“I understand the anger. I’m not angry. Maybe I will be, but I’m not right now,” Breuil continued. “I worry that we’ll make the same mistake as before, when the U.S. was attacked, by responding to violence with violence.”
As the world comes to grips with the implications of this week’s massacres in Paris, the issue on everyone’s mind is how, in the face of building pressure from war torn and climate pressured regions, nation states in the temperate zones can maintain economic prosperity, security and even national identity.
A well known climate change expert reminds me:
European heat wave August 2003: 70,000 fatalities, a sizable fraction of which are in Paris.
Terrorist attack November 2015: 129 fatalities.
Early reports indicate that at least one of those involved in the Paris attacks entered Europe as part of the recent flood of refugees escaping war, terrorism, and drought in the middle east. Right wing newspapers are making hay on this finding, and hate mongering harpy Ann Coulter has declared that the tragedy has handed the US election to immigrant baiter Donald Trump.
One hopes that western powers have learned from the mistakes of recent years that the best response to these provocations would begin with sober assessment by all the parties involved, and resisting the urge to lash out blindly. Understanding the root causes of emerging problems is a good start. The climate component of today’s refugee crisis was foreseen with eerie accuracy in testimony to the US Senate in 1980.
In addition to the foregoing possibilities, we must also address the likelihood that no action — neither U.S. nor international — is taken to guard against the environmental impacts of increase in CO2. What would be the effects of no action? Could scientist pinpoint the regions to be affected or determine the population movements likely to flow from alteration in physical conditions? Will there be a slow out-migration from affected areas as people see deterioration over a period of years, or would associated anomalous weather events trigger a disaster-impelled flight? If the latter, we will need mechanisms for providing swift initial aid and rehabilitation and for quickly resettling a large number of refugees, in order to prevent growth of dependency and bitter hostilities. Moreover, if populations move across national boundaries, how will this affect the countries demographically, linguistically, politically and in terms of changes in the mix of skills and needs? The Vietnamese flight provides current evidence of the unwillingness of countries to accept large numbers of refugees and of the enormous problems involved.
For years, the climate denial response to predicted social impacts of drought, heat, and water scarcity has been ridicule – but, as evidenced by the video at the top of the page, and here – military and intelligence experts have been well aware of these emerging issues for some time.
What’s concerning now is the the degree to which factors of corrupt government, religious animosity, nationalism, tribalism and violence synergize with climate impacts like water shortage, to amplify social disruptions.
In contrast, see the bland reassurances of self-styled “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg on the social impacts of major sea level rise:
A 20-foot rise in sea levels (which, not incidentally, is about ten times more than the United Nations climate panel’s worst-case expectations) would inundate about 16,000 square miles of coastline, where more than 400 million people currently live. That’s a lot of people, to be sure, but hardly all of mankind. In fact, it amounts to less than 6% of the world’s population – which is to say that 94% of the population would not be inundated. And most of those who do live in the flood areas would never even get their feet wet.
Our efforts to end dependence on fossil fuels should be motivated not just by climate change, but by the recognition of a dynamic that Thomas Friedman identified a few years ago, the correlation between oil-fueled, extraction based economies, and political dictators.
When I heard the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declare that the Holocaust was a “myth,” I couldn’t help asking myself: “I wonder if the president of Iran would be talking this way if the price of oil were $20 a barrel today rather than $60 a barrel.” When I heard Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez telling British Prime Minister Tony Blair to “go right to hell” and telling his supporters that the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas “can go to hell,” too, I couldn’t help saying to myself, “I wonder if the president of Venezuela would be saying all these things if the price of oil today were $20 a barrel rather than $60 a barrel, and his country had to make a living by empowering its own entrepreneurs, not just drilling wells.”
As I followed events in the Persian Gulf during the past few years, I noticed that the first Arab Gulf state to hold a free and fair election, in which women could run and vote, and the first Arab Gulf state to undertake a total overhaul of its labor laws to make its own people more employable and less dependent on imported labor, was Bahrain. Bahrain happened to be the first Arab Gulf state expected to run out of oil. It was also the first in the region to sign a free trade agreement with the United States. I couldn’t help asking myself: “Could that all just be a coincidence? Finally, when I looked across the Arab world, and watched the popular democracy activists in Lebanon pushing Syrian troops out of their country, I couldn’t help saying to myself: “Is it an accident that the Arab world’s first and only real democracy happens not to have a drop of oil?”
Is it a coincidence that the terrorist outrage in Paris was committed weeks before COP21, the biggest climate conference since 2009? Perhaps, writes Oliver Tickell. But failure to reach a strong climate agreement now looks more probable. And that’s an outcome that would suit ISIS – which makes $500m a year from oil sales – together with other oil producers.
–But it may not be. As the FT put it last week in an article titled ‘Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists‘, “Oil is the black gold that funds Isis’ black flag – it fuels its war machine, provides electricity and gives the fanatical jihadis critical leverage against their neighbours …
“Estimates by local traders and engineers put crude production in Isis-held territory at about 34,000-40,000 bpd. The oil is sold at the wellhead for between $20 and $45 a barrel, earning the militants an average of $1.5m a day …
“While al-Qaeda, the global terrorist network, depended on donations from wealthy foreign sponsors, Isis has derived its financial strength from its status as monopoly producer of an essential commodity consumed in vast quantities throughout the area it controls. Even without being able to export, it can thrive because it has a huge captive market in Syria and Iraq.”
But ISIS’s ambitions surely don’t stop there. Its aim is to consolidate its hold of the regions it already occupies, extend its empire to new regions and countries, and establish a Caliphate whose power and income will largely derive from oil. So the last thing it needs is a global climate agreement that will, over time, limit global consumption of fossil fuels.
The fossil fuel drivers for middle east terror are not lost on at least one key player in the US election. One form of extremism mirrors another.
One thing that needs to be stated very clearly, that has almost never been discussed in the press – is that terrorism is not so much a war of violence as it is a psychological tool. The terrorist knows he cannot defeat nation states on a battle field, so he seeks to get inside the heads of his enemies, and lure them into doing something stupid and self defeating. Osama Bin Laden was, I am sure, not blind to the obvious intellectual deficiencies of the Bush administration, and was extremely successful in leading a lumbering giant into a quagmire.
A clear view of the role of climate change and fossil fuel dependence in current and coming global crises should be part of calculations by citizens and decision makers.
Good luck with the idea that we will not repsond with military violence sparking a worse situation yet. by Now I’m comvinced Armageddon isn’t just a movie starring Bruce Willis. It is our future.
The only disappointing thing is that some version of a war to destroy all is/was seemingly too easily predictable; that we’d off ourselves by provoking each other into imbecility. So much for the claim to be thinking apes.
Then again, aren’t we already bombing ISIS without pity? Well, the Russians are said to be doing that.
Perhaps, we might realize that bombing is what got ‘ourselves’ into this situation, and that we might be able to try something else.
(Stop laughing. It’s not that funny.)
“Perhaps, we might realize that bombing is what got ‘ourselves’ into this situation, and that we might be able to try something else.”
As Carl von Clausewitz once remarked, ‘War is a mere continuation of politics by other means….’
Yes, but when he learned to fight wars they weren’t able to annihilate all human life on the planet. I’m not sure what any of the military thinkers would have thought of such a situation.
I think Sun Tzu might have mentioned something about engaging in a war that cannot be won. But it doesn’t exactly fit, IIRC.
This is all happening even faster than I expected. The intellectual and psychological deficiencies of the Republicans, who run both houses of Congress of course, are getting wider play from the works of Chris Mooney and others. I don’t expect America will suddenly grow smart and sober and mature. Smart, sober, mature people can have lapses, and then recover. But pathological people with smaller key brain parts and completely out to lunch on what it means to have emotional maturity and intellectual focus, do not suddenly become competent and brilliant. At best, we can hope they have a moment of such utter terror at their own inadequacies that they get out of the way for their betters to handle the situation. But that will probably take far more awful and cascading events in the future before that might happen.
Divesting from fossil fuels will make no difference without a thorough, complete, total reconstruction of the way we live on the planet. To make the divestment work we would have to live in places where organic, probably permaculture-designed food production on soils cared for is the very first order of business every day.
There will be no “marketing”, very little banking, almost no fossil fueled traffic, no airlines, no big box stores selling crap we don’t need, no, or very little social media, diminishing IT etc etc etc.
To get there we needed, 20 years ago, massive leadership, honest, clear conversations and incentive THEN to reach that place soon. Divestment is a crock, yet another simplistic, pointless “solution” that will simply add to the chaos before we have any action to deal with the consequences.
So what would you suggest instead, rlmrdl, given where we are now?
Well the climate changed in Oxnard Ca, as my local Ralph’s (subsidiary of Kroger’s) has had a sign up for weeks, saying they’re sorry but crappy weather has destroyed the current strawberry crops, which are grown in that region and (normally) sent to the store. Well, at least they still have strawberry preserves and biscuits…
=Our efforts to end dependence on fossil fuels should be motivated not just by climate change, but by the recognition of a dynamic that Thomas Friedman identified a few years ago, the correlation between oil-fueled, extraction based economies, and political dictators.=
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, in 1958, Eisenhower — this is in internal discussions, since declassified — Eisenhower expressed his concern for what he called the “campaign of hatred against us” in the Arab world, not by the governments, but by the people. Remember, 1958, this was a rather striking moment. Just two years before, Eisenhower had intervened forcefully to compel Israel, Britain and France to withdraw from their invasion of Egyptian territory. And you would have expected enormous enthusiasm and support for the United States at that moment, and there was, briefly, but it didn’t last, because policies returned to the norm. So when he was speaking two years later, there was, as he said, a “campaign of hatred against us.” And he was naturally concerned why. Well, the National Security Council, the highest planning body, had in fact just come out with a report on exactly this issue. They concluded that, yes, indeed, there’s a campaign of hatred. They said there’s a perception in the Arab world that the United States supports harsh and brutal dictators and blocks democracy and development, and does so because we’re interested in — we’re concerned to control their energy resources.
There are some intelligent media commentators
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/waleed-aly-hits-out-at-isis-over-paris-attacks-calls-them-weak/story-fn948wjf-1227611388541
“WALEED Aly has unleashed on Australia’s politicians and Muslim leaders who have preached “hate” in the wake of the Paris attacks saying their actions actually help Islamic State rather than defeat them.
The Project co-host used his regular ‘Something we should talk about’ segment to not only call for solidarity following the atrocity, which left 132 people dead and hundreds more injured, but to highlight what he says is the truth about the militant organisation — that they’re weak.
“There is a reason ISIL still want to appear so powerful, why they don’t want to acknowledge that the land they control has been taken from weak enemies, that they are pinned down by air strikes or that just last weekend they lost a significant part of their territory,” he said on The Project.
“ISIL don’t want you to know they would quickly be crushed if they ever faced a proper Army on a battlefield.
“They want you to fear them. They want you to get angry. They want all of us to become hostile and here is why:
“ISIL’s strategy is to split the world into two camps. It is that black and white. Again we know this because they told us.”
Ally said ISIL wanted to create World War III, and for societies around the world to turn on each other, and for countries like Australia to vilify Muslims.
He said this “evil organisation” believes if they can make Muslims the enemy of the West, then Muslims in France and England and America and here in Australia will have nowhere to turn but to ISIL.
“That was exactly their strategy in Iraq,” he said. “And now they want it to go global.”
Both USA Today and Politifact have recently had articles busting on Sanders for his comments about climate change and terrorism:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/11/17/fact-check-bernie-sanders-climate-link-terrorism/75950720/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/16/bernie-s/fact-checking-bernie-sanders-comments-climate-chan/
They both boil down to the use of the word ‘directly’. If Sanders had said, “climate change is related to the growth of terrorism”, they would have labeled it as true. But because he said “directly related”, they labeled it as “mostly false”.