Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk
from disease and starvation than at this very moment. On March 10th, Stephen
O’Brien, under secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian
affairs, informed
the Security Council that 20 million people in three African countries—Nigeria,
Somalia, and South Sudan—as well as in Yemen were likely to die if not provided
with emergency food and medical aid.
“We are at a critical point in history,”
he declared.
“Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian
crisis since the creation of the U.N.” Without coordinated international
action, he added, “people will simply starve to death [or] suffer and die from
disease.”
Major famines have, of course, occurred before, but never in
memory on such a scale in four places simultaneously. According
to
O’Brien, 7.3 million people are at risk in Yemen, 5.1 million in the Lake Chad
area of northeastern Nigeria, 5 million in South Sudan, and 2.9 million in
Somalia. In each of these countries, some lethal combination
of war, persistent drought, and political instability is causing drastic cuts
in essential food and water supplies. Of those 20 million people at risk of
death, an estimated 1.4 million are young children.
The cost of intervention, to implement existing UN action
plans in order to save nearly 20 million lives, is estimated at $4.4 billion.
The international response? Essentially, a giant shrug of indifference.
Despite the potential severity of the crisis, U.N. officials
remain confident that many of those at risk can be saved if sufficient food and
medical assistance is provided in time and the warring parties allow
humanitarian aid workers to reach those in the greatest need. “We have
strategic, coordinated, and prioritized plans in every country,” O’Brien said.
“With sufficient and timely financial support, humanitarians can still help to
prevent the worst-case scenario.”
All in all, the cost of such an intervention is not great:
an estimated $4.4 billion to implement
that U.N. action plan and save most of those 20 million lives.
To have time to deliver sufficient supplies, U.N. officials
indicated that the money would need to be in pocket by the end of March. It’s
now April and international donors have given only a paltry $423
million—less than a tenth of what’s needed. While, for instance,
President Donald Trump sought
Congressional approval for a $54 billion increase in U.S. military spending
(bringing total defense expenditures in the coming year to $603 billion) and
launched $89
million worth of Tomahawk missiles against a single Syrian air
base, the U.S. has offered precious little to allay the coming disaster in
three countries in which it has taken military actions in recent years.
As if
to add insult to injury, on February 15th Trump told
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari that he was inclined to sell his country 12
Super-Tucano light-strike aircraft, potentially depleting Nigeria of $600
million it desperately needs for famine relief.
Moreover, just as those U.N. officials were pleading
fruitlessly for increased humanitarian funding and an end to the fierce and
complex set of conflicts in South Sudan and Yemen (so that they could
facilitate the safe delivery of emergency food supplies to those countries),
the Trump administration was announcing plans to reduce American contributions
to the United Nations by 40%.
It was also preparing to send additional
weaponry to Saudi Arabia, the country most responsible
for devastating air strikes on Yemen’s food and water infrastructure. This goes
beyond indifference. This is complicity in mass extermination.
Like many people around the world, President Trump was
horrified by images of young children suffocating from the nerve gas used by
Syrian government forces in an April 4th raid on the rebel-held village of Khan
Sheikhoun. “That attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me—big
impact,” he told
reporters. “That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I’ve been watching it and
seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that.” In reaction to those
images, he ordered a barrage of cruise missile strikes on a Syrian air base the
following day.
But Trump does not seem to have seen—or has ignored—equally
heart-rending images
of young children dying from the spreading famines in Africa and Yemen. Those
children evidently don’t merit White House sympathy.
Who knows why not just Donald Trump but the world is proving
so indifferent to the famines of 2017? It could simply be donor fatigue
or a media focused on the daily psychodrama that is now Washington, or growing
fears about the unprecedented global
refugee crisis and, of course, terrorism. It’s
a question worth a piece in itself, but I want to explore another one entirely.
Here’s the question I think we all should be asking: Is this
what a world battered by climate change will be like—one in which tens of
millions, even hundreds of millions of people perish from disease, starvation,
and heat prostration while the rest of us, living in less exposed areas,
essentially do nothing to prevent their annihilation?
Famine, Drought, and Climate Change
First, though, let’s consider whether the famines of 2017
are even a valid indicator of what a climate-changed planet might look like.
After all, severe famines accompanied by widespread starvation have occurred
throughout human history. In addition, the brutal armed conflicts now underway
in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen are at least in part responsible
for the spreading famines.
In all four countries, there are forces—Boko Haram
in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, assorted militias and the government in
South Sudan, and Saudi-backed forces in Yemen—interfering
with the delivery of aid supplies. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that
pervasive water scarcity and prolonged drought (expected consequences of global
warming) are contributing
significantly to the disastrous conditions in most of them. The likelihood that
droughts this severe would be occurring simultaneously in the absence of climate
change is vanishingly small.
In fact, scientists generally agree that global warming will
ensure diminished rainfall and ever more frequent droughts over much of Africa
and the Middle East. This, in turn, will heighten conflicts of every sort and
endanger basic survival in a myriad of ways. In their most recent 2014
assessment of global trends, the scientists of the prestigious
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded
that “agriculture in Africa will face significant challenges in adapting to
climate changes projected to occur by mid-century, as negative effects of high
temperatures become increasingly prominent.” Even in 2014, as that report
suggested, climate change was already contributing to water scarcity and
persistent drought conditions in large parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Scientific studies had, for instance, revealed an “overall expansion of desert
and contraction of vegetated areas” on that continent. With arable land
in retreat and water supplies falling, crop yields were already in decline in
many areas, while malnutrition rates were rising—precisely the conditions witnessed
in more extreme forms in the famine-affected areas today.
It’s seldom possible to attribute any specific
weather-induced event, including droughts or storms, to global warming with
absolute certainty. Such things happen with or without climate
change. Nonetheless, scientists are becoming even
more confident that severe storms and droughts
(especially when occurring in tandem or in several parts of the world at once)
are best explained as climate-change related. If, for instance, a type of storm
that might normally occur only once every hundred years occurs twice in one
decade and four times in the next, you can be reasonably confident that you’re
in a new climate era.
It will undoubtedly take more time for scientists to
determine to
what extent the current famines in Africa and
Yemen are mainly climate-change-induced and to what extent they are the product
of political and military mayhem and disarray. But doesn’t this already offer
us a sense of just what kind of world we are now entering?
The Selective Impact of Climate Change
In some popular accounts of the future depredations of
climate change, there is a tendency to suggest that its effects will be felt
more or less democratically around the globe—that we will all suffer to some degree,
if not equally, from the bad things that happen as temperatures rise. And it’s
certainly true that everyone on this planet will feel the effects of global
warming in some fashion, but don’t for a second imagine that the harshest
effects will be distributed anything but deeply inequitably.
It won’t
even be a complicated equation. As with so much else, those at the bottom
rungs of society—the poor, the marginalized, and those in countries already at
or near the edge— will suffer
so much more (and so much earlier) than those at the top and in the most
developed, wealthiest countries.
As a start, the geophysical dynamics of climate change
dictate that, when it comes to soaring temperatures and reduced rainfall, the
most severe effects are likely to be felt first and worst in the tropical and
subtropical regions of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin
America—home to hundreds of millions of people who depend on rain-fed
agriculture to sustain themselves and their families. Research conducted by
scientists in New Zealand, Switzerland, and Great Britain found
that the rise in the number of extremely hot days is already more intense in
tropical latitudes and disproportionately affects poor farmers.
Living at subsistence levels, such farmers and their
communities are especially vulnerable to drought and desertification. In
a future in which climate-change disasters are commonplace, they will
undoubtedly be forced to choose ever more frequently between the unpalatable
alternatives of starvation or flight. In other words, if you thought the
global refugee crisis was bad
today, just wait a few decades.
Climate change is also intensifying the dangers faced by the
poor and marginalized in another way. As interior croplands turn to dust,
ever more farmers are migrating to cities, especially coastal ones. If
you want a historical analogy, think of the great Dust
Bowl migration of the “Okies” from the interior of
the U.S. to the California coast in the 1930s.
In today’s climate-change era,
the only available housing such migrants are likely to find will be in vast and
expanding shantytowns (or “informal settlements,” as they’re euphemistically
called), often located in floodplains and low-lying coastal areas exposed to
storm surges and sea-level rise.
As global warming advances, the victims of
water scarcity and desertification will be afflicted anew. Those storm
surges will destroy the most exposed parts of the coastal mega-cities in which
they will be clustered. In other words, for the uprooted and desperate, there
will be no escaping climate change. As the latest IPCC report noted,
“Poor people living in urban informal settlements, of which there are [already]
about one billion worldwide, are particularly vulnerable to weather and climate
effects.”
The scientific literature on climate change indicates
that the lives of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed will be the
first to be turned upside down by the effects of global warming. “The socially
and economically disadvantaged and the marginalized are disproportionately
affected by the impacts of climate change and extreme events,” the IPCC
indicated in 2014.
“Vulnerability is often high among indigenous peoples,
women, children, the elderly, and disabled people who experience multiple
deprivations that inhibit them from managing daily risks and shocks.” It should
go without saying that these are also the people least responsible for the
greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming in the first place
(something no less true of the countries most of them live in).
Inaction Equals Annihilation
In this context, consider the moral consequences of inaction
on climate change. Once it seemed that the process of global warming would
occur slowly enough to allow societies to adapt to higher temperatures without
excessive disruption, and that the entire human family would somehow make this
transition more or less simultaneously.
That now looks more and more like a
fairy tale. Climate change is occurring far too swiftly for all human societies
to adapt to it successfully. Only the richest are likely to succeed in
even the most tenuous way. Unless colossal efforts are undertaken now to halt
the emission of greenhouse gases, those living in less affluent societies can
expect to suffer from extremes of flooding, drought, starvation, disease, and
death in potentially staggering numbers.
And you don’t need a Ph.D. in climatology to arrive at this
conclusion either. The overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists agree
that any increase in average world temperatures that exceeds
2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era—some
opt for a rise of no more than 1.5
degrees Celsius—will alter the global climate system
drastically. In such a situation, a number of societies will simply
disintegrate in the fashion of South Sudan today, producing staggering chaos
and misery.
So far, the world has heated
up
by at least one of those two degrees, and unless we stop burning fossil fuels
in quantity soon, the 1.5 degree level will probably be reached
in the not-too-distant future.
Worse yet, on our present trajectory, it seems highly
unlikely that the warming process will stop at 2 or even 3 degrees
Celsius, meaning that later in this century many of the worst-case
climate-change scenarios—the
inundation of coastal cities, the desertification of vast interior regions, and
the collapse of rain-fed agriculture in many areas—will become everyday
reality.
In other words, think of the developments in those three
African lands and Yemen as previews of what far larger parts of our world could
look like in another quarter-century or so: a world in which hundreds of
millions of people are at risk of annihilation from disease or starvation, or
are on the march or at sea, crossing borders, heading for the shantytowns of
major cities, looking for refugee camps or other places where survival appears
even minimally possible.
If the world’s response to the current famine
catastrophe and the escalating fears of refugees in wealthy countries are any
indication, people will die in vast numbers without hope of help.
In other words, failing to halt the advance of climate
change—to the extent that halting it, at this point, remains within our
power—means complicity with mass human annihilation. We know, or at this point
should know, that such scenarios are already on the horizon. We still
retain the power, if not to stop them, then to radically ameliorate what they
will look like, so our failure to do all we can means that we become complicit in
what—not to mince words— is clearly going to be a process of climate genocide.
How can those of us in countries responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas
emissions escape such a verdict?
And if such a conclusion is indeed inescapable, then each of
us must do whatever we can to reduce our individual, community, and
institutional contributions to global warming. Even if we are already doing a
lot—as many of us are —more is needed.
Unfortunately, we Americans are
living not only in a time of climate crisis, but in the era of President Trump,
which means the federal government and its partners
in the fossil fuel industry will be wielding their immense powers to obstruct
all imaginable progress on limiting global warming.
They will be the
true perpetrators of climate genocide. As a result, the rest of us bear a moral
responsibility not just to do what we can at the local level to slow the pace
of climate change, but also to engage in political struggle to counteract or neutralize
the acts of Trump and company. Only dramatic and concerted action on multiple
fronts can prevent the human disasters now unfolding in Nigeria, Somalia, South
Sudan, and Yemen from becoming the global norm.
Michael T. Klare
is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire
College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His newest book, The
Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, has just recently been published. His other books include: Rising
Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy
and Blood
and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on
Imported Petroleum. A
documentary version of Blood and Oil
is available from the Media Education Foundation.
Climate Change as Genocide: Why Inaction Equals Annihilation
by Michael T. Klare
Nothing gets me more enraged than those who waste all their time worrying about overturning Roe -v- Wade and fighting government help with birth control--having no understanding or caring that we're so overpopulated and the quality of life for so many is so desperate that we don't know how long the planet can survive with all of us on it. I know there are some who just accept the biblical interpretation from their churches that we must be pro-life--no abortions for any reason. But those of us who are pro-choice also care greatly about life from the day the child is born but believe it's a woman's right to choose whether or not to go through with a pregnancy. We are not pro-abortion, but we are pro-choice. But too many so-called pro-life advocates also hate government, but believe this is an area the government should interfere in and also believe everyone must pull themselves up by their bootstraps while the Right has made it harder and harder to do so with their anti-education, anti-social programs free market mentality. Their political and religious contradictions are everywhere. They are moral hypocrites. They make absolutely no sense other than to feed their own desire for more money, more power, more control of the resources on this planet, and never-ending wars. There are those who can't wait to get their hands on our children at 18 to send them off to their next war in the name of their patriotism. The Armed Services hang out at our high schools just waiting to sign up our children with empty promises. These people are willing to tear up planet for profit and power, and a bigger and bigger military, while dismantling every program that is designed to help the poor and middle class. Most will do anything not to pay taxes in the name of free market--justifying never helping all those children who globally will die because of the results of their selfishness, free market rationalizations and self-engrandizement. We have become a global economy, basically because the same children they want born have become a source for the cheapest labor possible in their sweat shops as they move their manufacturing and drilling and contaminating the planet anywhere they can find the cheapest labor. They also move their headquarters to the countries that have the lowest tax rate or to offshore hide-ways to pay little or no taxes while their CEO's and other executives make endless millions/billions in stock options at our expense. There is no loyalty to our country or any other. They are "globalists," having loyalty only to the almighty dollar. So while the world population is growing at a dangerous rate, resources are diminishing, water and air quality are getting worse, agriculture is contaminated with gmos', pesticides and herbicides and often affordable for most people, and reduced regulation on drilling,air, food and products are causing all of us harm. New civil wars are breaking out every day over our fight for resources, and this very selfish and dangerous Trump administration will do absolutely nothing to stop the destruction of the planet through global warming caused by their abusive actions, they will do nothing to help people get free or cheap quality medical care, they will do nothing to educate, not indoctrinate our children, they will do nothing to retrain those who've lost their jobs, they will do nothing to save our social safety nets because of the greed of the one percent. They will do nothing to stem the tide of hate, fear, racism that they've caused. But, they will have to keep building bigger and bigger retainer walls outside their mansions on both coasts as the ocean waters rise because of their misdeeds. They will continue to move their many houses, planes, and cars to safer places inland on the planet while they destroy it for the rest of us. And they will have to live in fear for what they've bestowed on us as more and more people rise up in anger, frustration, and demand and end to the destruction of the planet.
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