So many read cute pics and tweets, and the outrage of the day is supreme here. COP26 is currently meeting the greatest existential threat this world has ever faced. You wouldn't know that here because so far, not one of the ClimateBrief diaries covering the conference has been able to trend for any more than just a few minutes.
Whatever, don't ever say we did not try to warn you. All of the green diarists work so hard to inform this site on the urgency of now. My personal belief is that most of you don’t deserve us. The climate breakdown is worse than they are telling you, and when you migrate with growling stomachs, you will find that out, but flame away; I do not care anymore.
Enjoy the tweets, adorable pics, and the deaths of Covid patients that refused to vaccinate and rec them up. This site has changed and I’m not sure if I should move on, but I am entertaining the thought. Shrug. Shame on some of you, get your priorities together.
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Rather than dealing with the human consequences of the climate emergency, wealthy nations have prioritized border security instead of climate action, which causes untold suffering and brutality to the billions that had nothing to do with the climate emergency in the first place.
It isn't just the wall at the southern border of the United States; however, it is likely the most egregious offender. Six of the G7 countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, and Canada, contribute 48% of global emissions.
However, they spend more building walls and investing in border intelligence than fighting the crisis, which leads people in developing nations to flee drought, heat, fires, and flooding from an out-of-control global emergency.
There are currently 30 walls that aim to keep neighboring nations' populations out. These include the Israeli-Egypt border fence that keeps out migrants from Africa, the India-Bangladesh wall that prevents Bangladeshis from fleeing sea rise inundation, and the Austrian-Slovenia border wall to keep out refugees from the middle-east.
Developing nations were promised 100 billion dollars in climate adaption investments. The money was never delivered and is still a bone of contention in the talks held in Glasgow, Scotland. Instead, what they have received is a militarized response that 'expands border and surveillance infrastructure.' The border and surveillance industry profits are sky high as a result.
The study notes:
In 2003 a Pentagon-commissioned report warned10 that in a worst-case climate scenario the US would need to erect ‘defensive fortresses’ to stop ‘unwanted starving migrants’ from countries like Guatemala and Haiti. The ‘fortresses’ are not just proposed by Washington, they are prevalent across the world and led and financed by the world’s largest emitters.
t seems that there is no limit to spending on national borders and immigration enforcement. US spending on militarising its southern border and detention and deportation of immigrants has nearly tripled since 2003 from $9.2 billion to $25 billion today. Yet the world’s richest countries have failed to meet even their inadequate promises of climate finance to tackle the impacts of climate change in the worlds’ poorest countries. The ratio of US border spending to climate financing, for example, is 11 to 1, based on the annual average between 2013 and 2018.
We are living in a world in which walls, border patrols, Black Hawk helicopters, unmanned aerial systems, motion sensors, and infrared cameras are placed between the world’s highest emitters and the lowest ones, between the environmentally relatively secure and the environmentally exposed.
This expanding global border regime is increasingly built by private industry. This fuels a lucrative border security industrial complex. Many of the same companies that the US, the EU and Australia have contracted to fortify their borders and detention systems also have been hired by fossil fuel companies in order to protect oil pipelines and other parts of the industry. The company G4S, for example, not only has contracts with the CBP to provide armed and armoured transport for migrants arrested near the US–Mexico border, but also provides protection services to Royal Dutch Shell, the seventh largest corporate emitter of GHGs worldwide.
The study's executive summary of the Transnational Industry has several bullet points on how the order security industry works hand in hand with the fossil fuel industry to keep people of color and the poor out.
- The world’s 10 largest fossil fuel firms also contract the services of the same firms that dominate border security contracts. Chevron (ranked the world’s number 2) contracts with Cobham, G4S, Indra, Leonardo, Thales; Exxon Mobil (ranking 4) with Airbus, Damen, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin; BP (6) with Airbus, G4S, Indra, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Thales; and Royal Dutch Shell (7) with Airbus, Boeing, Damen, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Thales, G4S.
- Exxon Mobil, for example, contracted L3Harris (one of the top 14 US border contractors) to provide ‘maritime domain awareness’ of its drilling in the Niger delta in Nigeria, a region which has suffered tremendous population displacement due to environmental contamination. BP has contracted with Palantir, a company that controversially provides surveillance software to agencies like the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to develop a ‘repository of all operated wells historical and real time drilling data’. Border contractor G4S has a relatively long history of protecting oil pipelines, including the Dakota Access pipeline in the US.
- The synergy between fossil fuel companies and top border security contractors is also seen by the fact that executives from each sector sit on each other’s boards. At Chevron, for example, the former CEO and Chairman of Northrop Grumman, Ronald D. Sugar and Lockheed Martin’s former CEO Marilyn Hewson are on its board. The Italian oil and gas company ENI has Nathalie Tocci on its board, previously a Special Advisor to EU High Representative Mogherini from 2015 to 2019, who helped draft the EU Global Strategy that led to expanding the externalisation of EU borders to third countries.
This nexus of power, wealth and collusion between fossil fuel firms and the border security industry shows how climate inaction and militarised responses to its consequences increasingly work hand in hand. Both industries profit as ever more resources are diverted towards dealing with the consequences of climate change rather than tackling its root causes. This comes at a terrible human cost. It can be seen in the rising death toll of refugees, deplorable conditions in many refugee camps and detention centres, violent pushbacks from European countries, particularly those bordering the Mediterranean, and from the US, in countless cases of unnecessary suffering and brutality. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) calculates that 41,000 migrants died between 2014 and 2020, although this is widely accepted to be a significant underestimate given that many lives are lost at sea and in remote deserts as migrants and refugees take increasingly dangerous routes to safety.
The Sierra Cub writes on QOP laws targeting environmentalists and social justice protesters.
According to a Greenpeace report titled Dollars vs. Democracy, many of the top donors to state legislators who sponsor these anti-protest and “critical infrastructure” bills were fossil fuel companies, including Koch Industries, Berkshire Hathaway, Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, and Marathon Petroleum. Connor Gibson, a former researcher with Greenpeace’s Investigations team, also found that law enforcement organizations were heavily involved in lobbying for anti-protest bills. Between 2019 and 2020, police and correctional unions contributed $342,602 to lawmakers sponsoring anti-protest bills introduced in the 2021 legislative session.
The similarities in language are conspicuous and bear the fingerprints of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a think tank that drafts legislation on behalf of an array of conservative interests including multinational fossil fuel companies. The group’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which has served as a template for numerous state bills, “draws inspiration from two laws enacted in 2017 in Oklahoma,” according to the ALEC website, elevating trespassing from a misdemeanor to a felony and imposing substantial fines and jail time.
According to Gibson’s research, ALEC’s model critical infrastructure bill was written at the behest of oil companies and trade groups including the American Chemistry Council, the Edison Electric Institute, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Gas Association, and Marathon Petroleum. “They all signed a letter to ALEC’s legislators and said, ‘please make a model bill out of this,’” Gibson told journalist Amy Westervelt in an interview in March. “And they listed a bunch of reasons justifying why a law was needed.”
The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis worldwide while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality politics arts.