OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS,
#104, December 5, 2022
Jeremy Kuzmarov. “… Vast
Military Spending… Greatly Accelerates Climate Crisis.”
(Tom Dispatch) Michael Klare. “What If the U.S. and China
Really Cooperated on Climate Change?
Jeremy Kuzmarov. “New Report
Details How Vast Military Spending By the Richest Countries Greatly Accelerates
Climate Crisis.” CovertAction Magazine (Dec 05, 2022).
So
why do climate justice groups like 350.org support the war in Ukraine?
While the world’s climate negotiators gathered for the COP27
summit in Egypt, a new report published by the Transnational
Institute, a Dutch think tank, emphasizes how rising global military spending
is a great threat to efforts to combat climate change.
According to the report’s authors, “every dollar spent on the
military not only increases greenhouse gas emissions, but also diverts
financial resources, skills and attention away from tackling one of the
greatest threats humanity has ever experienced.”
The trajectory of military spending has been rising since the
late 1990s, reaching a record of $2 trillion in 2021. Between 2013 and 2021,
the richest countries spent a combined $9.45 trillion on the military. By far
the biggest military spender was the U.S. which, between 2001 and 2018, emitted an estimated 1.267 trillion
tons of greenhouse gases, about 40% of which were attributed to the War on Terror and
military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq….
TomDispatch. IMAGINING CHINA AND US COOPERATING TO
STOP THE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE: A
MANHATTAN-SHANGHAI PROJECT?
Michael Klare, Can (Green)
Diplomacy Save Us?
November 27, 2022
Once upon a time, the American government was into
scientific problem-solving in a big way. I'm thinking of the World War II
years when that government invested upwards of $2
billion (no
small sum then) to gather together the greatest available scientific
minds to develop a war-ending weapon, the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project, as it came to
be called, would employ more than 120,000 people and create that
devastating weapon that would obliterate two Japanese cities and, to this
day, leaves our world up for grabs.
Still, on a planet where, from flooding to megadrought, melting ice to rising sea levels, everything seems increasingly up for
grabs, I sometimes wonder why, more than three-quarters of a century
later, the country that created the atomic bomb (and is still willing to
invest trillions of dollars in "modernizing" its
nuclear arsenal) can no longer imagine a Manhattan Project to mitigate
the overheating of this planet? It's true that the United Nations
regularly convenes top scientists at its Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change to assess "the state of scientific, technical and
socio-economic knowledge on climate change, its impacts and future risks,
and options for reducing the rate at which climate change is taking
place." And they do produce increasingly horrifying
reports on
what a disaster the fossil-fuelization of our planet is proving to be.
Despite that, neither this country, nor any other (as far as
I know), has been willing to invest big time to come up with breakthrough
ways of mitigating climate change in a world where greenhouse gas
emissions only continue to rise. Consider it a sorry tale indeed that
there is no twenty-first-century Manhattan Project in this country or,
for that matter, anywhere else on Earth.
Today, TomDispatch regular Michael Klare takes a
tiny bit of genuine good news -- the U.S. and China, the globe's two
greatest carbon emitters, are again at least talking about climate change
-- and tries to imagine where those two governments could actually go if
they truly decided to cooperate. All I would add to his thoughts is this: Isn't it time to establish a Manhattan-Shanghai
Project to find new ways to save this planet rather than blowing it
to smithereens or overheating it beyond repair? Tom
|
|
Michael Klare. “What If the U.S.
and China Really Cooperated on Climate Change? Imagining a Necessary Future.”
As President Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping
arrived on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, for their November 14th
"summit," relations between their two countries were on a
hair-raising downward spiral, with tensions over Taiwan nearing the
boiling point. Diplomats hoped, at best, for a modest reduction in tensions,
which, to the relief of many, did occur. No policy breakthroughs were
expected, however, and none were achieved. In one vital area, though,
there was at least a glimmer of hope: the planet's two largest
greenhouse-gas emitters agreed to resume their languishing negotiations
on joint efforts to overcome the climate crisis.
These talks have been an on-again, off-again proposition
since President Barack Obama initiated them before the Paris climate
summit of December 2015, at which delegates were to vote on a landmark
measure to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (the maximum
amount scientists believe this planet can absorb without catastrophic
consequences). The U.S.-Chinese
consultations continued after the adoption of the Paris climate accord,
but were suspended in 2017 by that climate-change-denying president
Donald Trump. They were relaunched by President Biden in 2021, only to
be suspended again by an angry Chinese leadership in retaliation for
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2nd visit to Taiwan, viewed in
Beijing as a show of support for pro-independence forces on that island.
But thanks to Biden's intense lobbying in Bali, President Xi agreed to
turn the interactive switch back on.
Click here to read more
of this dispatch.
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment