Well I’d like to change the channel from the Pandemic Gloom & Doom to the similarly depressing and helplessness inducing topic of climate change. The actors in feel similar in both channels, for instance, the vaccinated can only sit by and watch as the ignorant anti-vax crowd spreads Covid-19 to each other and fills the ICU wards past capacity. Concomitantly we can observe China and the US vie for world dominance economically and militarily while continuing to put stunning amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, catastrophically heating the planet.
Micheal Klare sets out the bare-bones minimum guidelines to avert the upcoming climate catastrophe. Unfortunately said guidelines involve China and the US backing down from their military buildups, finding a peaceable solution to Taiwan, and focusing their economies on moving away from using fossil fuels.
Awesome. No problem. We got this…
“Only when China and the United States elevate the threat of climate change above their geopolitical rivalry will it be possible to envision action on a sufficient scale to avert the future incineration of this planet and the collapse of human civilization. This should hardly be an impossible political or intellectual stretch. On January 27th, in an Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis, President Biden did, in fact, decree that “climate considerations shall be an essential element of United States foreign policy and national security.” That same day, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a companion statement, saying that his “Department will immediately take appropriate policy actions to prioritize climate change considerations in our activities and risk assessments, to mitigate this driver of insecurity.” (At the moment, however, the thought that Republicans in Congress would support such positions, no less fund them, is beyond imagining.)
In any case, such comments have already been overshadowed by the Biden administration’s fixation on dominating China globally, as have any comparable impulses on the part of the Chinese leadership. Still, the understanding is there: climate change poses an overwhelming existential threat to both American and Chinese “security,” a reality that will only grow fiercer as greenhouse gases continue to pour into our atmosphere. To defend their respective homelands not against each other but against nature, both sides will increasingly be compelled to devote ever more funds and resources to flood protection, disaster relief, fire-fighting, seawall construction, infrastructure replacement, population resettlement, and other staggeringly expensive, climate-related undertakings. At some point, such costs will far exceed the amounts needed to fight a war between us.
Once this reckoning sinks in, perhaps U.S. and Chinese officials will begin forging an alliance aimed at defending their own countries and the world against the coming ravages of climate change. If John Kerry were to return to China and tell its leadership, “We are phasing out all our coal plants, working to eliminate our reliance on petroleum, and are prepared to negotiate a mutual reduction in Pacific naval and missile forces,” then he could also say to his Chinese counterparts, “You need to start phasing out your coal use now — and here’s how we think you can do it.”
Once such an agreement was achieved, Presidents Biden and Xi could turn to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and say, “You must follow in our footsteps and eliminate your dependence on fossil fuels.” And then, the three together could tell the leaders of every other nation: “Do as we’re doing, and we’ll support you. Oppose us, and you’ll be cut off from the world economy and perish.”
That’s how to save this planet from a climate Armageddon. There really is no other way.“
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
5 comments
October 20, 2021 at 8:23 am
tildeb
Don’t forget to include mandatory singing circles. Kumbaya is surely right up there causing peace and love to spread unconditionally.
Look, climate change is all about using dirty energy. When that cost metric changes – and it is changing very quickly – so does public expenditure. And that includes military equipment. Believe me, the military is quite well informed about climate change effects and has, in fact, been leading the charge to bring about comprehensive change (since the 1960s, for crying out loud, due to air to air problems in missile tech with higher atmospheric carbon concentrations). To equate the military as some kind of major stumbling block and problem bringing about this much need change is typical narrative bullshit that sounds appealing to the lovers of Kumbaya but is factually wrong. That assumes one can appreciate the necessity of respecting facts to underwrite public policy. Far too many people think facts are too archaic, not progressive enough, to matter. They’re warming up their voices now.
One of the major stumbling blocks to addressing climate change is the public swallowing of oil and gas manipulation that each of us can do our part to ‘fix’ the problem one plastic straw and lightbulb at a time. Oh, and recycle, of course. Yup, turn off those lights. Evil cars. Vilify GMOs. Do more yoga. And so on. Narrative crap but so soothing to those who invest their moral capital in identifying as a supporter of this crap. Righteousness sells. Facts? Not so much.
Dirty energy is the problem. Clean energy is the solution. Eyes on the prize, people, and stop being sidetracked into these righteous bullshit narratives.
China is a totalitarian government. It is using concentration camps rights this minute to imprison millions of people. That’s a fact. The Chinese government and ALL of its policies, you see, is incompatible with liberal values. Fact. The only way for these two ideologies – Chinese totalitarianism and western liberal democracies – to coexist is because of a military stalemate. Of course, liberalism itself is under sustained attack by these same peddlers of narrative and identity bullshit.
So paying for a military capable of thwarting Chinese imposition of tis ideology is the ONLY thing stopping it from doing so. That’s the cost all of us must bear living in the luxurious waters of liberalism and individual rights and freedoms and no amount of singing Kumbaya is going to do anything meaningful affecting the Chinese government other than undermine the commitment IN liberal democracies to reject the imposition of totalitarianism on Western people that China will and must do to survive. If you don’t understand why that’s the case, then sing to yourself and support climate change policies that advance clean energy and reduce dirty.
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October 20, 2021 at 9:20 am
The Arbourist
@tildeb
The American military is a stumbling block because it takes so much money away from the rest of American society. It is also a huge consumer of fossil fuel to the tune of 100 million barrels of oil per year. And yes, the article does say the military is investing in ‘cleaner vehicles and fuels’ which of course is a good thing, but the large scale of GHG emissions remains. In 2017, for example, the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions were greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of entire industrialized countries as Sweden or Denmark.
So back up, get past your patriotic gut reaction and realize there is an reasonable argument to be made for a reduction in the military and military spending in general.
They coexist because of a nuclear stalemate. The US for all of its military might has had its butt kicked in every war it has been involved with starting with Vietnam. Iraq? Afghanistan? Abject failures. If China wants to win, it needs only to engage in a asymmetrical ground war and it is off to the races because despite the trillion dollar budgets and starving the domestic side of the US (while spending more on war than the next 11 countries combined – Austrailia, Italy,South Korea, Japan, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, UK, Russia, India and China) – the US military has not gotten the job done. Not an optimal investment by any reasonable metric.
Saving the world will, necessarily, be a cooperative venture.
The sooner we come to this realization the better it will be. I sincerely doubt it will come to pass though, as the ploys of National ‘Defense’ and the ‘defense of freedom’ like the Red Scare will be used to quash reasonable arguments and disagreements about humanity’s future in the world.
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October 20, 2021 at 9:45 am
tildeb
Switching from dirty to clean energy will be an economic venture.
Yes, militaries use a lot of dirty energy. That is changing. But you may not like what you find: AI and robotics.
Your assumption is that nuclear arsenals are deterrents to local and regional wars. So, are you suggesting Ukraine should have launched a nuclear strike over Crimea? This approach is lunacy. Stark raving mad. Armed conflicts and the ability to wage them are the reality.
Yes, addressing climate change is the existential issue of this century. So let’s keep focused on this issue rather than import the ridiculous notion of completely unrealistic notion that mutual demilitarization is somehow a necessary step. That’s like arguing that to reducing crime is best achieved by first getting rid of the law enforcement. The proposed solution is not connected to addressing the core problem. Dirty energy needs to be replaced with clean energy. The military component is an imported complication and not a realistic part of the solution. Demilitarizing doesn’t increase clean energy. Fact.
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October 23, 2021 at 8:14 am
The Arbourist
@tildeb
Your example illustrates the efficacy of the notion that the 800+ bases world wide are an effective deterrent to conflict. Yes Crimea was annexed by Russia despite the nuclear deterrent that exists, yet the military response of the US was muted at best. I would suggest that there was very little for the US to gain geopolitically or economically by engaging in a ground conflict in Crimea. So, it would seem that ‘holding back the authoritarian tide’ is linked to the economic and strategic value to the USA of the conflict zone.
It seems that the conflicts the US has engaged in (unsuccessfully) revolve around resources (Iraq) and malformed quest for justice (Afghanistan). So perhaps its time to engage a different set of instruments to engage with the world, because the major military ventures have produced precisely the opposite results with regards to favourable outcomes for the US and the West in general.
Deescalation of tensions in the region would be more likely with both sides removing some of their military forces from the theatre. How many tenuous Cold War stalemates can we afford? Considering how many times the world was on the brink of annihilation during the Cold War, do we really want to continue down that dangerous path?
Lowering Military production of GHG’s is directly connected to the core problem. When the US military has a footprint the size of Sweden or Denmark, there must be room to improve. Cutting the size of the military so the US only spends as much as the top 5 instead of top 11 other nations seems reasonable to me. The resulting peace dividend would do much to stabilize the home economy and strengthen the US domestic economy.
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October 23, 2021 at 8:36 am
tildeb
I know it’s difficult to wrap one’s head around the increased likelihood for conflict when peaceful de-escalation is intended, but that’s the real world, real politiks in action. Fort example, if the US couldn’t field immediate response with all facets of the military in, say, Taiwan, and to great effect in destructive power, the island would already be part of China’s ever-escalating, always-expanding policy. Such capability takes decades to establish and requires public investment, The alternative is not kumbaya peace but an increase in both size and scope of armed conflicts.
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