The floods in Pakistan are now believed to have affected twenty million people, fully 11% of the population. The case can be made that Islamic extremism hot spots Afghanistan and Somalia, both under pressure of drought in the years before their implosion, were actually the first to tumble. Pakistan appears to be the next climate domino set to fall.
Already our Pentagon, driven by profiteering defense contractors, has begun to apply the rhetorical devices of the Cold War to describe the consequences of climate change. See my clever title? Yes, indeed, we need to expand defense spending to be ready for the War On Climate Change(tm).
Or we can extract our heads from our hindquarters and come up with a rational response.
I wrote recently about The Anthropocene Thermal Maximum. Grim epochal change certainly, but don’t you DARE use the word apocalyptic to describe it. The Christian End of Days myth, posits a supernatural event. I’m more inclined to pay attention to physics, chemistry, and the follow on sciences supported by them such as geology and climatology.
We have three interlocking problem areas: economy, energy, and environment. They make such foreign adventures on our part fundamentally impossible.
Our economy has been completely looted. Thirty long years of exporting every job that wasn’t nailed down to American soil have hollowed out our country, disempowering the middle class, and providing some small transient sort of ‘profit’ to corporate entities. The last decade we separated the creation of credit from objective reality. Now puzzled corporations consider their lack of customers, the valueless crap in their vaults that was passed off as investment grade securities, and the former consumers are starting to understand that simply walking away from an overinflated mortgage is a wise long term move.
We’re not going to have the political will to finance training police in Iraq while our own streets go unpatrolled. We won’t build schools in Afghanistan while our own crumble around our children and their teachers. Not even if the Chinese were willing to finance our adventures, and the world grows increasingly sceptical of our sovereign debt. No one wants to talk debt repudiation just yet, but we’ll get there by and by.
That debt repudiation will come because we lack the energy to build our way out of the depression we are now entering. The last Great Depression peaked at the same time production in the vast oil fields of east Texas did. This time we face all of the supergiant oil fields currently in production simultaneously skidding toward the end off their lives while the last unworked onshore survivor beneath the sands of Kurdistan is forever out of reach due to the above ground issues in the region.
Our alternatives are natural gas from shale and coal beds, which means permanently wrecking groundwater in the areas where it is produced, or coal, which doubles down on carbon emissions per unit of energy. We can try and sequester carbon from coal, but that doubles the input required per unit of energy produced and it doesn’t fix our liquid fuel problem. Biofuels have their role in our future, but it’s pure foolishness to envision us living as we do now, driving as we do now, and running it all on corn ethanol and soy diesel.
We could do some things about the environment, but that would require real money and real energy, both of which are in short supply.
Projects conceived to help with climate change require funding. Note that I said funding, not financing; we’re in a deflationary spiral and it’ll continue until we find a bottom some years from now, after which a de facto default via hyperinflating away today’s debt will become an irresistible solution to our government.
Those projects, assuming the tax dollars are there to get behind them, will require energy to execute. A Wind and solar powered grid is a laudable goal but this does not make the diesel for the trucks used by those who install and service the systems, nor will it run the iron and copper mining required to build them in the first place.
The only outlet we have, the last untapped supergiant oil field in existence, is a negative one. We will be compelled, through a mix of shortages, financial failure, and growing environmental concern, to conserve what we have left for vital activities.
So we have a crashing environment, a crashing energy supply, a crashing economy, and a military industrial complex that swiftly rationalizes that the fallout from this requires an ever larger commitment of financial resources and energy to their ability to ‘secure’ our nation from the fallout of climate change.
Follow the reasoning: we will grow our economy, which implicitly consumes more energy and makes climate change worse, and we’ll get that done without an honest, sensible regulation of our financial markets. We’ll take the tax revenues from that theoretical growth (purely from the middle class, of course), and we’ll plow it into our bloated military industrial machine so that it can run around the planet, using a million barrels a day worth of oil, and they’ll gun down whomever the out of control intelligence contractors finger as a threat, thusly securing us from the globe from the evil effects of climate change.
I swear I’m not trying to snark here - the delusion is so thick you can walk on it, yes?
Let’s try and inject some objective reality into this whole thing, shall we?
Budget cuts, sweeping budget cuts, for all military operations. We can’t afford ‘em, China won’t lend for ‘em, that’s that. The conservative sniveling will be deafening - get your ear plugs now.
The budget cuts need to be not only dollars, but energy budget, too. A Predator drone armed with a pair of Viper Strike glide bombs costs $4.5M and uses a hundred gallons of fuel on a mission. A manned supersonic fighter like the F-35 costs $192M and uses 3,000 gallons of fuel on a mission. Which do we build more of, the fighter meant to face down an enemy that won’t have the fuel to field planes, or the nimble, more environmentally friendly drone?
Our air force swills 80% of that million barrel a day fuel cost. A dramatic cut here yields both operational cost savings and fuel economy.
The one thing the air force obviously and immediately needs a lot more of are the AC-27J Stinger II gunships. Militarily speaking a volatile, dangerous world is quite a bit like volatile, dangerous Afghanistan. Rather than an Army brigade taking and holding an area it’s far more likely we’ll be sending a Ranger company to tend to some problem and then quickly egress. Our existing fixed wing gunship fleet is like the rest of our military equipment, worn to a nub by extended deployment. Light weight, rapid strike capability is something we keep.
We have eighteen ballistic missile submarines today, fourteen nuclear armed and four that were converted to conventional weapons. We could upend that ratio; fourteen vessels that are unseen until needed, and when they do strike wielding the same force as our most potent surface vessel, would indeed be a deterrent worthy of the name.
Our Expeditionary Strike Groups, with a bit of wise hardening in the face of airborne threats, can likely stand on their own in a world where air power is increasingly rare. The count of Carrier Strike Groups, more tuned to Cold War large scale adversaries, should be carefully decreased.
A large scale liquid fuel dependent ground war is a thing of the past. We showed that clearly in how we handled Iraq in 1991. How Iraq has handled us since 2003 shows what is needed; lighter, efficient, mine and ambush resistant vehicles trump heavy, tracked machines meant to deal with an opponent with tanks.
Some of the needed cuts are easy and obvious - bad actors like Xe nee Blackwater and freeloaders like KBR? Cut ‘em loose. We should gut private military operations based in the United States forthwith, lest they be turned on U.S. citizens at some point in the future.
Doctors cringe when an addict presents themselves with obvious health issues directly related to their drug of choice. The endless wheedling and rationalization are both sad and tiresome. Our military industrial complex is going to respond to objective reality’s requirement that they trim systems, contractors, and operations in much the same fashion. And they’ve got 538 enablers who’ve got every excuse in the book as to why any cut that might be required should happen somewhere other than their state or district.
Government by and for the people will have to take place.