From Texas to Somalia, much of the world is experiencing extreme weather this year. Here in the United States a top climate scientist said this past spring had some of the most extreme weather the country has seen in the past century with epic floods, massive wildfires, drought and deadly tornadoes. Just this month, massive floods have shut down two nuclear plants in Nebraska and New Mexico, the nations top nuclear weapons lab at Los Alamos is being threatened by an uncontrolled wildfire. Meanwhile the United Nations is warning that a the Horn of Africa is facing its worst drought in 60 years. The drought has affected more than 10 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Uganda.
Christian Parenti talking:
it refers to the space between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the countries where you see the most extreme effects of climate change kicking in, but where you find vulnerable populations, people who live close to the land or the sea and have a minimal margin of error when bad weather strikes. But also these are countries and economies that have been ravaged by the Cold War and neoliberal economic restructuring.
From 1945 to 1990 the U.N. said there were 150 or so armed conflicts that killed 20 million people, displaced 15 million, 16 million were wounded. That all happened in the “global south” in this belt of states. And so now that’s where climate change is kicking in and that was also the same terrain where the last 30 years of IMF and World Bank-backed structural adjustment of privatization, deregulation of economies, cutting state support for farmers and fishermen — that program affected those states most intensely.
And now the weather associated with climate change, extreme weather such as the drought, punctuated by flooding in East Africa, is adding to this. And there’s this catastrophic convergence and climate change, the argument of the book is that climate change is very often, doesn’t just look like bad weather, it looks like ethnic violence or religious violence or banditry or civil war.
Ekaru Loruman was a Turkana pastoralist in northwest Kenya in the Rift Valley and he had been killed the day before in a cattle raid. So, I asked, who killed him? On one level, a neighbor killed him, someone from the Pokot tribe who was trying to steal his cattle. And he was at a water hole which was close to their territory because of this intense drought, and that was forcing the herds to concentrate around water holes because there was enough grazing elsewhere. But then also why weren’t there other water holes? Partly because of neoliberalism. The Kenyan government has stripped away its support for farmers and herders. And why was the raid so violent? Why was he killed with an AK-47? Why was this traditional pattern of cattle raiding, why did it look more like low-intensity conflict?
That is in part the result of the Cold War, where there were all these proxy fights in the “global south” that led to, among other things, state failure in Somalia. And now that whole region is full of cheap guns. There was a moment of state failure in Uganda and weapons were looted there. So, he was killed by climate change as it is articulated by these other pre-existing crises. Around the world, I found in doing this research, examples of that where climate change is a direct cause of violence or sometimes an indirect cause of violence. You look at many violent conflicts and there is frequently a climatological aspect, not the primary thing, but an increasingly important aspect.
The Pentagon, particularly around 2007, was putting out these reports and think tanks around them, realizing they were going to be called upon to respond to this problem. To their credit the armed services take climate change seriously, which is more than you can say for, say the GOP leadership in the House. And what they see again and again is not so much a future of interstate conflict, but of irregular warfare within states, social breakdown, increased banditry, mass migration. They realize they’re going to be called upon to respond to these low intensity conflicts and these civil wars, so front and center in their program of response is counterinsurgency.
This goes by different names — small wars, low-intensity conflict, counter insurgency. This is as part of the War on Terror become very important to U.S. foreign policy and I’m critical of that one, because I don’t think it will work. I don’t think it’s moral. But also, counterinsurgency, if you look at its record, what it does to societies is very damaging. Because the object is the population rather than territory, it leaves societies fragmented and vulnerable.
You see in Central America, as you guys have reported, societies that were the front lines of counterinsurgency in the 70’s and 80’s are now as violent as they were during war, but it’s a crime wave which the direct result of the legacy of counterinsurgency. An interesting fact, in World War I, 5% of casualties were civilians. World War II, it was 50%, by Vietnam it was 80% now it’s up to 90%.
What is proposed as a way of managing the problem, and I think it won’t work and it will make societies even less capable of adapting to the extreme weather and the necessary economic changes that they have to develop.
I was in Pakistan about a month ago, looking at the effect of the floods which began last summer. One thing I was surprised to see was that a lot of people who had been displaced by the floods were refusing to leave the refugee camps that they were in now because they did not want to go to these landlords. The flood revealed to me one of the underlying problems in Pakistan, which helps explain why it’s such a violent place. There’s an ethnic insurgency, there’s a religious insurgency, there’s a massive crime wave. These peasants would say we’d rather stay in these aid camps even as they cut off aid. They were protesting for the right to stay. The cops would attack them because they didn’t want to go back to the countryside where they would fall into debt to these landlords who have private prisons and treat them really as bonded servants. This is an example of how climate change works through other problems. It exacerbates pre-existing problems. The floods in Pakistan have primed yet another set of social problems. Where I was in Sindh there’s no insurgency, but it was a very badly hit area for the flood. Just north of it in the Punjab, the Taliban are actually moving in there. You can imagine what the long-term effects of these floods would be in terms of those types of politics. Where I was in Sindh what you saw was mostly a rise of banditry and perhaps an incipient ethnic rebellion developing.
in Kyrgyzstan it’s not on many people’s radar here, but last spring, 2010, you might remember that there were these ethnic riots between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz that left the capital in ruins and the government called for Russian troops to come in and the Russians very wisely said, no we’re not going to do that. When you dig in to what that story is it’s not just a bunch of hatred between people.
Kyrgyzstan gets 90% of its electricity from hydroelectric, they have these series of old Soviet dams. It has been suffering like Pakistan, like Afghanistan, like India, one of the worst droughts in living memory. So, the water level in these dams was half of what it should be. The government started rationing power as a result. Then comes the driest, coldest of winter on record, and herds are dying, pensioners are freezing to death. Industry has to shut down because there is not enough power, unemployment soars. Then comes the spring.
The President decides he wants to privatize the utility company, so he jacks the utility tariff by 100% and promises to jack it up 100% more after that and that’s what leads to these protests that then devolve in to this ethnic rioting between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz. So, there’s a very clear, but attenuated displaced through other issues, displaced through bad governance and neoliberalism. There’s this clear link to climatological crisis in the region.
In Afghanistan, that’s where I kind of came up with the idea for this book. I was reporting on the poppy economy, the heroin economy, and I asked the farmers, “why are you growing this illegal crop that the government and NATO come after you for growing.” One reason they would give is that it’s drought resistant. Which was actually the first I’d heard of this drought. And then they kept repeating that year after year as I would do other stories on this. Turns out Afghanistan is suffering the worst drought in living memory that coincides with the U.S. occupation there and the Afghan government and the NATO forces attack poppy as part of their counterinsurgency strategy and nation-building strategy. The Taliban defend poppy.
The farmers grow poppy because it uses one-fifth the amount of water that wheat uses. So, along with the ethnic issues for young Pashtun men, who join the Taliban and the religious ideology, there’s also a very material motive for the young recruits to the Taliban that is rooted in climate change, which is that the only way that they can survive is to grow poppy. One of these armed forces says we’ll protect as you do that the other one says we’re going to eradicate your fields. So, that’s not the cause of the war, but it’s an important factor and an increasingly important factor in why it drags on and on and on and why there’s such a social crisis in Afghanistan that expresses itself as war.
what climate change is actually doing is almost like turbocharging or being the fuel to the existing conflict, making them far worse than anyone envisioned that they would be, existing class conflicts or disparities that exist in the nation?
the Pentagon refers to it as a threat multiplier, which it sort of is. Speaking of the Pentagon, I was making a point earlier about counterinsurgency, the strange thing is that conventional warfare is associated with increased social solidarity. Not that I am for conventional warfare, but during the bombing of London, during the blitz, people came together, out of that kind of comes social democracy in England.
Counter insurgency, on the other hand, leaves societies divided because the civil society is the battlefield. The government forces, or the occupying forces inevitably create paramilitary forces that are manned by criminals, that involve smuggling, it involves all sorts of criminality that is a genie that once the war is over and the mission completed is impossible to put back in the bottle. So, counterinsurgency as a response to climate change or a form of global management by the United States and rich countries essentially seeds the world with problems, that can range from crime waves to social breakdown.
the international climate talks due to the U.S. have really stalled out. What’s necessary to deal with climate change and to avoid a future of warfare and social breakdown — is both adaptation, because we’re locked in for climate change even under the best case scenario, and mitigation. So, key facts that I’m sure all your listeners are, I’m sure, aware of that after 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere we enter a danger zone where there’s potentially self fueling climate change. We’re now at 390 parts per million in the atmosphere. So, even if the world economy ceased operating tomorrow there’s going to be climate change kicking in and disrupting society over the next coming decades and we need to adapt to that. War and banditry are a form of negative adaptation. Counterinsurgency, building borders that’s a form of militarized adaptation.
There are also positive forms of adaptation that I found in the book. In northeast Brazil, this is almost like if it didn’t exist you’d want to invent it. The Movimento Trabalhadores of the landless people’s movement in Brazil, which has been, as listeners to the show will know, very successful in redistributing land to the landless in Brazil, I found it a place where they — there was a community that on one side of a road they owned land and on another side of a road they were occupying land from an absentee Italian rancher. On the land they owned, where they had rights, they were adapting new agro-ecological forestry methods, real low-tech drip irrigation, not using pesticides, not using fertilizer, restoring the soil. On the side of the road where they didn’t own land, where they were operating with greater risk, they used traditional mainstream methods of clearing the land, burning it, planting mono-crops, using pesticides and they were a bit embarrassed about this because they were very proud of this green adaptive farming they were using, but they explained we cannot invest the five years it takes to get this up and running with these ecological methods if we don’t have the right to this land. That’s a perfect example of how adaptation is social justice. People in the Global South are not going to be able to come up with new technologies and new economic forms of organization that can work with this extreme climate if there isn’t at the center of that agenda social justice and redistribution of wealth, inside countries and globally and also redistribution of technology and capital.
You see in these anti-immigrant elements of the right in the Southwest the potential for a kind of green fascism. There are some of them that even make an environmental argument about immigration, and I think that that response is very dangerous. One of the reasons people are leaving their homes in Latin America and coming to the U.S. is because of climate change. The other reasons are the history of U.S. military intervention and support for states that have engaged in counterinsurgency and the U.S. support for a neoliberal economic restructuring.
In Juarez, I found numerous examples of people that I would consider climate refugees. One guy was a fisherman from Michoacán. He ended up at the border. When I met him he’s sitting on the Rio Grande looking at the U.S. He’s been deported, he’s saying I really don’t want to get involved in the drug trade, but that’s like the only thing I can do here if I can’t get back into the U.S.
His plight began in the late 90’s during an El Niño event when warm water came up and there was toxic algae plume that drove away the fish. You think, why would a small fisherman not be able to sustain one bad season? Part of the answer is NAFTA had basically gutted all the old supports that Mexican government had for small fishermen. There were no more cooperatives and cheap loans, so he had to go into debt privately. He then lost his boat and migrated north and ended up in the U.S., and was kicked out of there. And then found himself like many other people in Juarez where one way he could survive would be to get involved in the drug trade.
Similar examples in, with some Tarahumarac indigenous people who were driven off their land by a combination of drought and debt and deforestation. So, Michele Bachmann’s vision of militarizing the border is incredibly dangerous and the future projections for migration are intense. The U.N. says that possibly 10 times as many people could be on the move by the middle of the century as today. So we have to start looking at forms of adaptation to keep people on the land, to keep people productive in their home countries.
we have to empower the social movements that exist to insert a third element, which is society and social movements. They are actions planned in August, in D.C., around opposing tar-sands and the pipelines that would go to the tar-sands. This is one very simple easy point of purchase. If those incredibly filthy fuels are brought on line, the emissions would be so enormous that it could wipe out all other efforts at mitigation. So, there’s something that people can plug into. There’s good groups like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, 350.org that are organizing around this. Also, a key thing is the campaign against coal. We have to shut down coal mining. There can’t be any new coal plants and we have to take old coal plants offline.
I think that the U.S. is not — I don’t think, in the next few years — going to play a particularly positive role, so we have to be realistic about that. i still maintain hope that the rest of the world can push this agenda of redistributing capital and technology to help people adapt. I end the book with a couple of very concrete simple things that could be done without getting the Republicans to go along, without allocating new money. The federal government and state governments, in this country, constitute about one-third of GDP. If they were serious about clean purchasing of buying only clean electricity, only electric vehicles, that would be positive in and of itself it would reduce emissions, but it would indirectly help creating economies of scale for clean technology, and when those technologies are cheap enough, then they’ll be adaptation throughout the private sector.
Discussion with Christian Parenti.
Christian Parenti, contributing editor at the Nation. Author of several books, most recently “Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.”
– from democracynow.org