The Secure and the Dispossessed

How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World

Nick Buxton, Ben Hayes

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783717217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

While the world's scientists and many of its inhabitants despair at the impact of climate change, corporate and military leaders see nothing but opportunities. For them, melting ice caps mean newly accessible fossil fuels, borders to be secured from 'climate refugees', social conflicts to be managed and more failed states in which to intervene. They are 'securing' their assets at the expanse of the planet and its inhabitants. The Secure and the Dispossessed looks at these deadly approaches with a critical eye. It also considers the flip-side: that the legitimacy of the elite is under unprecedented pressure – from resistance by communities to resource grabs to those creating new ecological and socially just models for managing our energy, food and water. Topics covered include geoengineering, militarism, refugee protection, greenwashing and the agricultural crisis among others. Adaptation and resilience to a climate-changed world is desperately needed, but the form it will take will affect all of our futures.

PART I

THE SECURITY AGENDA

1

THE CATASTROPHIC CONVERGENCE: MILITARISM, NEOLIBERALISM AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Christian Parenti

Water flows or blood.

Slogan of the banned Pakistani political party Jamaat-u-Dawa

Introduction

Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis.¹ And the political responses to climate change increasingly take the form of ethnic, religious, or class violence in the form of banditry, rebellion, warfare, state repression and general militarisation. This is because the current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already existing crises of poverty and inequality left by thirty years of neoliberalism, and the violence and tattered social fabric left by Cold War-era military conflicts. 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 problem atop another. Rather, I am arguing 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, short-sighted and self-destructive. In the case of climate change, the past traumas that set the stage for bad adaptation – a destructive social response – are Cold War-era militarism and the economic pathologies of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last forty years, both 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. And this, I contend, seriously challenges society’s ability to avoid violent dislocations as climate change kicks in.

Climate crisis

The scientific consensus about climate takes institutional form in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC does not conduct independent research but is instead a government- and UN-supported international clearinghouse. It collects and summarises all published scientific literature on climatology and related issues in biology, hydrology and glaciology to facilitate governments’ response to climate issues based on fully vetted research.

The IPCC has been attacked by climate denialists as alarmist and wrong, due to several minor errors in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. But correcting these minor errors did not change the report’s overall conclusions. In fact, because the IPCC operates on the basis of consensus, its conclusions are quite conservative and its reports lag years behind the latest scientific developments. The IPCC represents the lowest-common-denominator, fully accepted conclusions of the scientific mainstream.

The IPCC has concluded that our civilisation’s dependence on burning fossil fuels has boosted atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from around 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution to 400 ppm today. Analyses of ancient ice cores show 400 ppm to be the highest that atmospheric CO₂ has been for 10,000 years.

Atmospheric CO₂ functions like the glass in a greenhouse, allowing the sun’s heat in but preventing much of it from radiating back out to space. We need atmospheric CO₂ – without it, the earth would be an ice-cold lifeless rock. However, over the last 150 years, we have been loading the sky with far too much CO₂, and the planet is heating up.

As the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions explains, ‘The Earth’s average surface temperature has increased by 1.4°F (0.8°C) since the early years of the 20th century. The 10 warmest years on record (since 1850) have all occurred since 1998, and all but one have happened since 2000.’²

Less than 1 degree Celsius warmer over a hundred years? That may not sound like much, but scientists believe it is enough to begin disrupting the climate system’s equilibrium. The negative feedback loops that keep the earth’s climate stable are increasingly giving way to destabilising positive feedback loops, in which departures from the norm build on themselves instead of diminishing over time. As a result, 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 analyse climate data agree 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. Extreme weather events and off-kilter weather patterns are causing more humanitarian crises. The UN estimates that 70 per cent of humanitarian disasters are climate related, up from 50 per cent two decades ago. Already climate change adversely affects 300 million people a year, killing 300,000 of them. By 2030 – as floods, drought, forest fires and new diseases grow worse – as many as 500,000 people a year could be killed by climate change, and the economic cost of these disruptions could reach $600 billion annually.³

This dangerous mix of extreme weather and water scarcity could inflame and escalate already existing social conflicts. Columbia University Earth Institute’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) and the International Crisis Group combined databases on civil wars and water availability, and found that ‘When rainfall is significantly below normal, the risk of a low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately doubles the following year.’⁴ The project cites the example of Nepal, where the Maoist insurgency was most severe after droughts and almost nonexistent in areas that had normal rainfall. In some cases, when the rains were late or light, or came all at once, or at the wrong time, ‘semi-retired’ armed groups often re-emerged to start fighting again.

Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer lies what I have called the ‘Tropic of Chaos’, a belt of economically and politically battered post-colonial states girding the planet’s equatorial latitudes. In this band around the tropics, climate change is beginning to hit hardest. The societies in this belt are heavily dependent on agriculture and fishing, thus very vulnerable to shifts in weather patterns. According to a Swedish government study, ‘There are 46 countries – home to 2.7 billion people – in which the effects of climate change interacting with economic, social and political problems will create a high risk of violent conflict.’⁵ Their list covers that same terrain. These latitudes are now being most affected by the onset of anthropocentric climate change.

In my book, Tropic of Chaos, I described numerous conflicts that are being exacerbated by climate change, beginning with the escalation of violence among East African pastoralists, most specifically the Turkana. Moving farther eastward, Afghanistan is facing the worst drought conditions in a hundred years. On to India, where a map of Naxalite guerrilla activity correlates almost perfectly with the most drought-affected districts. More recently, other climate conflicts have become well known: Syria’s civil war in 2011, for example, was precipitated in part by a horrific drought from 2006 to 2009.

Rising sea levels provide another major challenge for our capacity to adapt. In 2007, the IPCC projected sea levels could rise by an average of 7–23 inches this century. These numbers were soon amended and scientists now believe that sea levels could rise by an average of five feet over the next ninety years. Such sea-level rises will lead to massive dislocations. One 2014 study from Columbia’s CIESIN projects that 700 million ‘climate refugees’ will be on the move by 2050, although most of these will not cross borders and will move within their country of birth (see Chapter 5).⁶

Perhaps the modern era’s first ‘climate refugees’ were the 500,000 Bangladeshis left homeless when half of Bhola Island flooded in 2005. In Bangladesh, 22 million people could be forced from their homes by 2050 because of climate change. India is already building a militarised border fence along its 2,500-mile frontier with Bangladesh.⁷ And the student activists of India’s Hindu Right are pushing vigorously for the mass deportation of (Muslim) Bangladeshi immigrants.

Meanwhile, 22 Pacific island nations, home to 7 million people, are planning for relocation as rising seas threaten them with national annihilation. What will happen when China’s cities begin to flood? When the eastern seaboard of the US starts to flood, how will people and institutions respond?

Military legacy of the Cold War

The vulnerability of the Global South to climate change cannot be fully understood without noting that this region was also the frontline of the Cold War’s hot proxy battles and the laboratory for neoliberal, violent economic restructuring. The main pre-existing crisis of the catastrophic convergence is the legacy of Cold War militarism. In the Global South, the Cold War was hot. Revolution and counter-insurgency were its methods. Conventional warfare in which the military and infrastructures are targeted is, despite all its horrors, often associated with increased social solidarity, as witnessed in Britain during the Second World War, where Nazi bombardment was met with evacuation, rationing, conscription and an unprecedented levelling of class differences. Asymmetrical socio-military conflicts, such as those waged across the Global South at the height of the Cold War were quite different, erodi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Susan George
• Introduction: Security for whom in a time of climate crisis?
• Part I: The Security Agenda
• Part II: Security for Whom?
• Part III: Acquisition through Dispossession
• Conclusion: Finding security in a climate-changed world
• Notes on Contributors
• Index