Inaction Equals Annihilation
Not since World War II have
more human beings been at risk from disease and starvation than at this very
moment. On March 10th, Stephen O’Brien, under secretary-general of the United
Nations for humanitarian affairs, informed the Security Council that 20 million people in
three African countries -- Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan -- as well as in
Yemen were likely to die if not provided with emergency food and medical aid.
“We are at a critical point in history,” he declared. “Already at the beginning of the year we are
facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the U.N.”
Without coordinated international action, he added, “people will simply starve
to death [or] suffer and die from disease.”
Major famines have, of course,
occurred before, but never in memory on such a scale in four places
simultaneously. According to O’Brien, 7.3 million people are at risk in
Yemen, 5.1 million in the Lake Chad area of northeastern Nigeria, 5 million in
South Sudan, and 2.9 million in Somalia. In each of these countries, some
lethal combination of war, persistent drought, and political
instability is causing drastic cuts in essential food and water supplies. Of
those 20 million people at risk of death, an estimated 1.4 million are young
children.
Despite the potential severity
of the crisis, U.N. officials remain confident that many of those at risk can
be saved if sufficient food and medical assistance is provided in time and the
warring parties allow humanitarian aid workers to reach those in the greatest
need.
“We have strategic,
coordinated, and prioritized plans in every country,” O’Brien said. “With
sufficient and timely financial support, humanitarians can still help to prevent
the worst-case scenario.”
All in all, the cost of such
an intervention is not great: an estimated $4.4 billion to implement that U.N. action plan and save most of those 20
million lives.
The international response?
Essentially, a giant shrug of indifference.
To have time to deliver
sufficient supplies, U.N. officials indicated that the money would need to be
in pocket by the end of March. It’s now April and international donors have
given only a paltry $423 million -- less than a tenth of what’s needed. While,
for instance, President Donald Trump sought Congressional approval for a $54 billion increase in
U.S. military spending (bringing total defense expenditures in the coming year
to $603 billion) and launched $89 million worth of Tomahawk missiles against a single
Syrian air base, the U.S. has offered precious little to allay the coming
disaster in three countries in which it has taken military actions in recent
years. As if to add insult to injury, on February 15th Trump told Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari that he was
inclined to sell his country 12 Super-Tucano light-strike aircraft, potentially
depleting Nigeria of $600 million it desperately needs for famine relief.
Moreover, just as those U.N.
officials were pleading fruitlessly for increased humanitarian funding and an
end to the fierce and complex set of conflicts in South Sudan and Yemen (so
that they could facilitate the safe delivery of emergency food supplies to
those countries), the Trump administration was announcing plans to reduce
American contributions to the United Nations by 40%. It was also preparing to send additional weaponry to Saudi Arabia, the country most responsible for devastating air strikes on Yemen’s food and
water infrastructure. This goes beyond indifference. This is complicity
in mass extermination.
Like many people around the
world, President Trump was horrified by images of young children suffocating
from the nerve gas used by Syrian government forces in an April 4th raid on the
rebel-held village of Khan Sheikhoun. “That attack on children yesterday had a
big impact on me -- big impact,” he told reporters. “That was a horrible, horrible thing. And
I’ve been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that.”
In reaction to those images, he ordered a barrage of cruise missile strikes on
a Syrian air base the following day. But Trump does not seem to have seen -- or
has ignored -- equally heart-rending images of young children dying from the spreading famines
in Africa and Yemen. Those children evidently don’t merit White House sympathy.
Who knows why not just Donald
Trump but the world is proving so indifferent to the famines of 2017? It
could simply be donor fatigue or a media focused on the daily psychodrama that
is now Washington, or growing fears about the unprecedented global refugee crisis and, of course, terrorism. It’s
a question worth a piece in itself, but I want to explore another one entirely.
Here’s the question I think we
all should be asking: Is this what a world battered by climate change will be
like -- one in which tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of people
perish from disease, starvation, and heat prostration while the rest of us,
living in less exposed areas, essentially do nothing to prevent their
annihilation?
Famine, Drought, and Climate
Change
First, though, let’s consider
whether the famines of 2017 are even a valid indicator of what a
climate-changed planet might look like. After all, severe famines accompanied
by widespread starvation have occurred throughout human history. In addition,
the brutal armed conflicts now underway in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and
Yemen are at least in part responsible for the spreading famines. In all four
countries, there are forces -- Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia,
assorted militias and the government in South Sudan, and Saudi-backed forces in
Yemen -- interfering
with the delivery of aid supplies. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that
pervasive water scarcity and prolonged drought (expected consequences of global
warming) are contributing significantly to the disastrous conditions in
most of them. The likelihood that droughts this severe would be occurring
simultaneously in the absence of climate change is vanishingly small.
In fact, scientists generally
agree that global warming will ensure diminished rainfall and ever more
frequent droughts over much of Africa and the Middle East. This, in turn, will
heighten conflicts of every sort and endanger basic survival in a myriad of
ways. In their most recent 2014 assessment of global trends, the scientists of
the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that
“agriculture in Africa will face significant challenges in adapting to climate
changes projected to occur by mid-century, as negative effects of high
temperatures become increasingly prominent.” Even in 2014, as that report
suggested, climate change was already contributing to water scarcity and
persistent drought conditions in large parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Scientific studies had, for instance, revealed an “overall expansion of desert
and contraction of vegetated areas” on that continent. With arable land
in retreat and water supplies falling, crop yields were already in decline in
many areas, while malnutrition rates were rising -- precisely the conditions witnessed in more extreme forms in the famine-affected
areas today.
It’s seldom possible to
attribute any specific weather-induced event, including droughts or storms, to
global warming with absolute certainty. Such things happen with or
without climate change. Nonetheless, scientists are becoming even more confident that severe storms and droughts
(especially when occurring in tandem or in several parts of the world at once)
are best explained as climate-change related. If, for instance, a type of storm
that might normally occur only once every hundred years occurs twice in one
decade and four times in the next, you can be reasonably confident that you’re
in a new climate era.
It will undoubtedly take more
time for scientists to determine to what
extent the current famines in Africa and Yemen are mainly
climate-change-induced and to what extent they are the product of political and
military mayhem and disarray. But doesn’t this already offer us a sense of just
what kind of world we are now entering?
History and social science
research indicate that, as environmental conditions deteriorate, people will
naturally compete over access to vital materials and the opportunists in any
society -- warlords, militia leaders, demagogues, government officials, and the
like -- will exploit such clashes for their personal advantage. “The data
suggests a definite link between food insecurity and conflict,” points out Ertharin Cousin, head of the U.N.’s World Food
Program. “Climate is an added stress factor.” In this sense, the current
famines in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen provide us with a perfect
template for our future, one in which resource wars and climate mayhem team up
as temperatures continue their steady rise.
The Selective Impact of
Climate Change
In some popular accounts of
the future depredations of climate change, there is a tendency to suggest that
its effects will be felt more or less democratically around the globe -- that
we will all suffer to some degree, if not equally, from the bad things that
happen as temperatures rise. And it’s certainly true that everyone on this planet
will feel the effects of global warming in some fashion, but don’t for a second
imagine that the harshest effects will be distributed anything but deeply
inequitably. It won’t even be a complicated equation. As with so
much else, those at the bottom rungs of society -- the poor, the marginalized,
and those in countries already at or near the edge -- will suffer so much more (and so much earlier) than those at the
top and in the most developed, wealthiest countries.
As a start, the geophysical
dynamics of climate change dictate that, when it comes to soaring temperatures
and reduced rainfall, the most severe effects are likely to be felt first and
worst in the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, the Middle East, South
Asia, and Latin America -- home to hundreds of millions of people who depend on
rain-fed agriculture to sustain themselves and their families. Research
conducted by scientists in New Zealand, Switzerland, and Great Britain found that the rise in the number of extremely hot days is
already more intense in tropical latitudes and disproportionately affects poor
farmers.
Living at subsistence levels,
such farmers and their communities are especially vulnerable to drought and desertification.
In a future in which climate-change disasters are commonplace, they will
undoubtedly be forced to choose ever more frequently between the unpalatable
alternatives of starvation or flight. In other words, if you thought the
global refugee crisis was bad today, just wait a few decades.
Climate change is also
intensifying the dangers faced by the poor and marginalized in another
way. As interior croplands turn to dust, ever more farmers are migrating
to cities, especially coastal ones. If you want a historical analogy,
think of the great Dust Bowl migration of the “Okies” from the interior of the
U.S. to the California coast in the 1930s. In today’s climate-change era, the
only available housing such migrants are likely to find will be in vast and
expanding shantytowns (or “informal settlements,” as they’re euphemistically
called), often located in floodplains and low-lying coastal areas exposed to
storm surges and sea-level rise. As global warming advances, the victims of
water scarcity and desertification will be afflicted anew. Those storm
surges will destroy the most exposed parts of the coastal mega-cities in which
they will be clustered. In other words, for the uprooted and desperate, there
will be no escaping climate change. As the latest IPCC report noted, “Poor
people living in urban informal settlements, of which there are [already] about
one billion worldwide, are particularly vulnerable to weather and climate
effects.”
The scientific literature on
climate change indicates that the lives of the poor, the marginalized, and
the oppressed will be the first to be turned upside down by the effects of
global warming. “The socially and economically disadvantaged and the
marginalized are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change
and extreme events,” the IPCC indicated in 2014. “Vulnerability is often high
among indigenous peoples, women, children, the elderly, and disabled people who
experience multiple deprivations that inhibit them from managing daily risks
and shocks.” It should go without saying that these are also the people least
responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming in the
first place (something no less true of the countries most of them live in).
Inaction Equals Annihilation
In this context, consider the
moral consequences of inaction on climate change. Once it seemed that the
process of global warming would occur slowly enough to allow societies to adapt
to higher temperatures without excessive disruption, and that the entire human
family would somehow make this transition more or less simultaneously. That now
looks more and more like a fairy tale. Climate change is occurring far too
swiftly for all human societies to adapt to it successfully. Only the
richest are likely to succeed in even the most tenuous way. Unless colossal
efforts are undertaken now to halt the emission of greenhouse gases, those
living in less affluent societies can expect to suffer from extremes of
flooding, drought, starvation, disease, and death in potentially staggering
numbers.
And you don’t need a Ph.D. in
climatology to arrive at this conclusion either. The overwhelming majority of
the world’s scientists agree that any increase in average world temperatures
that exceeds 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above
the pre-industrial era -- some opt for a rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius -- will alter the global climate system
drastically. In such a situation, a number of societies will simply
disintegrate in the fashion of South Sudan today, producing staggering chaos
and misery. So far, the world has heated up by at least one of those two degrees, and unless
we stop burning fossil fuels in quantity soon, the 1.5 degree level will
probably be reached in the not-too-distant future.
Worse yet, on our present
trajectory, it seems highly unlikely that the warming process will stop at 2 or
even 3 degrees Celsius, meaning that later in this century many of the
worst-case climate-change scenarios -- the inundation of coastal cities, the
desertification of vast interior regions, and the collapse of rain-fed
agriculture in many areas -- will become everyday reality.
In other words, think of the
developments in those three African lands and Yemen as previews of what far
larger parts of our world could look like in another quarter-century or so: a
world in which hundreds of millions of people are at risk of annihilation from
disease or starvation, or are on the march or at sea, crossing borders, heading
for the shantytowns of major cities, looking for refugee camps or other places
where survival appears even minimally possible. If the world’s response
to the current famine catastrophe and the escalating fears of refugees in
wealthy countries are any indication, people will die in vast numbers without
hope of help.
In other words, failing to
halt the advance of climate change -- to the extent that halting it, at this
point, remains within our power -- means complicity with mass human
annihilation. We know, or at this point should know, that such scenarios are
already on the horizon. We still retain the power, if not to stop them,
then to radically ameliorate what they will look like, so our failure to do all
we can means that we become complicit in what -- not to mince words -- is
clearly going to be a process of climate genocide. How can those of us in
countries responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions escape such
a verdict?
And if such a conclusion is
indeed inescapable, then each of us must do whatever we can to reduce our
individual, community, and institutional contributions to global warming. Even
if we are already doing a lot -- as many of us are -- more is needed.
Unfortunately, we Americans are living not only in a time of climate crisis,
but in the era of President Trump, which means the federal government and its partners in the fossil fuel industry will be wielding their
immense powers to obstruct all imaginable progress on limiting global
warming. They will be the true perpetrators of climate genocide. As a result,
the rest of us bear a moral responsibility not just to do what we can at the
local level to slow the pace of climate change, but also to engage in political
struggle to counteract or neutralize the acts of Trump and company. Only
dramatic and concerted action on multiple fronts can prevent the human
disasters now unfolding in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen from becoming
the global norm.
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world
security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of
his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. Follow
him on Twitter at @mklare1.
