Climate Memo Mondays #59

 

59.  Climate Memo Mondays, January 24, 2022

McCoy, To Govern the Globe national sovereignty must be ended
Hunziker, “Warnings from the Far North”: warming breaking the food chain
Miller, “Defund the Global Climate Wall”: divert border money to climate action.

Alfred McCoy, To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change.  Chapter 7, “Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century.” Excellent summary of main events.  See CMM # 55 and #56.

“Warnings from the Far North”  [the economic system’s warming oceans bring mass death of sea creatures, breaking the food chain]
Originally published: Dissident Voice by Robert Hunziker (December 27, 2021 )  |  - Posted Dec 29, 2021. 
Forces profound and alarming are reshaping the upper reaches of the North Pacific and Arctic oceans, breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures and one of the world’s most important fisheries. ¹

“Breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures” is horrific to contemplate. It sends a powerful signal of trouble dead ahead. In that regard, scientists agree that what happens up North signals what’s in store to the South, and what’s happening up North is a gut-wrenching reality of life on a knife’s edge of catastrophe.

It’s never been more urgent and timely for the world to change its ways and abandon the current economic maelstrom that haunts all life on the planet. The pros and cons of capitalism’s experiment with neoliberal tendencies that enrich the few and bury the many should be debated in the context of strained resources throughout the biosphere, including all life forms. The GDP-to-infinity paradigm is barreling towards a wall of impending extinction. It’s already on a fast track. . . . https://mronline.org/2021/12/29/warnings-from-the-far-north/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=warnings-from-the-far-north&mc_cid=c1e29bca0c&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e

 

TODD MILLER.  “Why We Must Defund the Global Climate Wall.”

To create a safer, more sustainable world, the United States needs to divert border money toward climate mitigation.

November 1, 2021 by The Border Chronicles
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/11/01/why-we-must-defund-global-climate-wall

At a National Security Council meeting in September, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that the consequences of climate change "are falling disproportionately on vulnerable and low-income populations." He continued, "And they're worsening conditions and human suffering in places already afflicted by conflict, high levels of violence, instability." He assured his colleagues that the climate crisis is a "core element of U.S. foreign policy" and that "every bilateral and multilateral engagement we have—every policy decision we make—will impact our goal of putting the world on a safer, more sustainable path."

Blinken's sentiment was echoed by a report on the impact of climate change and migration from the White House earlier this month, one of a slew of reports as the U.S. prepared for the United Nations summit on climate change that begins in Glasgow on October 31. According to the report, "The current migration situation extending from the U.S.-Mexico border into Central America presents an opportunity for the United States to model good practice and discuss openly managing migration humanely, [and] highlight the role of climate change in migration."

Hypothetically, these words might reassure the more than 1.3 million Hondurans and Guatemalans displaced in 2020 by climate-induced catastrophes such as droughts, hurricanes, and floods. But the lofty rhetoric is contradicted by another story, one told by the U.S. government's budgets.

In a report titled The Global Climate Wall, which I coauthored for the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, we crunched the budget numbers for seven of the countries most responsible for the climate crisis. These countries collectively account for almost half the world's greenhouse gas emissions going back to the mid-19th century. They include Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and the United States (which led the charge at 30.1 percent of emissions). All together, these rich, high-polluting countries spend more than double on border and immigration enforcement budgets than on "climate finance"—that is, helping vulnerable countries adapt to climate change and transition to clean energy.

While the White House report does emphasize foreign aid (to note, advocates refer to the report as "disappointing"), it does not mention that the United States has dedicated 11 times more money to militarizing its borders and building up a draconian immigration enforcement system than to climate finance. And while the United States has the world's largest border budget (an average $19 billion from 2013 to 2018, and an almost 11-to-1 ratio of border to climate financing), Canada (15:1) and Australia (13.5:1) have even higher ratios. In no way is the United States, or most other countries, "managing" immigration "humanely." Precisely the opposite.

All together, the world's largest polluters are compounding one human-made disaster with another one. They are constructing a world of more than 63 border walls, with tens of thousands of border guards, and spending billions on technologies that blockade and criminalize people in desperate situations rather than assist them. More than 44,000 people (a vast undercount, according to researchers of the International Organization on Migration) have died crossing borders from 2014 to 2020, in both the world's deserts or seas. And tens of thousands of others are incarcerated in a global network of more than 2,000 detention centers, while companies in the border industry anticipate more contracts in a roiling, intensifying climate crisis. The company G4S, for example, told the Climate Disclosure Project in 2014 that the UN "projected that we [the planet] will have 50 million environmental refugees," which could offer investment opportunities.

As G4S surmised, climate-induced displacement and migration are already underway and are expected to increase. Not only are there more frequent and intensifying storms and floods that come quickly and recede, but there are also slower-onset disasters, such as desertification and sea level rise, that leave irrevocable damage and render places uninhabitable. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center estimates that nearly 25 million have been displaced yearly since 2008. These numbers will only get larger in a "business as usual" scenario in which 19 percent of the earth's surface—inhabited by nearly one-third of the planet—will become a "barely liveable hot zone" by 2070. A decade ago, another report, titled In Search of Shelter, one of the first empirical studies linking climate change and displacement, warned that in the status quo "the mass of people on the move will likely be staggering and surpass any historical antecedent." A decade later, this warning appears to have gone unheeded.

To respond to this with increased border fortification is to create a dystopian catastrophe. As with greenhouse gas emissions, we have to reduce barriers, surveillance drones, and high-tech cameras. One way to do so is to move money from border and immigration enforcement into climate financing.

The seven countries profiled in The Global Climate Wall were among the world's richest countries that committed to collectively contribute $100 billion by 2020 to climate financing at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009. But since then the money has fallen short. In any case, many, including the Group of 77, argue that the $100 billion goal is inadequate to confront the scope of the crisis. Moreover, climate financing is most often dedicated to building stationary resilience, such as sea walls, new resilient crops to withstand drought, and infrastructure to deal with flooding.

But climate financing needs to be extended to assist people who are displaced and forced to move in this intensifying ecological catastrophe. In other words, precisely the opposite of building more border walls. Finance could be directed to assist in moving costs or to helping build up infrastructure in places where people are moving,       MORE  https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/11/01/why-we-must-defund-global-climate-wall