tax contributions to paying off the Bushies’ war debt, not to addressing the increasingly severe effects of climate change. No doubt some will say, “Who are the culprits? Who is responsible for our desperate situation? Why didn’t they do time behind bars? But by then, it will be too late.
So the Iraq War, for all its distinctive features, has to be seen in relation to the massive catastrophe of global climate change that is coming toward us at a terrifying pace. Like the peril of all-out nuclear war, this will constitute an ultimate threat to our nation’s survival. If we had any sense at all, we would terminate the war as rapidly as possible, reject all war-related supplemental funding requests, dramatically cut our reliance on petroleum, and transfer massive funds from Iraq War accounts to research on alternative energy systems.
Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College, a Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) columnist, and the author of the forthcoming Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books, 2008).
Health Care: “Climate Change Will Ride Across This Landscape as the Fifth Horseman”
Excerpt from a lecture entitled Climate change and health: preparing for unprecedented challenges, presented by Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, in Bethesda, Maryland on December 10
As the climate scientists tell us, even if greenhouse gas emissions were to stop today, the consequences will be felt throughout this century. In the language of the scientists, human activities have committed this planet to climate change. The emphasis now is on the ability of our human species to adapt to changes that have become inevitable.
The warming of the planet will be gradual, but the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events – intense storms, heat waves, droughts, and floods – will be abrupt and the consequences will be acutely felt.
The health sector must add its voice – loud and clear – to the growing concern. Just as we fought so long to secure a high profile for health on the development agenda, we must now fight to place health issues at the centre of the climate agenda. We have compelling reasons for doing so. Climate change will affect, in profoundly adverse ways, some of the most fundamental determinants of health: food, air, water.
This is the reality that concerns me the most. Developing countries will be the first and hardest hit. Subsistence agriculture will suffer the most. Areas with weak health infrastructures will be the least able to cope.
Imagine the impact on health in areas where the food supply is already precarious, rural areas are populated with subsistence farmers and the capacity to cope with any emergency is already fragile.
Imagine the situation in cities, when water scarcity combines with heat stress and air pollution. We already have good evidence linking such conditions to increased deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular disease, especially in the elderly.
As the scientists tell us, the nature of climate change during this century is likely to go beyond human experience. But public health has abundant experience as a basis for interpreting the health consequences and understanding their impact. Public health has decades of experience in dealing with problems that will be made bigger and broader by climate change.
Ladies and gentlemen,
When I announced to my staff that I had selected climate change as the theme for next year’s World Health Day, I described climate change as the defining issue for public health during this century.
Let me take this statement one step further today. I have given my impressions about the public health landscape of today, the difficult challenges we face, but also the many reasons for unprecedented optimism.
I believe that climate change will ride across this landscape as the fifth horseman. It will increase the power of the four horsemen that rule over war, famine, pestilence, and death – those ancient adversaries that have affected health and human progress since the beginning of recorded history. Research already has a great deal to say about the impact of climate change on famine and pestilence.
Let us consider famine, hunger, food security, and malnutrition. In many parts of the world, the severe adverse effects of climate change – one could say, the catastrophic effects – are not expected to be felt until around the middle of this century or even later.
Not so for Africa. According to the latest projections, Africa will be severely affected as early as 2020. This is just a dozen years away. By that date, increased water stress is expected to affect from 75 million to 250 million Africans. A dozen years from now, crop yields in some countries are expected to drop by 50%.
Imagine the impact on food security and malnutrition. In many African countries, agriculture remains the principal economic activity, and agricultural products are the principal source of export trade. Vast rural populations survive, hand-to-mouth, on subsistence farming. There is no surplus. There is no coping capacity. Yes, as I said, these are catastrophic effects.
Concerning pestilence, abundant evidence links the distribution and behaviour of infectious diseases to climate and weather. As the scientists say, climate defines the geographical distribution of infectious diseases. Weather influences the timing and severity of epidemics.
Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes are particularly sensitive to variations in climate. Warmth accelerates the biting rate of mosquitoes and speeds up maturation of the parasites they carry. Sub-Saharan Africa is already home to the most severe form of malaria and the most efficient mosquito species. What will happen if rising temperatures accelerate the lifecycle of the malaria parasite? What if malaria spreads to new areas?
NIH funded the landmark study that demonstrated a link between climate variability and increased malaria epidemics in the highlands of East Africa. We all know about the explosive epidemic potential of malaria when this disease reaches non-immune populations. Though we are making progress, we are still not able, right now, to achieve adequate population coverage with preventive interventions in areas of stable malaria transmission.
The landmark publication on microbial threats, issued in 1992 by the Institute of Medicine, opened the eyes of the world to the growing menace of emerging diseases. It also showed how changes in the way humanity inhabits this planet have created abundant opportunities for microbes to exploit.
It is easy to see how climate change will increase these opportunities in significant ways. When we consider the effects of climate change on emerging diseases, we are looking at disruptions to intricately balanced ecological systems that reached equilibrium following centuries of evolution. Nature gives us every reason to believe that disruption of this delicate equilibrium will have profound consequences.
Biofuels – A New Threat to Climate and Climate Justice
Text of a flyer distributed by Biofuelwatch at the UN climate talks in Bali. Read more
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