Climate Disruption Will Be The Precursor To Global Political Disruption – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

In an opinion piece for The Guardian on September 19, 2024, Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, sees a direct link between alterations in the Earth’s environment that are now fully evident and the prospects for stable governments in the future. “I’ve studied geopolitics all my life,” Lieven writes. “Climate breakdown is a bigger threat than China and Russia.”

His analysis begins with an amusing anecdote about how in 1751, Henry Ellis, a ship’s captain from Ireland, used the cool waters deep below the surface of the Atlantic ocean to chill his wine. This lead to the discovery of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC). The Gulf Stream that runs along the East Coast of the United States is part of it. He points out that Ellis had no idea that the oceanic pattern he stumbled upon had been critical to the climate, the agriculture, and the entire development of western Europe for centuries.

The latest scientific analysis published in February in the journal Science Advances found that, based on evidence from the last ice age, there is a possibility AMOC could shut down surprisingly quickly — perhaps as early as 2050 — because of global heating and the resulting influx of fresh water from the melting Greenland ice cap. The result would be catastrophic. Average temperatures in the UK would be equivalent to those in Newfoundland — 10 to 15 degrees cooler than today. Agriculture would collapse because it would be too cold to grow the crops farmers have cultivated there for centuries. Housing and infrastructure would have to be radically adapted to withstand the new climate. The collapse of AMOC, Lieven suggests, would result in decades or even generations of economic hardship.

As temperatures fall in western Europe, they would rise in west Africa. The population of Britain would survive a collapse in local agriculture, albeit in constrained and rationed circumstances reminiscent of the second world war and its aftermath. People in Africa would not. As a result, there would be an immense increase in the migration, with the political consequences already happening in Europe, Leiven  predicts.

Fortunately, such a rapid collapse of AMOC is improbable. It is not a negligible risk, however, and if the climate crisis continues to gather pace, the chance of it occurring will only increase with time. Therefore, we might expect the entire external policy of the UK and other western European states nations would be devoted to fostering international cooperation and action to limit the climate breakdown and mitigate its consequences. However, nothing of the sort has occurred, despite repeated statements that the climate crisis is an “existential” threat. Nor is anything of the sort to be expected from the new Labour government, he says.

The Pace Of Climate Change Is Accelerating

Climate breakdown in general is visibly proceeding even faster than most models predicted, Lieven warns, and some of its worst probable consequences are already clear. July marked the 14th consecutive month of record high global temperatures. Arctic and Antarctic temperatures are rising much faster than global ones, increasing the risk of a disastrous tipping point. In south Asia, if this summer’s record temperatures become the regular pattern and extend over several months, agricultural production will be severely damaged, threatening hundreds of millions with famine. In Europe, central Spain appears to be in the early stages of desertification, even as central Europe is devastated by floods caused in part by a collision of cool northern air with exceptionally warm air moving up from the Mediterranean.

Lieven claims that none of this should be in the slightest bit complicated or mysterious. The inability of our security elites — and the political elites who consume their “analysis” — to perform their core duty — the objective assessment of risk. That is not due to some intellectual failing. It stems from layer upon layer of ancient inherited culture and immensely powerful institutional and economic interests. It is not that the climate crisis is ignored altogether, but rather that it is placed in a separate compartment from security. That means it is continually being eclipsed by the latest “security threat,” which is invariably grabs the attention of interested parties and journalists looking for a good story.

It was apparent in the run-up to the Ukraine war that no western government, security institution, or leading media source was focused on the impact of that war on climate breakdown or saw it as a key reason to seek compromise with Russia. Most progressives also failed to put climate at the center of their thinking, relegating it to a  compartment of its own alongside issues of the day that are unlikely to be seen by future generations as of remotely similar importance.

Adopting A New Climate Attitude

To move to a different mindset, three things are necessary. The first is that if we fail to adequately limit climate breakdown, then very few of the other causes that progressives care about will survive in the world that will result. When starvation and societal collapse are the order of the day, there would be little chance of human rights, including gender rights.

The second is that the climate crisis largely erases the distinction between democratic and authoritarian systems. That is true of action against climate breakdown today, and will be true of resilience against it in future. Today, apart from the super-wealthy oil producing countries of the Gulf and elsewhere, three of the worst carbon emitters per capita are supposedly liberal democracies such as the US, Canada, and Australia. For the future, we have no idea which systems will best cope with the effects of global heating.

Finally, and most importantly, we need to realize that to concentrate on action against the climate crisis will mean making some hard and painful choices. At present, the mainstream left in Europe and North America appears to believe that it is possible to reshape economies to limit carbon emissions and to increase spending on health and social welfare and to radically increase military spending to confront Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere. It isn’t possible. The money simply isn’t there. The result of pursuing all three goals simultaneously would be to fail at all of them, as demonstrated by the latest political developments in France and Germany, where a populist backlash is undermining support for Ukraine and climate action.

A critical step in the struggle to limit the climate crisis must be the pursuit of détente with Russia and China and disengagement from conflicts in the Middle East, including the war in Gaza. This will require some very difficult and painful changes in existing policy and attitudes. Nobody ever said that tackling climate breakdown was going to be easy, Lieven concludes.

What Is The Quincy Institute For Responsible Statecraft?

Most of us are familiar with some of the alphabet soup of think tanks and institutes that are prevalent in Washington, DC. But the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, founded in 2019, is not one that springs to mind unbidden. Wikipedia has a summary for the organization and it is rather extraordinary in that two of its founding members are people you would never expect to be in the same room together — George Soros and Charles Koch.

According to Wikipedia, it advocates for realism and restraint in US foreign policy. Initial funding for the group included half million dollars each from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and Charles Koch’s Koch Foundation. Substantial funding has also come from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. The institute distinguishes itself from many other think tanks in Washington, D.C. by refusing to accept money from foreign governments.

The Takeaway

Anatol Lieven and the Quincy Institute are not household names, so why are their ideas getting our attention? Because the climate crisis is well and truly upon us and nobody is taking it seriously. The financial sector makes vague promises about net zero equivalency by mid-century but continues doing business as usual, just as it has done for the past 100 years. Accountants dream up ideas like renewable energy credits that allow tech companies to claim their data centers are “green” when they are anything but. The United States makes mention of its peaceful intentions while being one of the largest supplier of armaments to nations all across the globe.

Tom Lehrer, the MIT mathematician and satirical songwriter, once penned a song about National Brotherhood Week that summarized the situation rather nicely. Here is one verse: “Oh, the poor folks, hate the rich folks and the rich folks hate the poor folks. All of my folks hate all of your folks, it’s American as apple pie.” With Russia threatening nuclear annihilation and China sending its aircraft carriers to disrupt the Japanese navy, it’s easy to understand why taking the climate crisis seriously falls down the agenda of things to do until is on a par with the scourge of tooth decay. At the most recent presidential debate in America, the moderators reserved one minute for the subject of climate change at the very end of the 90-minute debate and even at that, both candidates ducked the question. 

Anatol Lieven is correct when says if AMOC shuts down, the UK, western Europe, and Africa will experience almost unimaginable changes to their climates and those changes will result in massive migrations. But what can be done about it? Based on human experience to date, the answer is that nothing at all will happen until it is too late to alter the outcome. A global government with only one mission — keeping the Earth habitable for humans — is one possible answer, but the political will to take that route is virtually nonexistent. Decamping for another planet ruled by the whims of Elon Musk is another, although that would doom billions of people to untimely deaths.

There is one solution, one that is radical but has never been tried. Make the cost of pollution part of the cost of fossil fuels, steel, aluminum, or concrete. The only thing that has been proven to reliably affect human behavior is economics and yet it is the one lever we haven’t pulled to address the climate crisis. Maybe it’s time to give it a try — before the AMOC shuts down permanently.

[Note: I use Wikipedia frequently as a reference. I send them $50 a year to support their efforts. 98% of Wikipedia users contribute nothing. If you could find a way to make a small donation to support their work — they welcome donations of as little as $2.00 — that would be much appreciated. Thank you.]