The Chatham house rules prevent me from saying who said what in our Climate Change meeting this week, but we can safely say that the lead speaker was the UK climate secretary Chris Huhne who offered a stark and stern warning.
A seriously dire warning of increasing war and violence as a direct result from climate change.
He said that some of the key threats currently facing society result from the schism in our mind between humans and nature.
Because on some fundamental level, we, as a society, don’t seem to realize that considerably altering the natural environment and atmosphere can create many concerning human and societal implications. Yes, we may have had some “environmental revolutions” over the past half century, but we still rank the environment and climate relatively low on our list of priorities or concerns. With this being the case, one of the clear tasks of climate change and environmental professionals is to clarify and share how environmental and climate changes are tied to human society.
Addressing mainly senior military, topmost civil servants and foreign service thinkers along with international security and national defense experts, in a packed auditorium at the Chatham House, Chris Huhne made it very clear that climate change will increase the risk of war and violence, in particular, against the UK, but this statement applies well, to countries all over the world.
Chris said specifically: “Climate change is a threat multiplier. It will make unstable states more unstable, poor nations poorer, inequality more pronounced, and conflict more likely. And the areas of most geopolitical risk are also most at risk of climate change.”
This risks reversing all progress made in prosperity and civilization since the industrial revolution.
This is heady stuff and the Environment and Energy Minister of the UK, Chris Huhne warned that humans could increasingly suffer through “nasty, brutish and short” lives in a “Hobbesian” world over the coming century — if we don’t address climate change quickly.
Chris’ words came timely at the heels of the UN report this Wednesday about the insecurities of climate change. UN’s Sec Gen said: ”Global warming’s impacts can add another victim to its list, with international peace and security threatened by a changing climate causing security vacuums and this must be addressed by all countries”
In other words we are facing a serious existential crisis. A very human existential crisis. And we might not all come out the other side together. As a matter of fact the losses will be amongst all of us – no matter how poor or insular you might feel at the moment. And this loss of children and elderly first is a very real familiar pattern. Just look at Somali-land now facing the worst famine in this world over the last half century.
And it’s also a very personal loss. Because for me it’s another thing to say this in platitudes as when I spoke about National and International Security at the Westpoint Military Academy — and another thing when a conservative UK government Minister spells it out at Sandhurst and Chantham house. Unfortunately this Minister has a very limiting agenda but nonetheless it is important to hear him out, even though he is not as passionate a speaker as yours truly. It’s about his internalizing and believing on the issues at the core of his being. And he is not there yet.
Because when I had spoken at Westpoint - upstate in New York on the banks of the Hudson river – about Energy Security and how that was intertwined with using renewable energy to reduce emissions and address climate change the young military officers were stunned by my passion in their ”show no feelings world” of officers, cadets, marines and full on machismo. But they all dug it. THEY WERE ALL OVER IT AND LIKED BOTH THE MESSAGE AND THE MESSENGER. For them passion is clearly understood to be far from fear…
A far cry from my previous experiences in my speeches to conservative audiences…
A sea change really.
Still yesterday, predominant in our minds and in the agreed crowd mind of the distinguished attendees at the Chatham House meeting in St James square, was this thought: A real Climate Action Role Model has to be established for the US — the leading CO2 emitter. And someone has to show the way to our American cousins – same as Churchill showed the way to combat faschism in WWII – and motivated the US to act decisively for victory.
We can do this well. No need for a canary in the coalmine. We are it…
And although the UK is far from perfect in its response to climate change, especially with “conservative Tories” in power, it seems to be light years ahead of the United States.
Still this being the Anglo-Saxon world’s role model, on action to mitigate and adapt to climate change, it might be prudent to communicate this to the conservatives across the pond and get the US conservatives and the Republican party faithful to sign off on simple doable climate change policy.
This has been the work of the Environmental Parliament and as such we have sponsored a few bills that periodically grace the desks of all the senators and congressmen from both political parties in Washington DC. But so far the bills we prepared and some of them got support from illustrious Senators and many Congress people like Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham and Congressmen Mackey and Waxman, we never got to the finish line…
And even President Obama promised that the third pillar of his administration will be a response to Climate Change with a robust policy – we haven’t seen this yet.
So perhaps it behooves us to share with the US what works well and what doesn’t as a means to show the positive side of climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts in the hope the US conservatives will learn and act. Because for every decade we stay back and we have stayed our response for more than that is you consider the Kyoto agreement the US failed to endorse… we are paying double the cost of inaction. Meaning the response costs us roughly double for every ten years we wait to act — in order to keep the global warming to 2C.
And even then we will get about 150 Million people moving from the drought and famine stricken areas as is now Somaliland and Ethiopia and from the increasingly unbearable for agriculture or human habitation central eastern Africa. This trend has already started and will be fully manifest in this decade and all these people will be on the move by 2016 if not sooner based on how dire the global drought and famine gets…
Because methinks, that if you want to see the future go to these parts of Africa. And if you want to see the past go to the American capital… This part of the world is becoming unsustainable and desertification takes hold. Vast and populous areas are deserted from people moving into refugee camps and becoming wards of the UN security food program… But a lot of these people will have eventually to be resettled in other countries. Go to Lampedusa Italy’s southernmost island in order to see the thousands of refugees washed up from the sea every day and every night. Some have drowned but many more survive in a Darwinian twist to an age old game.
The survivors have come to look for simple food and not for the American/European dream or even for a brighter tomorrow. Simple existence — as all humans have hoped for — since the dawn of time.
Still in these treacherous times we are passive watchers instead of active players. We watch famines unfold on our TV screens and feel unaffected and dehumanized. Somehow the sterility of the medium makes us invulnerable to our own humanity. And the same goes for our leaders who instead of simply seeking solutions to help the Climate refugees they instead shut the doors in their faces. They throw them back at sea and they built electric fences and giant walls of apartheid. Who amongst us is not responsible for our brothers?
Why can’t we be smart enough to keep these Peoples in their own lands by addressing the basic reason of their movement?
You and I know that they are moving away because of the nasty reality of Climate Change. And because they are decimated in the process, by the time the survivors of this massive migration of people arrives in your neighborhood it is too late to do anything to protect them and their kin. The few who make it come to Europe, the US and UK, and all other countries simply in order to survive. And by then — it is too late to reverse the global warming trend and the human band of survivors will move itself out from the 15 degrees latitude from either side of the equator… These places will be just too hot and rendered uninhabitable.
So the Environmental Parliament’s mandate this year is to help people live with minimum global warming by staying in their homes. Not just stay home and survive with the bare essentials of human existence coming to them through air drops of manna from the sky but with regular lives, education and agriculture.
That is why we are fighting Climate Change and global warming.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
In this matter the UK has done such simple things as cancel the expansion of London Heathrow airport to address climate change, while U.S. Republicans in Congress have largely stifled any significant climate action at all. UK prime minister David Cameron recently accepted the “fourth carbon budget.” Under this plan, the UK would cut its global warming emissions in half by 2025, a greater cut than any other developed country is aiming for.
This is a far greater federal move than we can even dream of in the US and can only happen with a bipartisan agreement and only if a large number of Republicans accept scientific reality and agree to act in legislating laws to address and reverse the trend of global warming.
We know how it’s done, we have the tools and we willingly share with the politicians and their minders.
But it takes guts to fight and the President has promised us this…
Yet who are the leaders of the democratically elected house of Parliament in the US who will lead their people out of this mess and give us an effective Climate Change Policy?
PS2:
We’ll meet all of them this fall when the Environmental Parliament holds it’s new ”Washington Consensus” summit on Climate Change in WDC and inaugurates a new lobby for the Earth and it’s Peoples.
It’s right after our conference in New York at the UN in September and You are invited.
PS3:
And by the way, please be kind to those wretched refugees — for who knows, you might be one of them tomorrow.
