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Biden “climate plan” says $10 billion needed to improve climate resilience of US military bases around the world, $10 billion in damages to bases in 2019 from “extreme weather.” John Kerry climate group, American Security Project, says, US “climate” efforts must maintain “particular focus on the Russian border.”
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Added: Activists stopped noticing endless US wars, switched focus to climate. NY Times page 1 Nov. 1969 headline, college kids may switch from protesting US wars to protesting environmental issues: Nov. 30, 1969, “Environment May Eclipse Vietnam as College Issue; ‘Environmental Crisis’ May Eclipse Vietnam as College Issue," NY Times, Gladwin Hill, page 1
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1/28/21, “The Biden climate plan, Part 2: Preparation for war,” wsws.org, Jonathan Burleigh
“Kerry and the American Security Project [ASP]”
“Kerry has indeed devoted considerable attention to climate change throughout his career. However, this interest is not unrelated to his decades of political service to the needs of US imperialism. In 2005, he co-founded the non-partisan American Security Project (ASP), which describes itself as “a leading organization detailing the threats posed by climate change” from a national security perspective.
ASP hailed Kerry’s appointment, highlighting, “Three urgent and important issues that the National Security Council should take up immediately after the new Biden Administration takes office to begin to reduce the threats that climate change poses to security are: (1) military base resilience, (2) reorienting foreign aid and [US taxpayer] military assistance to support climate security, and (3) preparing for the security challenge of a melting Arctic.” In other words, the focus is less on reducing the impacts of climate change and more on ensuring that the US war machine responds effectively as the world [allegedly but in any case not because of the US] warms.
Each of these points figures prominently in Biden’s climate plan, illustrating that the ASP’s hopes are well-founded that Kerry would help the administration pursue these priorities.
The Biden climate plan includes the following passages, apparently paraphrasing the ASP report. Biden will (1) “[i]nvest in the climate resilience of our military bases and critical security infrastructure across the U.S. and around the world, to deal with the risk of climate change effects.” Both documents use almost identical language, noting roughly $10 billion [US taxpayer dollars] in damages to US bases from extreme weather in 2019. (2) “rally a united front of nations to hold China accountable to high environmental standards in its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects,” and (3) “use the Arctic Council to put a spotlight on Russia’s activities in the Arctic, standing firm with council partners to hold Russia accountable for any efforts to further militarize the region.”
The ASP argues that China is using climate and energy as a tool to gain influence in regions such as South America, the Pacific, and West Africa, and that the US should do the same, using the “soft power tool” of climate aid [as 48 million Americans lived in poverty as of 2014, well before many US state and local governments ordered mass closing of businesses and, worse, ordered schools closed, forcing many women to have to quit their jobs and return home to care for children].
The ASP report concludes, “The U.S. should use the new tools of the [US taxpayer funded] Development Finance Corporation to direct climate and energy aid to countries that are both threatened by climate change and strategically important.” Biden’s climate plan includes similar language on both the South China Sea and the Belt and Road initiative….
Biden’s climate plan calls for mobilizing the US-dominated Arctic Council “to put a spotlight on Russia’s activities [what about starving children in the US?] in the Arctic, standing firm with council partners to hold Russia accountable for any efforts to further militarize the region.”
In explaining what this would mean in practice, the ASP states, “the U.S. military should actively participate in Arctic joint exercises, and publicize US military deployments to the region, with particular focus on the Russian border.” In other words, a Biden administration will bring the reckless methods of militarized “freedom of navigation exercises” from the South China Sea to Russia’s Arctic coast….
Highlighting the militarist and essentially right-wing role of Kerry’s approach to climate change, in 2019 he co-founded an organization called World War Zero, dedicated to “uniting scientists and entrepreneurs, four-star generals and youth activists, popular artists and global leaders, Democrats and Republicans” to fight climate change. Prominent members of this organization include former Republican governors Arnold Schwarzenegger (California) and the John Kasich (Ohio), as well as actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Aside from a goal of net zero emissions by 2050 and calls for people who support climate action to stop fighting each other, the organization has essentially nothing concrete to say….
In truth, there can be no serious talk of addressing [alleged excess CO2 in Communist China] climate change while the world’s imperialist powers prepare for global war, led by the anti-Russia and anti-China hawks of the Biden administration. The only way a capitalist Earth can limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is through a nuclear winter. Biden’s proposed militarized climate policy only raises the odds of such an outcome.
China currently leads the world in carbon emissions, with 30 percent of the total compared to 15 percent for the United States. This is an inevitable outcome the development of world capitalism, not a specifically Chinese affair. As a central element of the globalization of production, China has emerged as the manufacturing hub of the world. Targeting China and forcing it to reduce its emissions would, under global capitalism, only lead to corporations shifting production to other countries, while destroying jobs in China and driving down wages and living standards for workers all over the world.”…
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Added It’s estimated that in Iraq, just one of countless US military aggressions, that 250–600 million tonnes of CO2 were created from 2003-July 2010:
July 8, 2010, “What’s the carbon footprint of…the Iraq war?” UK Guardian, Mike Berners-Lee, Duncan Clark
“The direct human costs of wars are so great that it might seem flippant to think about their environmental impacts. But modern armed forces are rapacious consumers of energy and kick out vast quantities of carbon emissions that may contribute towards human harm well beyond the battlefield.
All carbon footprints are virtually impossible to pin down accurately, and this is especially the case for something as complex and chaotic as war. Indeed, the best that can be done in this case is to give some very crude numbers to provide a sense of scale.
Perhaps the only academic estimate of the carbon footprint of an atomic war concluded that even a ‘small nuclear exchange‘ of just fifty 15-kilotonne warheads would cause 690 million tonnes of CO2 emissions through the burning of cities – more than the current annual emissions of the UK.
But a war doesn’t need to be nuclear to have a large carbon footprint. At the time of writing the financial cost of the US military operation in Iraq since 2003 has been estimated at $1.3 trillion, with a further $600 billion anticipated for the lifetime healthcare costs of injured troops. Extrapolating from the carbon intensity of the health and defence industries in the UK, it’s possible to have a rough stab at converting this expenditure into carbon. This approach suggests that the US military operation in Iraq may have clocked up around 160–500 million tonnes of CO2e, plus a further 80 million tonnes for the healthcare of troops.
Add on a few per cent to both numbers to include the coalition forces and, say, another 1% for the footprint of the much more poorly resourced insurgency, and we might be looking at 250–600 million tonnes – roughly equivalent to everyone in the UK flying to Hong Kong and back between one and three times. And that’s excluding the direct emissions from explosions.
The war-and-carbon discussion starts to get distinctly uncomfortable (and methodologically just about impossible) at the point where we start factoring in the indirect emissions impact caused by the human and economic impacts of the war. In the nuclear example, the report in question estimates 17 million deaths – equivalent to around one-quarter of the UK population. Looked at in the starkest and simplest possible terms, if each of these people had a typical UK footprint, then the carbon saving of their ceasing to exist might make up for the direct emissions from the war in just a few years. In other words, mass annihilation turns out to be an effective way of curbing emissions-though of course it also defeats the object.”
• This article is adapted from How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee.
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