Naomi Klein’s new book is This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. Her previous books include The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Jason Box is an ice-sheet climatologist and geographer. At The New Yorker, they write—Why a Climate Deal is the Best Hope for Peace. An excerpt:
When our safety feels threatened, it’s difficult to think of anything else. Major shocks like the Paris attacks are awfully good at changing the subject. But what if we decided to not let it happen? What if, instead of changing the subject, we deepened the discussion of climate change and expanded the range of solutions, which are fundamental for real human security? What if, instead of being pushed aside in the name of war, climate action took center stage as the planet’s best hope for peace?
The connection between warming temperatures and the cycle of Syrian violence is, by now, uncontroversial. As Secretary of State John Kerry said in Virginia, this month, “It’s not a coincidence that, immediately prior to the civil war in Syria, the country experienced its worst drought on record. As many as 1.5 million people migrated from Syria’s farms to its cities, intensifying the political unrest that was just beginning to roil and boil in the region.”
As Kerry went on to note, many factors contributed to Syria’s instability. The severe drought was one, but so were the repressive practices of a brutal dictator and the rise of a particular strain of religious extremism. Another big factor was the invasion of Iraq, a decade ago. And since that war—like so many before it—was inextricable from the West’s thirst for Iraqi oil (warming be damned), that fateful decision in turn became difficult to separate from climate change. ISIS, which has taken responsibility for the attacks in Paris, found fertile ground in this volatile context of too much oil and too little water.
If we acknowledge that the instability emanating from the Middle East has these roots, it makes little sense to allow the Paris attacks to minimize our already inadequate climate commitments. Rather, this tragedy should inspire the opposite reaction: an urgent push to lower emissions as rapidly and deeply as possible, including strong support for developing countries to leapfrog to renewable energy, creating much-needed jobs and economic opportunities in the process. That kind of bold climate transition is our only hope of preventing a future in which, as a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change put it, large areas of the Middle East will, by the end of the century, “experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans.”
Tweet of the Day
Blast from the Past
At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Financial parity in sight:
Republicans have always outspent Democrats. It is by sheer force of the Democratic message that we have been able to remain competitive against the GOP financial juggernaut.
(Which is why we have been hurting as the Dems have lost their message...)
But all things being financially equal, Democrats are more than able to compete and win against the best the GOoPers can throw at us (witness Landrieu and Blanco in Louisiana).
Now, for the first time, an activated left is pumping significant dollars into the 2004 contest, and the GOP is genuinely worried it may lose its money advantage.
On today’s “encore performance” Kagro in the Morning show, it’s the 11/19/14 episode, way back when we were still talking about Jonathan Gruber, KXL and Scott Walker as not just a viable presidential candidate, but a likely front-runner! The Bill Cosby story had just broken through and Uber was caught creeping on their clients and journalists!
Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!
High Impact Stories • Top Comments