Climate change is happening faster than initially predicted,
and its impacts are already upon us in the form of more extreme
weather events, desertification, ocean acidification, melting
glaciers and incrementally rising sea levels.
The scientists who construct the computer models that analyze
climate data believe that even if we stop dumping greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere, CO2 levels are already so high that
we are locked into a significant increase in global
temperatures. Disruptive climate change is a certainty even if
we make the economic shift away from fossil fuels.
Incipient climate change is already starting to express itself
in the realm of politics.
Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The
current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect
with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. I
call this collision of political, economic and environmental
disasters the catastrophic convergence. By catastrophic
convergence, I do not merely mean that several disasters happen
simultaneously, one atop another. Rather, I argue that problems
compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through
another.
Societies, like people, deal with new challenges in ways that
are conditioned by the traumas of their past. Thus, damaged
societies, like damaged people, often respond to new crises in
ways that are irrational, shortsighted, and self-destructive.
In the case of climate change, the prior traumas that set the
stage for bad adaptation, the destructive social response, are
Cold War–era militarism and the economic pathologies of
neoliberal capitalism. Over the last 40 years, both of these
forces have distorted the state’s relationship to society –
removing and undermining the state’s collectivist, regulatory
and redistributive functions, while overdeveloping its
repressive and military capacities. This, I argue, inhibits
society’s ability to avoid violent dislocations as climate
change kicks in.
Planning for apocalypse
A slew of government reports have discussed the social and
military problems posed by climate change. In 2008. Congress
mandated that the upcoming 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review –
the policy document laying out the guiding principles of US
military strategy and doctrine – consider the national-security
impacts of climate change. The first of these investigations to
make news, a 2004 Pentagon-commissioned study called “An Abrupt
Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States
National Security,” was authored by Peter Schwartz, a CIA
consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell,
and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business
Network.The report was made at the behest of octogenarian
military theorist cum imperial soothsayer Andrew Marshall.
Known to his followers as Yoda, after the wrinkled, dwarflike
puppet of Star Wars fame, Marshall got his start at the RAND
Corporation in 1949 as a specialist on nuclear Armageddon and
its alleged survivability. He moved from RAND to the Pentagon
during Richard Nixon’s presidency and served every president
since. (It is interesting to note the presence of atomic-era
Cold Warrior physicists among both the climate-change
denialists and the military adaptationists. In his book How to
Cool the Planet, Jeff Goodell remarks on the same set’s
infatuation with the high-tech solutions promised by
geoengineering, in particular Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s
Lowell Wood, a tie-dye wearing disciple of Edward Teller.)
Schwartz and Randall’s report correctly treats global warming
as a potentially nonlinear process. And they forecast a new
Dark Ages:
Nations without the resources to do so may build virtual
fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for
themselves … As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters
strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs
will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense
of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression
in order to reclaim balance … Europe will be struggling
internally, large numbers of refugees washing up on its shores
and Asia in serious crisis over food and water. Disruption and
conflict will be endemic features of life. Once again, warfare
would define human life.
In 2007, there came more reports on climate and security. One,
from the Pentagon-connected think tank CNA Corporation,
convened an advisory board of high-ranking former military
officers to examine the issues – among them General Gordon
Sullivan, former chief of staff, US Army; Admiral Donald
Pilling, former vice chief of naval operations; Admiral Joseph
Prueher, former commander in chief of the US Pacific Command;
and General Anthony Zinni, retired US Marine Corps and former
commander in chief of US Central Command. That report
envisioned permanent counterinsurgency on a global scale. Here
is one salient excerpt:
Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability …
Unlike most conventional security threats that involve a single
entity acting in specific ways at different points in time,
climate change has the potential to result in multiple chronic
conditions, occurring globally within the same time frame.
Economic and environmental conditions in these already fragile
areas will further erode as food production declines, diseases
increase, clean water becomes increasingly scarce, and
populations migrate in search of resources. Weakened and
failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival,
foster the conditions for internal conflict, extremism, and
movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical
ideologies. The US may be drawn more frequently into these
situations to help to provide relief, rescue, and logistics, or
to stabilize conditions before conflicts arise.
Another section notes:
When a government can no longer deliver services to its people,
ensure domestic order, and protect the nation’s borders from
invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and
terrorism to fill the vacuum … the greatest concern will be
movement of asylum seekers and refugees who due to ecological
devastation become settlers.
In closing the report notes, “Abrupt climate changes could make
future adaptation extremely difficult, even for the most
developed countries.”
Another report from 2007, the most scientifically literate of
the lot, titled The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy
National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,
was produced by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and the Center for a New American Security. Its
prominent authors included Kurt Campbell, former deputy
assistant secretary of defense; Leon Fuerth, former national
security advisor to Vice President Al Gore; John Podesta,
former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton; and James
Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Age of Consequences laid out three plausible scenarios
for climate change, each pertaining to different global
average-temperature changes. The authors relied on the Fourth
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change but noted, “Recent observations indicate that
projections from climate models have been too conservative; the
effects of climate change are unfolding faster and more
dramatically than expected.” The report conceives of future
problems not in terms of interstate resource wars but as state
collapse caused by “disease, uncontrolled migration, and crop
failure, that … overwhelm the traditional instruments of
national security (the military in particular) and other
elements of state power and authority.” Green ex-spook James
Woolsey authored the report’s final section laying out the
worst-case scenario. He writes:
In a world that sees two meter sea level rise, with continued
flooding ahead, it will take extraordinary effort for the
United States, or indeed any country, to look beyond its own
salvation. All of the ways in which human beings have dealt
with natural disasters in the past … could come together in one
conflagration: rage at government’s inability to deal with the
abrupt and unpredictable crises; religious fervor, perhaps even
a dramatic rise in millennial end-of-days cults; hostility and
violence toward migrants and minority groups, at a time of
demographic change and increased global migration; and intra-
and interstate conflict over resources, particularly food and
fresh water. Altruism and generosity would likely be blunted.
the west versus the rest
Other developed states have conducted similar studies, most of
them classified. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) produced a
report on climate conflict in 2007, a summary of which was
leaked two years later: “Environmental stress, caused by both
climate change and a range of other factors, will act as a
threat multiplier in fragile states around the world,
increasing the chances of state failure. This is likely to
increase demands for the ADF to be deployed on additional
stabilization, post-conflict reconstruction and disaster relief
operations in the future.”
The European powers are also planning for the security threats
of a world transformed by climate change. The European Council
released a climate-security report in 2008, noting that “a
temperature rise of up to 2°C above preindustrial levels will
be difficult to avoid … Investment in mitigation to avoid such
scenarios, as well as ways to adapt to the unavoidable should
go hand in hand with addressing the international security
threats created by climate change; both should be viewed as
part of preventive security policy.”
In familiar language the report noted, “climate change
threatens to overburden states and regions which are already
fragile and conflict prone,” which leads to “political and
security risks that directly affect European interests.” It
also notes the likelihood of conflict over resources due to
reduction of arable land and water shortages; economic damage
to coastal cities and critical infrastructure, particularly
Third World megacities; environmentally induced migration;
religious and political radicalization; and tension over energy
supply.
Western military planners, if not political leaders, recognize
the dangers in the convergence of political disorder and
climate change. Instead of worrying about conventional wars
over food and water, they see an emerging geography of
climatologically driven civil war, refugee flows, pogroms and
social breakdown. In response, they envision a project of
open-ended counterinsurgency on a global scale.
the eco-fascist threat
The watchwords of the climate discussion are mitigation and
adaptation – that is, we must mitigate the causes of climate
change while adapting to its effects.
Adaptation means preparing to live with the effects of climatic
changes, some of which are already underway and some of which
are inevitable – in the pipeline. Adaptation is both a
technical and a political challenge.
Technical adaptation means transforming our relationship to
nature as nature transforms: learning to live with the damage
we have wrought by building seawalls around vulnerable coastal
cities, giving land back to mangroves and everglades so they
can act to break tidal surges during giant storms, opening
wildlife migration corridors so species can move north as the
climate warms, and developing sustainable forms of agriculture
that can function on an industrial scale even as weather
patterns gyrate wildly.
Political adaptation, on the other hand, means transforming
humanity’s relationship to itself, transforming social
relations among people. Successful political adaptation to
climate change will mean developing new ways of containing,
avoiding, and deescalating the violence that climate change
fuels. That will require economic redistribution and
development. It will also require a new diplomacy of peace
building.
However, another type of political adaptation is already
underway, one that might be called the politics of the armed
lifeboat: responding to climate change by arming, excluding,
forgetting, repressing, policing, and killing. One can imagine
a green authoritarianism emerging in rich countries, while the
climate crisis pushes the Third World into chaos. Already, as
climate change fuels violence in the form of crime, repression,
civil unrest, war and even state collapse in the Global South,
the North is responding with a new authoritarianism. The
Pentagon and its European allies are actively planning a
militarized adaptation, which emphasizes the long-term,
open-ended containment of failed or failing states –
counterinsurgency forever.
This sort of “climate fascism,” a politics based on exclusion,
segregation, and repression, is horrific and bound to fail.
There must be another path. The struggling states of the Global
South cannot collapse without eventually taking wealthy
economies down with them. If climate change is allowed to
destroy whole economies and nations, no amount of walls, guns,
barbed wire, armed aerial drones, or permanently deployed
mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from
the other.
Christian Parenti is a visiting scholar at the Center for Place
Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center and was just
appointed professor at the School for International Training,
Graduate Institute. This essay is drawn from his new book
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of
Violence.
