32. OMNI Climate Memo Mondays, July 19, 2021
WAR AND WARMING: CHAOS
WAR CHAOS, Engelhardt, Chapter Two, “Empire of Chaos.”
US Imperial Overreach and National Security State “led to the attacks of September 11, 2001. That day was the very definition of chaos brought to the imperial heartland.” Tom Engelhardt, A Nation Unmade by War, p. 40.
The 9-11 destruction of the World Trade Towers by bin Laden and mainly Saudi followers produced the enlargement of the US National Security State (US NSS) “to monumental proportions, and a staggering…imperial overreach.” The overreach undoubtedly; the security ironically, for the nation lives with constant threat and insecurity alleged by our leaders and used by administration after administration to balloon the Pentagon budget until the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex constitute virtually a fourth branch of government.
The so-called global War on Terror quickly became a global War OF Terror to establish a “military-enforced Pax Americana” of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a drone assassination program, an expanded surveillance and secrecy regime “so all-encompassing that much of government activity became unknowable to ‘the people’,” all costing “literally trillions of dollars” and tens of thousands of civilian lives, all a Pax of Chaos. At its Camden weapons complex, its C-130 base at Jacksonville, its fighter aircraft and drones at Ft. Smith, and its research at UAF, Arkansas
participates in this lethal peace.
“In the 5 years since the Paris Agreement, the world’s 6 biggest banks have financed fossil fuels to the tune of $3.8 trillion. Runaway funding for fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure fuels climate chaos and threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions.” Fossil Fuels Final Report, Rainforest Network 2021
CLIMATE CHAOS, Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,Chapter One, “Cascades” (heading to chaos); Chapter Two, “Elements of Chaos.”
We are so wrapped in the “comforting delusions” of the economic system one would hardly know that the enveloping crisis will leave “no life undeformed.” One won’t read in the daily newspapers that our present energy system is responsible—that in only the last three decades, burning fossil fuels has emitted more than half of the total carbon in the atmosphere, more than in all the preceding millennia, and that our FF regime has deranged our climate, our weather, and our lives. One didn’t discuss this July 4 that we knew the crisis was growing, or that the UN established the scientific consensus to report the crisis three decades ago. “…we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance. . . . The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime”—ours (4)..
Wallace-Wells concludes chapter 2 with the increase of warming sure to come from perma-frost melting and the rising oceans certain to follow.. The consequences of rising seas will create ultimate chaos. More than 600 million people live within thirty feet of sea level today. The US Geological Survey estimates the ultimate rise at 80 meters, or more than 260 feet, at some distant future. At 170 feet around 97 percent of Florida and Delaware would disappear. San Francisco, Sacramento, Seattle, NYC, Houston. . .”would be under water. “ “In many places, the coast would retreat by as much as one hundred miles. Arkansas and Vermont, landlocked today, would become coastal.” (68).
And he ends his book with a contrast of the two publics’ responses to nuclear weapons and climate change. “The threat from climate change is more total than from the bomb. It is also more pervasive.” (226). Perhaps these conditions partly explain the passivity of the public toward climate catastrophe, compared to the massive protests against the Bomb and the Bombers (29-31). But for both we still have time to stop them, if we will.