If Donald Trump and his Republican controlled congress are able to defund the EPA, Department of Energy , Department of State, NASA’s Earth Sciences, NOAA as well as fulfilling their promise to withdraw from the Paris Climate pact, they will purposely and recklessly unleash social upheaval upon the earth the likes of which has never been experienced by humanity.
C J Werleman has a must read piece in Middle East Eye. He begins the article by noting Osama bin Laden’s letter to the American people which outlined his justifications for the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Werleman notes that among these justifications, were two that were largely ignored by the media and the American people.
You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.
The life of all mankind is in danger because of the global warming, which is largely due to emissions of the factories of the major companies; nonetheless, the representatives of those companies in the White House insist on not observing the Kyoto Accord, notwithstanding…the death and displacement of millions of people as a result.
His statement is hard to disagree with. The Center for Climate and Security has a repository of Department of Defense articles that can be found here, and here, where the DOD outlines the national security risks from climate change caused by our relentless burning of fossil fuels.
From the Middle East Eye Article.
Let’s be very clear: climate change is no longer a prediction or a forecast. It’s a now-cast. Climate change is happening now, and its impact is sowing anarchy and chaos the world over. From this social chaos comes violent, transnational, non-state actors – many who exist now; many who will emerge later; all of whom will come to threaten the very notion of the nation-state itself.
The author notes that Trump’s refusal to act on the planetary climate emergency “is to willingly sponsor a myriad of violent transnational groups – and global violence on a scale the world has never seen before.”
In 1994, Robert Kaplan, a geopolitical analyst, published the widely read and highly controversial The Coming Anarchy” which warned how “scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet,” and moreover, how the impacts of climate change promise to apply a blowtorch to each of these “wicked problems".
Almost everything Kaplan forecasted 23 years ago has become a reality today. He warned the impacts of climate change – drought and famine - would result in rapid and uncontrollable urbanisation in the global South, producing growth and an increased appeal of militant extremist groups. For the global North, Kaplan predicted forced mass-migration from disintegrating states in the global South to strong states in the global North would fertilise racism, resulting in the rise of hyper-nationalist demagogues in Europe and the US.
Read that last paragraph again because that’s exactly where we are today, exactly where Kaplan said we would be nearly a quarter-century ago. To Kaplan’s last point, a recent op-ed in The Atlantic identified Donald Trump as the “first demagogue of the Anthropocene,” arguing he “represents a white racial backlash…insofar as his supporters are drawn to him by a sense of global calamity, and insofar as his rhetoric singles out refugees as yet another black and brown intruder trying to violate the nation’s cherished borders".
President Obama, in a interview noted that:
While Trump has called Obama’s suggestion that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” which he made during the State of the Union, “one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics,” the president pushed back in an interview that “CBS This Morning” aired Friday.
“What we know is that — as human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen,” the president told co-host Norah O’Donnell, in a conversation taped Wednesday. “And, you know, if you look at world history, whenever people are desperate, when people start lacking food, when people — are not able to make a living or take care of their families — that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous.”
snip
The president said current security threats, such as the Islamic State, can be resolved more easily than a long-term challenge, such as global warming.
“They will be defeated. There will be ongoing efforts to — disrupt the world order from terrorists, from rogue states, from cyberattacks. There’s always some bad people out there tryin’ to do bad things. And we have to be vigilant in going after them,” he said. “But, if you start seeing the oceans rise by five, six, seven feet — if — you see major shifts in weather patterns so that what have been previously— bread baskets to the world suddenly can no longer grow food, then you’re seeing the kind of crisis that we can’t deal with through the deployment of the Marines.”
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