32. OMNI Climate
Memo Mondays, July 19, 2021
WAR AND
WARMING: CHAOS
WAR CHAOS, Engelhardt, Chapter Two, “Empire
of Chaos.”
US Imperial
Overreach and National Security State “led to the attacks of September 11,
2001. That day was the very definition
of chaos brought to the imperial
heartland.” Tom Engelhardt, A Nation Unmade by War, p. 40.
The 9-11 destruction of the World Trade
Towers by bin Laden and mainly Saudi followers produced the enlargement of the
US National Security State (US NSS) “to monumental proportions, and a
staggering…imperial overreach.” The overreach undoubtedly; the security
ironically, for the nation lives with constant threat and insecurity alleged by
our leaders and used by administration after administration to balloon the Pentagon
budget until the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex constitute
virtually a fourth branch of government.
The so-called global War on Terror quickly
became a global War OF Terror to establish a “military-enforced Pax Americana” of wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, a drone assassination program, an expanded surveillance and secrecy
regime “so all-encompassing that much of government activity became unknowable
to ‘the people’,” all costing “literally trillions of dollars” and tens of
thousands of civilian lives, all a Pax of Chaos. At its Camden weapons complex, its C-130 base at Jacksonville, its fighter aircraft and drones at Ft. Smith, and its research at UAF, Arkansas
participates in this lethal peace.
“In the 5 years since the
Paris Agreement, the world’s 6
biggest banks have financed fossil fuels to the tune
of $3.8 trillion.
Runaway funding for fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure fuels climate chaos and
threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions.” Fossil Fuels Final Report, Rainforest
Network 2021
CLIMATE CHAOS, Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,
Chapter One, “Cascades” (heading to chaos); Chapter Two, “Elements of Chaos.”
We are so wrapped in the “comforting delusions” of the economic
system one would hardly know that the enveloping crisis will leave “no life
undeformed.” One won’t read in the daily
newspapers that our present energy system is responsible—that in only the last
three decades, burning fossil fuels has emitted more than half of the total
carbon in the atmosphere, more than in all the preceding millennia, and that
our FF regime has deranged our climate, our weather, and our lives. One didn’t discuss this July 4 that we knew
the crisis was growing, or that the UN established the scientific consensus to
report the crisis three decades ago.
“…we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we
ever managed in ignorance. . . . The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze
mission is the story of a single lifetime”—ours (4)..
Wallace-Wells concludes chapter 2 with the
increase of warming sure to come from perma-frost melting and the rising oceans
certain to follow.. The consequences of
rising seas will create ultimate chaos.
More than 600 million people live within thirty feet of sea level
today. The US Geological Survey
estimates the ultimate rise at 80 meters, or more than 260 feet, at some
distant future. At 170 feet around 97 percent of Florida and Delaware would
disappear. San Francisco, Sacramento,
Seattle, NYC, Houston. . .”would be under water. “ “In many places, the coast
would retreat by as much as one hundred miles. Arkansas and Vermont,
landlocked today, would become coastal.” (68).
And he ends his book with a contrast of the two publics’
responses to nuclear weapons and climate change. “The threat from climate change is more total
than from the bomb. It is also more
pervasive.” (226). Perhaps these conditions partly explain the
passivity of the public toward climate catastrophe, compared to the massive
protests against the Bomb and the Bombers (29-31). But for both we still have time to stop them,
if we will.
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