Goodbye to New York, Miami Beach and the Florida Everglades
Will climate change destroy precious parts of America? Yes, that seems inevitable. The White House and its security advisors have concluded this month of October 2021 that migrations and climate change – and migrations due to climate change - threaten national peace + security; but they do not have the imagination needed to offer creative solutions.
CLIMATE CHANGE and MIGRATIONS THREATEN PEACE
Climate change is now officially a major security threat, according to the White House, the State Department, the Coordinator of National Security and the Pentagon. Of course it is. How clever of them. The rest of us had worked that out around twenty or thirty years ago. Three scientists from the British Antarctic Survey reported in the scientific journal Nature on May 16th 1985 that they had found unanticipated and large decreases in stratospheric ozone levels over the Antarctic. After about 20 years of fairly steady values, ozone levels began dropping in the austral spring months around the late 1970s. As a result, some of us began attacking the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs for short), which damage the ozone layer: in 1978, I managed to block a spray can product from being marketed by Beecham Agricultural Products, in order to reduce CFC usage. The campaign had begun to save the Planet. But American politicians did not get the message.
Even Al Gore, supposedly the environment champion, avoided discussing the climate when he to ran (and lost) his presidential campaign against Shrub (Molly Ivens’ mocking name for GW, or Baby Bush). I always believed that if Al Gore had based his campaign on telling America about Climate Change and about his personal commitment, he would have seemed less like a wooden doll during the campaign, and he would have won the election.
The lamentable George W. Bush and Donald Trump denied the very existence of climate change and walked away from international collaboration, making America more vulnerable for having lost twenty years of preparation. When New York, Miami Beach and the Florida Everglades disappear under rising sea levels, it is their Republican Party that will be to blame.
The United Nations COP-26 conference begins on October 31 st , and already most of the world believes that America and its NATO allies, China and India, Brazil, Indonesia and Russia will not do enough – or indeed will do nothing – to reduce carbon emissions and “Save the Planet.”
Climate change affects the poorest the most. While that is true for populations within the USA, it is even more evident for the world’s poorest countries where most of their populations live on the breadline. In the Sahel and right across the northern equatorial belt (including North Africa and the Middle East, Afghanistan and other ‘stans right across northern Pakistan into China), populations will find themselves without any breadline at all because cops will fail, seeds will not produce grain crops, and starvation will beckon.
I was working in West African agriculture management when the Ethiopianfamine induced Bob Geldorf to lead the Live Aid Concert,
a 1985 fund-raising effort that persuaded millions of people in the West to donate money and to urge their governments to participate in the relief effort in Ethiopia. Some of the proceeds also went to the famine hit areas of Eritrea. Thanks to Geldorf (seen here in Ethiopia) the international music event raised $US 127 millions, and eventually this rose to £145 million (close to $200 millions). The awareness- raising among NATO populations about poverty in the so-called Third World was also huge. But people seem to have forgotten. Drought an starvation – leading to massive out-migrations - will be some of the results of Climate Change.
Fifty years ago, starvation was frequent in places like India and Ethiopia, in Mali, Niger and Chad whenever the rains failed : as happened catastrophically in the 1970s and 1980s. Now it will happen again. This time we shall know that it happened because of us. It will be due to our greed, to our reluctance to embrace change, to the failure of our political leaders and to the failure of our corporate capitalist system. Revelations keep coming about oil corporations (Shell, Exxon, Total ..…) and chemical corporations (Monsanto, Du Pont, Bayer …..) not just failing to act, but deliberately hiding known truths, suppressing their own research and corrupting scientists to produce false data and phony arguments to avoid facing up to the damage their industries.
National security is therefore threatened: both because coastal populations will be flooded, and because migrations will inevitably increase. Europe’s borders are already overrun by migrants fleeing America’s vicious and heedless destruction in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (a direct offshoot of the Iraq war that replaced a Sunni Muslim regime with a Shia regime). The rise of radical Islam in the Sahara is due largely to poverty, and also to American ambitions in Africa. When the crops fail and poverty increases, Spain, Italy and Greece (Europe’s southernvborderlands) must expect vastly more migrations from Africa.
The same will happen – and is already happening – in Central America and in the American borderlands of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California. In early June 2021 I wrote a letter to Samantha Power, the new Director of USAID, offering simple recipes for improving the impact of USAID development programs, in order to seek to limit the surge in migrations. She has not responded. Probably some junior official ensured that Samantha would never even see my letter.
How do Western leaders respond to migrations? They build walls and unroll the razor wire. They seem to learn nothing from experience.
Experience shows that hardening frontiers is futile. What works is serious investment in the areas from which migrants come, to improve their lives and allow them to raise their children decently in the place they live. What do people want? Parents want adequate food, electricity for lights and television, health care for their elderly, education and fair prospects for their children. What they do NOT want is more money given to corrupt border guards and venal governors whose behavior simply encourages more migration.
Like U.S. military projects, European Union responses actually increase migration. While the African Union wants to treat frontiers as “Zones we can develop in partnership,” the EU funds border guards and builds border posts for people in uniform. Anyone who has visited Africa knows that border posts on main roads stop nobody who wishes to evade them. The EU appears to be too rigid to change policies; Eurocrats with whom I have talked, who know their policies are nonsensical, are too afraid of the hierarchy to tell the Commission that their border policy “emperor has no clothes.”
The African Union wants poverty alleviation. Western allies offer military solutions that make the problems worse. China offers infrastructure. This will do nothing to alleviate African out-migrations, of course, but it is better than bringing weapons. Sometimes one thinks that the only things that America creates are computer apps, and instruments that kill people.
The United States seems unaware of migrants’ needs. The Washington Post reports (October 21 st 2021) that “sweeping assessments …. by the White House, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon …. show a deepening concern …. that the shifts unleashed by climate change can reshape U.S. strategic interests.”
The White House report on migration, which examines the way climate change is driving human movement around the world, notes that drought and other extreme weather can spark conflicts and force population displacements — and that countries such as China and Russia are poised to take advantage.
“Absent a robust strategy from the United States and Europe to address climate-related migration, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, and other states could seek to gain influence by providing direct support to impacted countries grappling with political unrest related to migration,” the White House report says.
So migration is a matter of Great Power Politics?
What about the starving women and children?
It seems perverse for the U.S. to worry that China and Russian may “take advantage” of the world’s misery – largely (but not solely) caused by America’s excessive consumption of natural resources and its reluctance to take a lead in (or even join) worldwide efforts to reduce our human carbon imprint and limit CO2 emissions. How come the U.S. does not think about the world’s suffering?
Maybe – just maybe – not only Africans and Latin Americans, but even the Chinese and Russians will be suffering from the effects of climate change just as much as everyone else; suffering and more than resource-rich America.
Meanwhile we have learned that many governments have been trying to persuade the United Nations to water down its report on climate change: coal producers want to keep producing coal, and beef producers want consumers to keep eating meat. None of our political leaders seems to be taking the Save The Planet campaign seriously.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg (shown speaking in 2018 at the COP-24) says the UN’s upcoming COP-26 climate talks in Glasgow (Oct 31-Nov 12, 2021) –which have been billed as humanity’s last chance to avoid catastrophic global warming - told AFP: “As it is now, this COP will not lead to any big changes, we have to continue pushing. My hopes are, of course, that suddenly we will realise that we are facing an existential crisis and act after that.”
COP? This means the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But the “parties” are lobbying the UN to diminish its work to save the Planet ….. Thank goodness most United Nations officials are committed to do “good work” and protect their personal integrity. I have always been proud to represent the UN flag.
British opinion leader Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, has commented that we should focus on saving Earth. “We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live,” William said of the space race between private entrepreneurs taking billionaires for a ride: rich playboys creating even more pollution.
Why have the United States been unwilling to take a lead to protect the Planet?
Could it be that the U.S. System is so beholden to corporations committed to making short-term profits - and gaining power - that nothing else matters to American leaders? I remember with shock when an American grandfather on TV, when asked if he did not want to protect the world for his grandchildren, replied that he cared nothing about his grandchildren: what they did would be their problem. [That seems a callous attitude to your grandchildren. But we know that American family structures have broken down.]
Is short-termism the dominant theme of American life and politics? It seems that Congress can think no farther than the next election, and “winning” it. This suggests to me that elections have a negative impact on the climate; while the American obsession with “winning” battles may explain why they always lose their wars. Even after losing humiliating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (not forgetting Vietnam), United States foreign policy seems to exist only in terms of “winning” battles and “beating” rivals.
Climate change is a universal challenge facing us all. There will be no “winner” at all, only losers. What we need is the realization that we can only win the battle to save Planet Earth, of we all work on the same side towards the same goal.
Unless America makes overtures to its rivals to establish partnerships, the voters of America will be betrayed by their leaders. They will either drown, or they will lose everything they have and be forced into migration. Goodbye to New York, Miami Beach and the Florida Everglades.