Climate Change Ignored for War
Updated 2024-08-24
2024-08-22 Climate Crisis & Election Roundtable: From Tim Walz’s Record to Project 2025 to Israel Climate activists disrupted a DNC-adjacent event sponsored by ExxonMobil on Wednesday, the same day that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz formally accepted his nomination as vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Walz has faced harsh criticism from Indigenous and environmental rights groups in Minnesota for his authorization of the Line 3 oil pipeline through Native treaty lands in the state. We host a roundtable discussion on the climate crisis and the Democratic Party’s response with Ojibwe lawyer and founder of the Giniw Collective Tara Houska; climate organizer Collin Rees, who was part of the ExxonMobil action at the DNC; and climate scientist Michael Mann. Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHh_daM9cek&t=11s
2024-08-11 A Note on Noam Chomsky and Climate Collapse As Noam once said, “if you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.” In many of his recent writings, Noam Chomsky has warned that humanity has reached a very dangerous point because we are now living in a world of cascading crises.
What’s happening in Gaza is an abomination, one that the leaders of this world are watching coldly from a distance. The same can be said about climate collapse, which is as real as the daily slaughtering of scores of innocent women and children in Gaza by Israel’s military. Our global institutions are incapable of doing anything meaningful about these crises. Real power is in the hands of the most powerful nation-states and their leaders have opted to turn a blind eye to both disasters so as not to disrupt business as usual. Profits and geostrategic interests take priority over human lives and the environment. This is as clear as day, and it has always been so since at least the emergence of capitalism and the rise of the nation-state. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/noam-chomsky-climate-collapse
2024-06-06 ‘Horrific’: Israel’s War on Gaza Also Destroying the Climate, Study Finds In addition to its death toll, Israel’s war in Gaza comes at great cost to the climate, mainly because of the emissions that will be required to reconstruct tens of thousands of buildings there, a study published Thursday shows.
The study looked at the first four months of the war, during which time the authors estimated that some 156,000 to 200,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged in the Gaza Strip. The resulting climate costs were greater than the annual emissions of each of the world’s 135 lowest-emitting countries, the study, a preprint that was posted to SSRN and is currently under peer review, shows.
Though the vast majority of the estimated climate cost comes from the future rebuild, the study authors also looked at the immediate climate emissions from wartime activities, most of which came from flights by Israeli fighter jets and U.S. cargo planes that supplied weapons, fuel, and other supplies. There were 244 round-trip cargo flights from the U.S. to Israel during the four-month study period. https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-climate
2024-01-12 Opinion: Climate movement splinters as activists target Israel Ever since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack and Israel’s counteroffensive, prominent climate activist groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and Fridays for Future have led anti-Israel protests, attempting to align the Palestinian cause with the global climate cause. But this messaging is deeply flawed, and as a 24-year-old Jewish climate commentator, I fear it could seriously divide and impede the climate movement. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/opinion-climate-movement-splinters-as-activists-target-israel/ar-AA1mTqEa
2024-01-11 Measuring the carbon ‘boot print’ of Israel’s war in Gaza The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.
The vast majority (over 99%) of the 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US. According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tons of coal. https://thebulletin.org/2024/01/measuring-the-carbon-boot-print-of-israels-war-in-gaza/#post-heading
2023-11-27 A Slow-Motion Gaza as We Destroy Planet Earth Imagine this: humanity in its time on Earth has already come up with two distinct ways of destroying this planet and everything on it. The first is, of course, nuclear weapons, which once again surfaced in the ongoing nightmare in the Middle East. (An Israeli minister recently threatened to nuke Gaza.) The second, you won’t be surprised to learn, is what we’ve come to call “climate change” or “global warming” — the burning, that is, of fossil fuels to desperately overheat our already flaming world. In its own fashion, that could be considered a slow-motion version of the nuking of the planet.
Put another way, in some grim sense, all of us now live in Gaza. (Most of us just don’t know it yet.) Yes, if you actually do live in Gaza, your life is now officially a living (or dying) hell on Earth. Your home has been destroyed, your family members wounded or killed, the hospital you fled to decimated. And that story, sadly enough, has been leading the news day after day for weeks now. But in the process, in some sense even more sadly, the deepest hell of our time has largely disappeared from sight.
I’m thinking about the urge to turn our whole planet into a long-term, slow-motion version of Gaza, to almost literally set it ablaze and destroy it as a habitable place for humanity (and so many other species).
Yes, in the midst of the ongoing Middle Eastern catastrophe, the latest study by James Hanson, the scientist who first sounded the climate alarm to Congress back in the 1980s, appeared. In it, he suggested that, in this year of record temperatures, our planet is heating even more rapidly than expected. The key temperature danger mark, set only eight years ago at the Paris climate agreement, 1.5 degrees Centigrade above the pre-industrial level, could easily be reached not in 2050 or 2040, but by (or even before) 2030. Meanwhile, another recent study suggests that humanity’s “carbon budget” — that is, the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere while keeping global temperature rise at or under that 1.5-degree mark — is now officially going to hell in a handbasket. In fact, by October, a record one-third of the days in 2023 had broken that 1.5-degree mark in what is undoubtedly going to prove another — and yes, I know how repetitive this is — record year for heat.
In fact, it’s past time to start talking about World War III, even if this time it’s a war on the planet itself. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gaza-world-war-iii-climate
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