The Secure and the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World (Transnational Institute) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745336965 ISBN 13: 9780745336961

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

While the world’s scientists and many of its inhabitants despair at the unfolding impacts of climate change, corporate and military leaders see nothing but challenges and 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. With one eye on the scientific evidence and the other on their global assets and supply chains, powerful elites are giving increasing thought as to how to maintain control in a world gradually reshaped by climactic extremes. The Secure and the Dispossessed looks at these deadly approaches with a highly critical eye. It also considers the flip-side: that the legitimacy of the global 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. Adaptation and resilience to a climate-changed world is desperately needed, but the form it will take will affect all of our futures. This collection of authoritative essays by high profile journalists, academics and activists will shape this most important of debates for years to come.

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Nick Buxton is communications manager for the Transnational Institute. Ben Hayes works for the civil liberties organization Statewatch and is a fellow of the Transnational Institute.

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The Secure and the Dispossessed

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

By Nick Buxton, Ben Hayes

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2016 Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3696-1

Contents

List of figures and boxes, vii, 
Acknowledgements, viii, 
Foreword by Susan George, xi, 
Introduction: Security for whom in a time of climate crisis? Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes, 1, 
PART I: THE SECURITY AGENDA, 
1 The catastrophic convergence: Militarism, neoliberalism and climate change Christian Parenti, 23, 
2 Colonising the future: Climate change and international security strategies Ben Hayes, 39, 
3 Climate Change Inc.: How TNCs are managing risk and preparing to profit in a world of runaway climate change Oscar Reyes, 63, 
PART II: SECURITY FOR WHOM?, 
4 A permanent state of emergency: Civil contingencies, risk management and human rights Nafeez Ahmed, Ben Hayes and Nick Buxton, 87, 
5 From refugee protection to militarised exclusion: What future for 'climate refugees'? Ben Hayes, Steve Wright and April Humble, 111, 
6 The fix is in: (Geo)engineering our way out of the climate crisis? Kathy Jo Wetter and Silvia Ribeiro, ETC Group, 133, 
7 Greenwashing death: Climate change and the arms trade Mark Akkerman, 152, 
PART III: ACQUISITION THROUGH DISPOSSESSION, 
8 Sowing insecurity: Food and agriculture in a time of climate crisis Nick Buxton, Zoe W Brent and Annie Shattuck, 171, 
9 In deep water: Confronting the climate and water crises Mary Ann Manahan, 190, 
10 Power to the people: Rethinking 'energy security' The Platform Collective, 210, 
Conclusion: Finding security in a climate-changed world Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes, 230, 
Notes on Contributors, 249, 
Index, 251, 

CHAPTER 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. 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 CO has been for 10,000 years.

Atmospheric CO 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 CO 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 CO, 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.'

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, CO 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.

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745336965
• ISBN 13: 9780745336961
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Herausgeber: Buxton Nick, Hayes Ben
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland