We only have a few decades to deal with climate change. If humanity fails to cut back dramatically on carbon emissions by 2050, according to an alarming new UN report, our planet may warm past the point of our ability to fix the problem.
Given global dependence on oil, gas, and coal, weaning every economy from fossil fuels to save Mother Earth won’t come easy or cheap. Fortunately, there’s a big pot of money available to avert a climate catastrophe.
Accessing that money, however, requires cutting back on a different set of pollutants — the huge cache of weapons the world continues to produce.
Europe has trimmed its military spending and the Pentagon budget is leveling off. Yet other regions are burning through more cash to wage or gear up for war than they used to.
Military outlays are rising the most in Africa and the Middle East. And Asia surpassed Europe last year for the first time in terms of overall military spending.
The United States still faces no competition for its distinction as the world’s military spending champion. The Pentagon’s $640 billion tab amounted to more than a third of the $1.75 trillion in global military spending the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute itemized for 2013.
What does worldwide military excess have to do with today’s reliance on fossil fuels? Instead of investing in ways to slow global warming and adapt to a changing climate, too many nations are pouring money into weapons in an ongoing fight over the dwindling resources we haven’t quite used up yet.
There’s still time to pivot in a new direction. One big step governments, industries, and investors must take is to quadruple the money they’re pumping into sustainable alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.
Those investments now total about $250 billion a year. While that may sound like a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, the United Nations says it’s not enough. It will take a “clean trillion” every year between now and 2050 keep the world livable, the International Energy Agency estimates.
Yes, the private sector needs to play a role in building a fossil-free global economy. So do governments, which possess the power to tax carbon-intensive energy. That’s certainly one good way to generate revenue for meeting the climate challenge while creating incentives to increase efficiency.
But world leaders can’t really fight climate change unless they slash military spending.
As climate writer and activist Bill McKibben says, do the math. Just shrinking the global military-industrial complex by 25 percent would free up $437.5 billion a year. Given the security challenges climate change poses, this makes perfect sense.
The head of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific has identified climate change as the biggest threat facing the region. The Pentagon is devoting considerable resources to studying rising temperatures as “threat multipliers” bound to stoke competition for resources, make humanitarian disasters more common, and increase political instability.
Battleships and fighter jets can’t defeat the threat of a melting ice cap or rising sea levels. It will take mountains of money to reduce our carbon emissions while maintaining a modern economy.
It may help to think about climate change as “getting embroiled in a war that lasts 100 years” without any obvious exit strategies, as retired Brigadier General Chris King puts it.
“You can see in military history, when they don’t have fixed durations, that’s when you’re most likely to not win,” warns King, the dean of academics at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Unless every nation ramps down military spending, we’ll all lose the next big war over the fate of the Earth without even firing a shot.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy