The Hot War on Climate Change – Blake Lovewell
An unpublished article from 2021 addressing the shift in narrative on climate change in the media and amongst politicians. It offers some analysis of the emerging ‘Green New Deal’ and the financialisation of nature.
The Hot War on Climate Change
How environmentalism is being re-framed to American Imperialism
“For Millenials and […] Gen Z and all these folks are like: This is the War … This is our World War Two.”[1] Met with rapturous applause, the voice of Alexandria Ocasia Cortez booms out, amplified and reverberating around the hall. She is talking about the entwined causes of social justice and climate change. Her following is based in the aforementioned young: the post-2000, post-growth, post-truth, Post Malone generation. All they know of war has been fed to them through the wringer of the mass media. Visions of the modern ‘shock-and-awe’ hybrid war are superimposed through news flashes of distant lands bursting into flames; in video games, interactive maps become scenes of virtual shoot-outs – the backdrop need only be semi-fictional and the modern mind will fill the gaps. Unfortunately, many of them are approaching the age of 18 where war can take an all too tragic turn into reality. I am haunted by an advert in my own youth where an unmanned aircraft was being flown by a young recruit in a dusty container who, sat at his glowing green screen let out a grin as he ‘eliminated’ a target. He is using a common Xbox controller, the kind that will have been in millions of kids’ hands the world over. Is a digital interface device, a game controller, the AK-47 of the Millennial child soldier?
What I am getting at is that talk of war is cheap, but real war is very expensive. It is costly financially, being one of the biggest industries in the world. But that cost pales in comparison to the intergenerational calamities caused by war: the famines, the loss of the young and fit. And further still the spiritual burden, the years of post-trauma endured by many or most survivors of war. Truly nobody is a winner in war. Briefly, let us take Syria as an example.
Reports are disparate on the cost of the war that has been waged on Syria, the UN put the financial cost at $400 billion, for the 7 years 2011-2018 [2]. However, World Vision, a Christian relief organisation puts the cost up to the trillions [3]. Syria has lost 50% of its GDP, in a war waged by proxies directed by the faltering Imperialist automaton of the American military-industrial complex. More striking in their report though to me is the 11,000-19,000 cases of children killed, mostly by explosives. It’s the type of thing that the Western 4th estate shies away from. You’re more likely to find the UK media fomenting the war and thrumming away at the drums than telling the open truth, the raw shameful crime against humanity that is war. I quote the regional leader of the charity: “other times I struggle to bring the numbers and the stories together – knowing that each child being counted has a unique story of what the conflict has cost. Lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, friends. Lost homes, toys, dreams. Lost education. There is no meaningful way to measure these losses.”
Which is why it rankles when politicians use war talk as a political tool, it cheapens the moral conversation. Those politicians who make “tough decisions”, rarely seem to have to live with the consequences of those decisions. Does David Cameron, who pushed to commence the war in Syria, alongside Barack Obama, have to lose his friends to schrapnel, to drink contaminated water and nearly starve for his difficult decisions? It would seem not – last year alone he earned over £800,000 outside of his ministerial wages from lucrative speaking tours [4], and we know this is no exception, more the rule for legacy political puppets. Those who cause the wars do not fight them, they take the money and run.
As I write, Joe Biden is attempting to grab the illusory reins of power from Donald Trump. We’re still in the flux period or the critical juncture on that count, but we can still work with the facts on the ground. Foreign Policy, one of the US deep-state’s many propaganda quislings cries: “Kerry’s return signals coming war on Climate Change” [5]. Yes the Kerry who shook the hands of almost every dictator on Earth, and had plenty of them wiped off it too, is back with a bang! And this time there’s a new war. It will be a war against an invisible adversary, no not terrorism – that’s the invisible enemy of 2001. No, nor is it Coronavirus, the elusive, un-isolated and potentially deadly enemy of 2020. In the year 2021, the new pernicious enemy to draw the ire of the war-hawks is climate change.
I believe that most people have good intentions, they are just led astray by a few rotten actors – who act in self-interest, and perhaps even with evil intent. Most of the people in the green movement that I have met are sharing, tolerant and intelligent people. It attracts a compassionate sort, alternative thinkers and people more in touch with nature. It is a great sadness that so many of these activists, friends and previously free-thinkers, have been captured and funnelled into a war frame of mind. This mental re-framing shifts a love of nature to a fear of extinction or a feeling of shame. It fosters a demand to “act now” whatever that action may be, it has to happen immediately as there is a “climate emergency”. However, even this is not enough for the manipulators. If we engage in a little discourse analysis, we get a clearer picture of the incipient war footing.
Joe Biden released a whitepaper, setting out his, and the Democratic mafia’s, plan for the environment. At a broad stroke it tells the reader: “”Scientists inform us we must achieve net-zero carbon emissions across our economy as quickly as possible in order to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis”[6]. There is scant detail in the document, it relies on neat little sound-bytes like ‘net-zero’. These memes slip into the public psyche and give the illusion of a benefit to the environment. However there is no such thing as their “clean energy”. The report says up to 50% of the USA’s energy mix should be nuclear. More of a plutonium green glow than the eco-friendly branding. The report fails to mention that the West coast of the country is currently being bathed in isotopes leaked across the Pacific Ocean from Fukuyama, a rolling ecological disaster. They also advocate a system of Carbon credits and “carbon offset” plans which simply end up allowing the polluters to keep on polluting. All they add is another layer of bureaucracy whereby these global corporations – otherwise above regulation – can ‘greenwash’ their credentials by investing in certain financial instruments. The reality created by this is Cory Morningstar’s maxim: “The Financialization of Nature” where every aspect of common land becomes a privately tradable asset and becomes lost to humanity at large [7].
These plans are not just hot air. John Podesta, long time Democrat skeleton-hider, has been touting the idea of forming a ‘Foreign Policy’ on climate change. “Foreign policy” is a piece of doublespeak which usually infers military policy. Biden will oversee the creation of an executive branch of government “Modeled after the National Security Council and the National Economic Council, the National Climate Council would boast a specialized support staff capable of directing and delivering quantifiable results across the federal government”[8]. Note that the National Security Council is basically the War-room of generals and spooks who put the X on the map and decide which people to kill. To model the Climate Change response on that structure seems extreme to a threat that won’t be apparent for hundreds if not thousands of years. Jason Bordoff, who served on Obama’s National Security Council, lays the cards on the table: “You need a really single, forceful, powerful actor within the White House with the mandate to lead the president’s climate agenda”. It sounds just like instating a dictator with unalloyed power to act unitarily, and make use of the USA’s military architecture.
So what will this new warlord do as their first act against the nebulous enemy of ‘climate change’? Biden’s Unity Task force document reads” “We will restore U.S. global climate leadership by working with world leaders to catalyze increased global investments in clean energy solutions and climate resilience”. They slipped that term “leadership” in there, bet you almost missed it. So with a renewed hegemonic USA they wish to “catalyze investments” – now that sounds a lot more like the Biden of yore, running big international contracts where the millions just disappear into back pockets. But the next part really takes the biscuit:
“… including to help low-income countries move along a more sustainable development path.” Well I bet those low-income countries will be glad that the American Imperium sees fit to delve into every aspect of their lives, to tell them what to buy with their meagre lot, and all the while couching it in the language of social justice, bringing those lower down up to our level. The more historically aware among us might be able to see that this plan parallels much more the colonialist mindset than the egalitarian. It smacks of exploitative fat cats, salivating at those fledgling states still unconnected to the globalised financial system. ‘Let us help you’ they purr in dulcet tones, the unspoken subtext being …’into our stomachs’.
The other option to investment is sanctions. There will be disincentives to eliminate products and services that new executive branch decide, are not kosher with the Green New Deal. Your petrol fuelled car and your methane exuding cow will not make the cut. States who continue to disregard the rules dictated from on high will therefore be part of the enemy, in many ways the only real-life enemy in this war. And just as many populations have suffered from sanctions, they will suffer, starve and eke out a meagre existence in the face of a monolithic empire. This Climate Leadership seems to echo the financial leadership of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization, which were all subsumed by US power. These institutions could bring nations to their knees with mere ones and zeroes, by creating huge debts, enriching a corrupt elite and saddling the unwitting public into footing the bill.
The sickening truth is that sanctions only produce harm and rarely produce results. The Bossuyt report to UN Commission on Human Rights states: “The “theory” behind economic sanctions is that economic pressure on civilians will translate into pressure on the Government for change. This “theory” is bankrupt both legally and practically” … “Under sanctions, the middle class is eliminated, the poor get poorer, and the rich get richer as they take control of smuggling and the black market”. [9]. Sanctions didn’t work against Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, nor Castro in Cuba. And the UN embargo on Haiti has in part created the failed state that is exploited by global elites to this day. The powerful people who sit on Biden’s climate proto-tryanny know that sanctions cause harm, and yet they still go on with the plan. One hopes that the modern ideologues like Alexandra Ocasia Cortez who sit among these hellacious wolves are simply misguided and blinded by the light of their utopian goals.
She tells us: “Our differences are exactly why I joined Biden’s Climate Unity Task Force – so we could set aside our differences & figure out an aggressive climate plan to address the planetary crisis at our feet.”[10] – Now perhaps you noticed it: “aggressive climate plan”.
We must see the tools being used by bad actors to manipulate us, and not stand for them. We should not be re-framed into a war mode of thought – for that dehumanises us and creates an ‘other’, to whom we can commit unspeakable crimes. It is the same lexical skulduggery that has preceded so many bad political decisions and cascading consequences over the years. It is time to get wise to it before it’s too late, and call off the hounds, call off the war.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5GVXmHgy1A (Alexandria Ocasia Cortez addresses crowd)
[2] https://apnews.com/aa0aaa2c44cd430196f572227b45c150/The-Latest:-UN-says-civil-war-has-cost-Syria-%24388B-in-damage
[3] https://www.wvi.org/sites/default/files/The%20Cost%20of%20Conflict%20for%20Children%20report%20-%20online%20version.pdf
[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/01/31/david-cameron-rakes-836000-thanks-lucrative-speaking-fees/
[5] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/24/biden-puts-white-house-climate-war-footing-john-kerry/
[6] https://joebiden.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/UNITY-TASK-FORCE-RECOMMENDATIONS.pdf
[7] http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/tag/financialisation-of-nature/
[8] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-04-13/foreign-policy-climate
[9] https://www.globalpolicy.org/global-taxes/42501-the-adverse-consequences-of-economic-sanctions.html#ilaw-c
[10] https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1311133187251359744