Το Σπίτι, House, 1996. Painting by Evi Sarantea. It mirrors the elimination of society by climate chaos and wars. The surviving house is but the roof and door and windows and a couple of children hiding on the door.
Prologue
The year 2023 was the hottest in the past 100,000 years. Human activities in industrialized agriculture, deforestation, and hunting of wild animals in Europe and America also became the norm in the tropics. The results are all bad. Raptor birds of prey in Africa have been forced to extinction. Tropical forests in Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia have been converted to industrial farms and logging factories. The tragedy of this massive deforestation is that it eliminates trees, which absorb carbon dioxide, perhaps the most destructive of greenhouse gases warming the planet.
No more subsidies to climate change
Yet fossil fuels business as usual is booming. The International Monetary Fund reported that, In 2022, countries subsidized them at the tune of $ 7 trillion. India is dramatically increasing its coal extraction and use. Norway is allowing the mining of its seas for metals useful for the batteries of electric cars.
The United Nations allowed a petroleum kingdom, United Arab Emirates, to preside over the Climate Summit of December 2023. Fossil fuel lobbyists invaded Dubai, numbering 2,456. The predictable result was a victory of fossil fuel companies. They will continue funding professors to manufacture doubt about the science of climate change. In addition, they are spending lots of money trying to convince the younger generation to keep driving gas guzzlers and deny global warming.
The coming class war
The year 2024 opens with a triumphant billionaire class acting like an independent state, even having its own missiles. But one wonders if these very wealthy people ever think about their future in a wrecked planet, basically their doing. There’s no Earth B. And the thought must have crossed their Artificial Intelligence brain that the many powerless are bound to react to the bad news. That billionaires made certain that nothing happened to slay the climate dragon in the room. The many will also find out that big oil, coal, and natural gas designed humanity’s helpless pretense of fighting global warming / climate change.
The drama becomes complicated. The country is punished by a “mixed bag of unsettled weather.” Winter pretends to exist. In the first 11 days of January 2024, nights in southern California turned cold, very cold. Heavy snow is covering the Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains. In my small town of Claremont, the Sun would offer relief and I would bike for half-an-hour or so. Walking the streets of Claremont added pleasure, save for the sporadic violent sounds of leaf-blowers.
What happened to climate change?
But climate change disappeared from public discourse. On October 10, 2023, I gave a talk to the Claremont University Club. I spoke to them about the history and effects of climate chaos. My slides depicted the dramatic rise of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, CO2. These gases grasp chunks of solar energy and don’t release them to space. Slowly and in the past century or so these extra amounts of energy increase the normal temperature from solar radiation. Higher temperatures cause higher precipitation that come down as rains, some of which fall rapidly with the potential of floods. Other consequences of higher temperatures include forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves on land and seas, politicized climate summits, young people protesting the uncertain and dangerous future they are inheriting from their blah, blah elders. I even mentioned the complete indifference of the Claremont City Council to climate change. A couple of people asked questions. One man talked to me after the presentation.
American politics
So, if the horror and destruction and heat of climate change leaves Americans cold, what are they excited about? The Republicans in Congress refuse to cooperate with their Democratic colleagues. Republican Congressmen / women are trying to impeach President Biden in order to get even with the House impeachment of former president Trump. Meanwhile, droves of Republican evangelicals in Iowa want Trump to be the next president. Some of them say Trump exemplifies Jesus. Others – Christian Zionists — may look at Trump in order to trigger the second coming of Jesus. And Trump encourages this insane behavior as fitting politics in America in 2024.
Wars boost barbarism and climate chaos
Another insane crusade of global dimensions is America’s funding of World War III-like war in Ukraine, pitting America’s NATO underlings against nuclear weapons armed Russia. The second war funded and armed by America is the mayhem and vast ecocide between Jews and Moslem and Christian Palestinians in Palestine Gaza. “The violence inflicted on Palestinians by an Israel [supported] by President Biden and his foreign policy team,” says Joshua Frank, “is unlike anything we had previously witnessed in more or less real-time in the media and on social media. Gaza, its people, and the lands that have sustained them for centuries are being desecrated and transformed into an all too unlivable hellscape, the impact of which will be felt — it’s a guarantee — for generations to come.”
An armada of America is serving the relentless Israeli bombing of largely civilians in the Gaza strip. The American embrace of Israel has contained the war, but, sooner or later, that atrocity and war crime will engulf the rest of the Middle East. These two wars together have probably doubled the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
These international cow-boy wars are signals and symptoms of irresponsibility and anarchy. They are forcing me to think in unconventional ways. Could it be we have exhausted and corrupted the political theory behind democracy and civilization? Even the integrity of independent states? We see that warfare and global warming are shredding the foundations of civilization. Only a pretense of a roof is remaining over humanity. Are we resurrecting the centuries-long instability and chaos and plunder of the Roman Empire?
But the heart of the matter is the supremacy of the private over the public interest. We don’t seem to be able to escape the barbaric notion that power makes right. This flaw is fundamentally responsible for the cosmic tragedy of global warming. Like a giant cloud, the fossil fuel oligarchy covers the sky of reason and desire for survival. The citizens of America, Europe, China, India, and Africa know practically nothing about each other. They (in America and Europe) calculate they don’t want to buy solar panels for their homes, for example, because the others (in China, India, and Africa) won’t. Besides, the very wealthy care only about themselves in their own countries. For example, the Republican candidates for president promise to eliminate any measures and policies fighting climate change. Their agenda is simple – drill, baby drill. Their politics is to give more power to fossil fuels billionaires. They say let China and India fight climate change. This selfishness brings discord and war.
Imperial temptation
Add to this the widely shared distrust from centuries of religious hatred, the imperial temptation of fossil fuel companies and billionaires is probably scheming to take over the world. Such a coup will likely trigger class conflict and more global war with unforeseeable catastrophic climate and political consequences.
The real mechanism for global consensus about fighting climate change was the annual Climate Summit. But even that process has been purchased by fossil fuel companies. Climatologists working for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issue annual reports that highlight the dangers of ceaseless emissions of greenhouse gases. These gases come from millions of animal farms and huge industrialized farming; billions of cars and trucks; millions of yachts and private airplanes; countless large commercial airplanes and ships; billions of homes heated by the burning of natural gas; factories producing electricity and fertilizers and pesticides and cement. Add wars to these colossal uses of fossil fuels, and you have Dante’s inferno.
Building our own future
The only way out of this extraordinary dilemma is the rapid education and action by the public. Environmentalists must join hands and explain climate change and what has to be done to the voters. Ask them to set aside their private religious ideas and focus on their survival and the survival of our Mother Earth. Phasing out fossil fuels is the only option right now. And working together for the next several years would suffice to build the alternative and livable energy infrastructure from solar energy and wind. An enormous benefit of this cooperation would be the rebuilding of both civilization and democratic society.
The post Climate Change and Wars Are Breaking Down the Foundations of Civilization appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.
Evaggelos Vallianatos | Radio Free (2024-01-15T06:55:15+00:00) Climate Change and Wars Are Breaking Down the Foundations of Civilization. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/15/climate-change-and-wars-are-breaking-down-the-foundations-of-civilization/
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