Author: Metta Spencer
Get up! Our house is on fire!” a thirteen-year-old girl calls out. Exactly. Get up! We adults have been acting as if there were no emergency, although we are confronting the hardest challenge in human history. So, get up! Hurry!
We must rouse all the other grown-ups too and do everything possible to save the world from six potential catastrophes: militarism (the foolish reliance on weapons and warfare for security); the climate crisis; and four other impending threats—famine; pandemics; massive radiation exposure; and cyberattacks.
These are all real risks and we caused them all, so it’s up to us to handle them. And we may fail. But after all, the most interesting problems are the hard ones. As John Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Saving the world will be even harder. But just as much fun!
Okay, What Shall We do?
Read moreFirst, let’s find out what we need to know. Second, let’s talk about it. (All the time! Bring up the subject out of the blue four or five times every day! That’s how to wake the others up.) Third, let’s act—but act according to the smartest plans we can devise.
Unfortunately, no university offers a course called “Save the World 101,” though that is what everyone needs. But I was a university professor who specialized in teaching introductory courses, so I’ve prepared a mini-course for you to take by reading the next eight pages. After you finish it, please go to our website, tosavetheworld.ca, which offers lots of resources and a page for each of the six global threats, including a comment column for discussions. And pick one of those problems for your own, if you haven’t already.
The website also shows our Platform for Survival (which was adopted by a two-day exercise of participatory democracy) and an explanation for each of its 25 planks, which are our policy proposals for solving all six problems. However, some of the solutions may make sense only after you have a good grasp of the problems, so we also present on the website a bibliography and over sixty videos (each an hour in length) on various relevant global issues.
If you consider an hour too long to watch a video, you can listen the same talks as audio podcasts instead. In fact, you can subscribe and receive a new one every week on your mobile phone. That way you can listen while walking your dog or washing dishes.
There are seventeen mini-lessons in this mini-course. The first one will introduce the idea of addressing the whole set of threats as a system. Then fifteen lessons will examine the interactions among the six threats that compose that system. The seventeenth lesson will be about “enabling measures”—economic and structural reforms of governance that may be essential for enabling the other solutions. But you don’t have to pass a test or turn in an assignment.
You may reasonably ask: Why these six threats? On what basis were they chosen? Answer: I chose them on the basis of the urgency of each one. We won’t dwell on the chronic problems that have always threatened our survival: illness, hunger, attacks by wild animals and bad weather, for example. These chronic problems are being solved, but two crises are now threatening the survival of homo sapiens: war and weapons (especially nuclear), and global warming.
These two dangers are often called “existential threats.” Indeed, we may be entering the “sixth great extinction.” In five previous geological periods, most living species on the planet became extinct. During the Permian period, 251 million years ago, 96% of all species were lost. Can we now prevent our own extinction?
The other four threats in our list are not, in themselves, quite so risky. Although each one could kill millions or possibly a billion human beings, they don’t threaten our survival as a species,. A few years ago, we even believed that famine had been eliminated. Also, we haven’t experienced a pandemic on the scale of the Spanish flu since 1918, and there are already drugs that can stop the HIV epidemic. As for radiation exposure from something like Chernobyl, well, there have been no known deaths yet from the Fukushima melt-down. And we have not experienced a cyber war yet, so our Internet fears are confined to our irritation about cybercrime, fake news, and election interference. Overall, these four problems are not mortal threats to the future of humankind.
True. Separately, none of these four “minor” catastrophes do endanger humanity’s survival. It is the combination of them that should worry us. And in fact, each of them is causally linked to one or both of the two big threats—militarism and global warming—and they also interact with each other. These interactions multiply the risk that each one poses separately. These six problems interact as a system. Indeed, not one of them can be solved without addressing at least one of the others. Here’s the basic argument of this article: To solve any one of the six problems, we should look at the combinations and interactions between each pair of them. So here we’ll explore the causal connections among all combinations of the six threats. Not all of them are of equal urgency, so I will boldface the ones that should be given top priority.
You may feel daunted by the difficulty of solving each problem separately, much less the whole set. Many people prefer to work on them as distinct, separate challenges—if indeed they even have the courage to work on any at all. To address all six at once may seem overwhelming. And that’s fine! You are probably already working to save the world from one or more of the six perils, and there is no reason for you to change. Just keep up your good work!
Yet when dealing with a system, it can be easier to solve the whole combination of problems together than any one of them singly. That is true when one of the problems is causing most of the other problems. If you solve it, the others will be easy. So it’s important to prioritize—to choose which issues to work on and in which order. Afterward we may all keep specializing in solving a single small part of the problem, but we’ll understand how the parts fit together as a big picture. When you’re working on a jigsaw puzzle, it helps to see the picture on the box lid and get a notion as to where each piece may belong. So, this course is meant to be like a picture on the box of our huge puzzle called “How to save the world.” Let’s begin now.
Lesson One: Our Six Problems Form a Single System
Systems are complicated. Whenever you jiggle one part, it affects some other part, which in turn may reverberate and move another part, and so on. It helps to know in advance how the whole thing works. I cannot explain all of this system. Nobody can; it’s too complicated. But we may make smarter decisions if we consider all of the fifteen possible connections among pairs of our six global threats. Here is a graph showing all those interactions. We will find a causal connection linking almost every pair of them.
I won’t discuss the “knock-on” effects as the whole system reverberates further beyond the pairs of threats. Nor are all of these first-order interactions equally urgent. We should prioritize them so we can devote our energies to solving the most causally consequential of the six threats. We will use evidence whenever possible in prioritizing, but sometimes we may resort to intuition, despite all the risks of error. You may, of course, disagree with my hunches. To save paper, I will print the footnotes on our website, peacemagazine.org.
Lesson Two: Militarism Interacts with Global Warming
Let’s begin with the top cell in our pyramid of interactive problems. These are the two worst threats to humankind and they interact. (I use the term “militarism” interchangeably with “war and weapons.”) There is a real possibility that our species will become extinct because of global warming. It is hard to envision any other outcome if the permafrost and ocean clathrates melt and send their methane into the atmosphere. There is even a possibility (maybe slightly less) that a nuclear war will eliminate the entire human population. I will not review the evidence here, but neither idea is crazy.
What we should think about first is the way these first two existential threats—militarism and global warming—interact, each exacerbating the other. Perhaps the lesser impact is the effect of the climate crisis on the probability of war. People who are affected most by drought or floods often lack the capacity to wage war; instead they may become refugees in a tent city somewhere far from home. However, there seems to be a moderate correlation between temperature and war that sometimes is consequential. If the crops fail and food prices rise, there are often civil disturbances. For example, most food is imported to the Middle East and when the world prices for food shot upward, the result was the Arab Spring, (1) which began with nonviolent protests but led to wars in several countries. One of them was Libya, a country that almost uniquely had (thank heavens) abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The ensuing war was bad enough.
Likewise, according to one somewhat controversial narrative,(2) the Civil War in Syria is also a “climate war.” This account attributes the war to drought, for the farmers who could not produce crops had to move to cities, where they were unemployed and hence were easily recruited to insurgent movements. The result was the Syrian Civil War, which is not even over yet.
Whether one accepts this explanation or not, there are also other studies showing some connection between global warming and warfare. For example, the Economist showed that a 1 percent increase in temperature leads to a 4.5 percent increase in civil war in the same year and a 0.9 percent increase in the following year. But another study concluded that the causes of conflict are primarily political and economic, not climatic.(3) So we can conclude that global warming is a minor cause of warfare and militarism, but not the most promising way of resolving the whole system of six problems. It is, however, immensely consequential for its many _direct _effects and must therefore be assigned top priority.
The other direction of causality for this pair is unmistakable. Militarism definitely contributes a great deal to global warming —in two different ways. First, there is the direct release of carbon into the atmosphere as a result of military preparations or actual wars. The manufacture, distribution, and training in the use of weapons and other military equipment inevitably emits a huge amount of greenhouse gas, even during peacetime. Military bases, target ranges, and training grounds pollute the air, land, and water, causing long-term damage. And when a war is actually fought, the climatic consequences are obviously even worse, for in the aftermath, whole cities must be rebuilt. The US military is the world’s largest institutional source of greenhouse gases.
The second way in which militarism exacerbates global warming is by its enormous budgets. The world spent over $1.822 trillion on military activities in 2018.(4) All national armies are exorbitantly expensive, but especially the American one. The Department of Defense is responsible for about 35 percent of all global military expenditures, including the costs of bygone wars. The US spends 40 percent of its annual budget on militarization.(5) Forty percent of the Pentagon’s budget for overseas operations is spent simply for transporting fuel to the countries where the war is being fought—where it is emitted to the air as greenhouse gas.
When governments have to justify these harmful activities and expenditures, they are no longer ashamed to acknowledge their real motivation: to protect profits for the arms manufacturers and jobs for the general population. Indeed, the sale of weapons to oppressive regimes is no longer considered a shameful way to maintain high employment levels. Militarism is taken for granted as normal, even inevitable, in modern societies. One cannot reverse militarism while ignoring its connection to money.
But now we must spend enormous sums to develop new technologies for limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees. This is essential for the survival of civilization, if not our entire species. According to the United Nations Foundation, it will cost between $5 and $6 trillion per year to fulfill the Sustainable Development Goals(6) – and they do not count all the changes required for limiting climate change. In the long term, almost all of the measures to halt the climate crisis will save money, but there will be considerable up-front costs, and the only money sufficient for that purpose must come from the huge military expenditures, most of which do far more harm than good anyway as means of security.
Yet achieving this reform is an enormously difficult political goal. All the nuclear powers are planning to spend even more to modernize and improve their arsenals, while at the same time abrogating some of the crucial arms control agreements that limited these weapons. A treaty was adopted at the United Nations in 2017 to prohibit the very existence of any nuclear weapons on the planet, but there is little prospect now that the nuclear weapons states will sign it. This is true even in democratic countries where surveys show that a majority of the voting population favor the abolition of all nuclear weapons. Governments do not respond to such wishes because the voters do not express them imperatively. Indeed, some even vote for candidates who support nuclear weapons and all other forms of militarism. We generally get the governments that we deserve.
The crucial lesson is this: Both militarism and global warming threaten the survival of humankind, or at least of civilization. They interact, with militarism showing more impact on global warming than vice versa. Probably it will be impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees unless militarism is vastly reduced, both because of its expense and its inevitable production of greenhouse gas. Hence, the top priority solution to both problems may be to reduce most national armed forces and divert the money to minimizing global warming. Now let’s analyze the other fourteen possible combinations of threats in this fiendish system of evils.
Lesson Three: Militarism Interacts with Famine
Militarism means war—a systematic plan for killing other people. And, among the many ways of killing others, there is starvation. In ancient times, one army might lay siege to another city—a method that has not escaped the attention of modern war-makers.
But in previous centuries, when large parts of a population died from under-nutrition, it was mainly because of natural disasters—primarily bad weather—or because they could not move food supplies around enough. Sometimes ample food was for sale but people had no money to buy it. And, as Amartya Sen pointed out, mass starvation reflected the lack of responsible governance.(7) Where a country was ruled by a reasonably good democracy, food would somehow be provided to stave off actual starvation.
A decade ago it seemed that the world had conquered mass starvation. There were still individuals suffering poverty and hunger, but for a few years no actual famines occurred anywhere in the world. That is no longer the case, but the recent famines are no longer caused by natural disasters or market failures, but rather by deliberate acts of war. The siege is back again. In South Sudan throughout 2017, especially in the north part of the country, about five million people (half of the population) experienced famine because their homes and fields were burned. The South Sudanese Army was paid, not in money, but with the privilege of confiscating cattle and possessions. The UN described this as(8) “a strategy to deprive the civilians living in the area of any form of livelihood or material support.”
The following year, famine came to Yemen. Over 17 million of Yemen’s population were affected, including over 3.3 million children and pregnant or lactating women. The famine was compounded by an outbreak of cholera, with about 5,000 new cases per day. These disasters were deliberately caused by air strikes led by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Navy, which have deliberately targeted water systems and destroyed fishing boats, leaving the fishermen unable to support their families.(9) The port of Hudaydah was blockaded, keeping food, medicine, and other humanitarian aid from reaching those in need.(10)
There is no international law prohibiting the use of famine as a weapon. This situation must change. There is now an initiative urging the adoption of a UN resolution to declare famine a “crime against humanity.”(11) It is a measure that deserves universal support. Famine does not cause war or weapons, but war certainly can cause famine. That’s happening now and can get worse unless we break the link to war. How? By creating an international prohibition against depriving of a population of food. High priority!
Lesson Four: Global Warming Interacts with Famine
Although all current famines must be blamed on warfare, that does not mean that climate is irrelevant. Access to food will become iffy in the future because the human population continues increasing and climate is reducing the capacity of land to yield sufficient crops. There are expected to be 9.3 billion people on the planet by 2050.(12) This will require a doubling of food production, but rivers and groundwater are already shrinking. The Himalayan glaciers are melting and the North China Plain is running out of water.(13)
In other areas, it is flooding that presents a worse threat. Most small island states such as the Maldives recognize that the combination of drought and rising sea levels threaten their agricultural production. Islanders will have to emigrate as their coastal lands are inundated. A report declared, “Climate change is one of the biggest culprits in driving hunger. Of 51 nations facing food insecurity, 33 are least developed countries with a combined population of 82 million. Almost a quarter of the population of the least developed countries face food insecurity.”(14)
As usual with systems, the causal impact between famine and climate change is not just uni-directional, but rather a vicious cycle. The more climate refugees are created by global warming, the more of the planet’s resources must be devoted to supporting them, for they cannot produce their own food and other necessities. Those costs will drain money away from technological improvements to mitigate the climate crisis. Indeed, the solution to this problem can only be an urgent world-wide, top-priority campaign to limit global warming.
Lesson Five: Militarism Interacts with Pandemics
Historically, wars have usually been associated with the spread of infectious diseases. The most obvious example occurred in World War I when the Spanish flu was spread in part by troop movements. The disease sickened an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed between 20 million and 50 million victims—far more than were killed in the war itself.(15)
This connection between military action and disease can be observed in almost all instances. Today there are about thirty civil wars being waged around the world, and they are often foci of infectious disease. For example, although there had not been a single case of polio reported in Syria since 1999, in 2013 new cases began to appear there among children.
According to Paul Wise and Michele Barry, “The Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa exposed glaring weaknesses in the global strategy to control pandemic outbreaks in areas with minimal public health capacity.” But solutions do exist. For example, there is a potential for using satellites and other technologies for the surveillance of remote areas.
However, sometimes these disease outbreaks are not accidental flukes but are deliberately caused. The most famous historical examples occurred when the blankets of diseased persons were bestowed upon an enemy as “gifts” for the purpose of infecting them. For example, William Trent recorded in his journal at Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania in 1753 that, “Out of our regard to [the Native American leaders visiting us] we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.”(16)
But even today, Wise and Barry write, “At the most basic level, the destruction or withholding of essential health capabilities can be used to coerce adversaries into political compliance, if not complete submission.”(17)
Germ warfare has not yet occurred in our own day and may be prevented. Biological warfare would involve the military’s use of pathogens to infect an entire enemy population. While the possibility of such actions cannot be entirely excluded, the likelihood was reduced when a treaty entered into force in 1975 that prohibits the development, production, and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons. This has been signed by 182 countries(18) and ratified by all of them except five. What would also help would be the addition of more means of formal verification: the actual monitoring of compliance. However, much has already been accomplished in limiting threat of biological warfare. Pandemics are a high threat that need to be addressed in their own right and in connection with climate change, but the association with war and weapons is not now a concern.
Lesson Six: Global Warming Interacts With Pandemics
Clearly, global warming can cause pandemics, and we have every reason to be alarmed and to prepare for that possibility. Indeed, Bill Gates regularly warns us that the greatest immediate threat to humanity is a pandemic. That is because new pathogens emerge from mutations of viruses, which travellers can transfer by airplane before they even become sick. As the climate changes, there are changes in animal habitat as well. Insects can move into new areas, bringing Zika, West Nile, and other diseases. Forests are felled and with the growing population, people begin occupying land that had been the habitat of animals with viruses they had never met before. Infections arise and spread.
New vaccines are required to manage this challenge, but they take time to develop, and diseases can spread faster. Worse yet, antibiotics have been widely and inappropriately used, even by farmers to fatten animals. All pathogens can acquire immunity over time by evolution, so by now there are new viruses and fungi in hospitals that cannot be destroyed by any of the current array of drugs(19) Now a new fungus is especially worrying—a type of yeast called Candida auris, nearly 600 cases of which had been confirmed in the US in 2019, as well as in Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, and Africa. There is no drug that can cure it now, and infections have occurred already in numerous hospitals.(20)
But can the causal connection between climate and disease run in the other direction too? Can pandemics cause the climate to change? The idea seems ridiculous, but history can yield some astounding discoveries. Indeed, the most remarkable story involves the indigenous people of America, who were far more numerous before the European settlers arrived than was formerly supposed. There were an estimated 56 million Native Americans on this continent, many of whom were farmers. The white settlers brought diseases with them for which the indigenous people had no immunity. As mentioned in the example above, not all of the exposure was inadvertent; some was intentional genocide, though it is impossible to estimate how much. In any case, the entire indigenous population was decimated, and after they perished their farms reverted to forests and other wild vegetation. The trees absorbed more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which, according to a current account, was so great an increase that it cooled down the planet. The result was a period of history when the entire planet became cooler—a time known as the Little Ice Age.(21)
There is a lesson for us here: Plant trees! This is a high priority. We don’t need an Ice Age, but we do need a cooler planet, and quickly! *An extra trillion trees will help reduce climate change, which (among other things) spreads diseases that we don’t want. Also, because new viruses are already spreading world-wide, we must give high priority to developing better ways of blocking their spread.
Lesson Seven: Famine Interacts with Pandemics
Famine and infectious disease are twins. They predictably occur together, for whenever people begin starving, their immune system weakens and they become susceptible to infections that their bodies could otherwise have resisted. Indeed, as the World Health Organization explains, “between starvation and death, there is nearly always disease.”(22) The immediate cause of death is the disease. In today’s famine in Yemen, it is not surprising that there is also an epidemic of cholera.
And theoretically, the causal direction could also run in the other direction. When people are sick, they cannot work. Farmers and fishers stay in bed, so little food can be produced or transported to market. A pandemic could, in principle, cause a famine. However, we are not in an immediate risk of a famine-related pandemic, so we need not urgently address the interaction between the two phenomena, though we must certainly pay more attention to stopping the spread of pandemics, as proposed above in connection with global warming.
Lesson Eight: Militarism Interacts with Radiation Exposure
Nuclear weapons require fissile materials that do not occur in nature. Uranium is present in nature, but not in a form that can sustain a chain reaction, so natural uranium cannot make a nuclear bomb. Instead, the weaponeers require highly-enriched uranium or plutonium, which is produced by all reactors.
The only thing keeping authoritarian nations and terrorists from acquiring their own nuclear weapons is the difficulty of obtaining the necessary fissile materials. However, every reactor produces such materials as a by-product of generating electricity. These waste materials are extremely radioactive and cannot easily be captured and used, however, without killing the thief who takes them.
If any aspirant to nuclear weaponry does manage somehow to obtain the mixture of radioactive wastes from a reactor, it cannot be made into an explosive but it can be used as a “dirty bomb.” That is, it can be combined with a conventional explosive and detonated in a crowd where the radioactive substances will scatter and kill large numbers of people. This would be terrible, but less so than a fission bomb.
However, radioactive waste is sometimes reprocessed—put through a chemical process that separates the fissile elements. The result of that procedure enables some of the fissile materials to be recycled—used again in another reactor to produce power or, instead, as the core of a nuclear weapon. Reprocessing is dangerous because it creates the possibility for nations or terrorists to get the material they want for proliferating nuclear weapons.
The best solutions to this problem are obvious: close the reactors that produce about 11 percent of the world’s electricity and close all reprocessing plants. We would still have some problems left: how to guard the existing stockpiles of radioactive wastes from nuclear bombs and reactors.
However, despite the desirability of shutting down almost all reactors, it is not going to happen because we need energy and must, even more urgently, stop using fossil fuels. Nuclear power plants have been considered the main alternative to fossil fuels, so additional ones are even now being built, especially in Asia. The policy to close nuclear reactors is highly controversial among climate change activists, but peace activists are virtually united in their opinion: close nuclear power plants in order to prevent future nuclear wars. Because it is so controversial, I will not boldface it as a top priority measure, though perhaps I should.
Lesson Nine: Global Warming Interacts with Radiation
In a way, the connection between global warming and radiation is indisputable: Our planet’s sole source of warmth is the radiation sent to us from the sun. However, we don’t normally consider it possible to change the amount of sunshine that falls on earth—although there are cases in which something does affect it. When a volcano explodes, for example, it sends particles up into the stratosphere that circle the planet and blot out enough of the sun’s rays to cause a temporary decrease in global temperature. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, for example, sent gases and solids into the stratosphere, where they lingered three or four years.(23)
Some people even wish to apply this idea by injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere to stop global warming temporarily. Let’s hope that our predicament does not become that urgent, for, although the method would be cheap and easy, there might be harmful side effects that we can’t foresee. (However, it may be wise to study the technology ahead of time, just in case.) Anyway, there is nothing about this matter requiring high-priority action.
Lesson Ten: Famine Interacts with Radiation
Nor is there any immediate reason to worry about the causal connection between famine and radiation. No famine can cause a reactor to explode or any other source of radiation to harm people, nor is it plausible to expect a reactor to create a famine. However, one unlikely possibility does exist and cannot be totally ignored: a reactor explosion could be severe enough to create a plume that would contaminate a region, preventing any agriculture from being possible, which could lead to food shortages.
Still, such a situation supposes that a number of disasters might happen at about the same time. For example, it is possible that in a war, a state might decide to obliterate its enemies by bombing their nuclear reactors at the same time. The effect on the population would indeed be catastrophic, killing large numbers of people by famine, if they had not been killed by the direct effects of radiation poisoning itself. Again, this is a situation where militarism should be considered the primary precondition for the disaster. *Therefore, the essential way of preventing such an outcome is to interrupt militarism itself, as we have seen in other connections. *That is the top priority—more urgent than either famine or the management of reactors and fissile material.
Lesson Eleven: Pandemics Interact with Radiation Exposure
Infectious diseases do not cause reactor explosions or other sources of radiation. They do, however, affect the capacity of people to withstand the radiation. Not all bodies are equally affected by radiation, and “radio-resistance” is determined in part by the immune response. Hence radiation would have a more severe impact on a population that was already weakened by an epidemic of some sort.
Still, the simultaneous occurrence of these two catastrophes seems unlikely unless a third factor is involved, such as a major calamity resulting from global warming or a war in which one side deliberately tried to expose the other population to risk. Thus there is no immediate reason to address this combination of circumstances as a distinct problem. There are urgent reasons, however, to tackle the two predisposing causes of such a calamity: global warming and militarism.
Lesson Twelve: Militarism Interacts with Cyberattacks
Here we come to another top-priority issue. The linkage between militarism (i.e. war and weapons) and cyberattacks is so obvious that some people regard them as the same thing. That is not the case, of course, for we all experience phishing attacks without being at war, and banks lose stupendous amounts of money to cybercrime (far more than they disclose). Even film companies can have their productions ruined if they offend Kim Jong Un by producing a satirical movie.(24)
Still, it is the prospect of cyberwar that must worry us most. The next world war may be waged by people sitting at their keyboards. The Federal Reserve considers its most serious danger to be a cyberattack on their financial records in a real act of war. The possible destruction of a country’s centralized electric grid, its water treatment facilities, or flight control system staggers the imagination. Even destroying the satellites that control the GPS system on our cell phones would paralyze a modern society. The death toll from a cyberattack could be immense. Yet so far, there are no international laws limiting this.(25)
Several countries and the United Nations have proposed measures to establish international treaties defining the rules of engagement in such a war. The purpose would be to protect the essential infrastructure of every society from attack. So far, every such initiative has died for lack of support by the countries that now hold a dominant position in the cyberworld. It is, however, one of the most urgent needs of humankind, even if, so far, few of us are aware of our vulnerability.
Lesson Thirteen: Global Warming Interacts with Cyberattacks
Cyberattacks will neither cause nor prevent global warming, but they may determine who will die of it. We must expect enormous, world-wide societal disruptions and migrations when the climate crisis intensifies. Already, immigration has become a huge political issue in the US and Europe. Nations are putting up walls to keep refugees out and preventing humanitarian ships from rescuing refugees on the Mediterranean.
Such aggressive actions all represent the early disruptions of the climate crisis, and as more instances occur, additional military means may be used to protect each country’s “sovereign homeland.” Cyber technologies (even things like killer robots) might be used too. To prevent such horrors, it is necessary to limit climate change, replace militarism with projects that support human well-being, and enact international norms regulating the Internet.
Lesson Fourteen: Famine Interacts with Cyberattacks
As noted above, a cyberattack against an electric grid, for example, would leave everyone living in filthy dwellings in the dark, without food or water for months, possibly years, awaiting repairs to their infrastructure. Millions of people would starve, freeze, or perish for lack of water. This point needs no further elaboration. The question is merely: What can be done to prevent it?
Every effort should be made now to develop something like a “Geneva Cyber-convention” to establiish international norms to protect people before the worst actually happens.
But the real solution is to avert war and militarism altogether. Current military systems cannot protect anyone from cyberattacks, so it is necessary to invest in alternative systems of sustainable common security. Thus a top priority is to replace each nation’s armed forces with measures that can yield real security. The connection between famine and war has been mentioned as a high priority above. Its connection is not specific to cyberattack war.
Lesson Fifteen: Pandemics Interact with Cyberattacks
According to international law,(26) hospitals and humanitarian workers are never supposed to be attacked in a battle, and they are supposed to assist all injured or needy people, no matter which side of the conflict they favor. The law states: “Medical units exclusively assigned to medical purposes must be respected and protected in all circumstances. They lose their protection if they are being used, outside their humanitarian function, to commit acts harmful to the enemy.”
Also, according to the principles of “just war,” no civilians, but only enemy soldiers, should be targets in a battle. That rule has been increasingly violated, notably during World War II, and indeed now more civilians than soldiers are killed in almost all wars. Indeed, in the “new wars”, hospitals are themselves sometimes bombed. And cyberattacks are even disproportionately targeting health care institutions in civilian life as well.
Whether or not a cyberattack is perpetrated with the intention of killing large numbers of people, mass deaths could be the outcome. The health care system faces huge threats from cyberattacks,(27) especially when it comes to ransomware attacks. The most famous case was WannaCry, which affected more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries, with total damages ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. The British National Health Service was affected seriously, with the price tag estimated as £92 million in disruption to services and IT upgrades.(28) Russian President Putin blamed the US intelligence services for having developed such cyber weapons. However, most other countries pinned the blame on North Korea.(29) Was this an act of war? There is no easy answer.
It is clear, however, that not only can medical records and hospital equipment be manipulated by hackers, but there is even a potential for murder to be committed digitally, by someone acting remotely. Researchers in Israel created a computer virus capable of adding tumors into CT and MRI scans—malware designed to fool doctors into misdiagnosing patients.(30)
These are peacetime exploits. Wartime would be worse. *We should assign top priority to the regulation of the cyber world, for many reasons, one of which is to protect public health from cyberattacks.
Lesson Sixteen: Radiation Exposure Interacts with Cyberattacks
A cyberattack against a reactor would be an ideal way to kill large numbers of an enemy. Even some rebel groups are seeking ways to do it with suicide bombers.
Suppose that a small group of unknown terrorists did manage to crash a plane into a reactor and irradiate the whole region. What would the government of that state conclude? Possibly they would mistakenly blame the attack on an unfriendly nation, and retaliate with a nuclear strike. There is a real possibility of starting a nuclear war by error. And there is no military way of preventing this. The only realistic solution is to reverse militarism—especially by abolishing all nuclear weapons. Non-military sources of security must be developed instead. But what?
Lesson Seventeen: Enabling Measures
We have found that almost all combinations of these six global problems are causally interdependent—but some of them seem more consequential than others. Clearly, global warming and militarism (especially nuclear weapons) are existential threats to humankind and to our civilization and ending them must be our top priority.
Global warming is the more immediately alarming threat just now, since it may even make the planet uninhabitable. But the other existential threat—militarism (especially nuclear)—is a major cause or predisposing condition for all the other five problems: global warming, famine, pandemics, radiation exposure, and cyberattacks. Therefore, we can get more “mileage” by reducing militarism than by any other feasible intervention.
What would be involved in abolishing militarism?
Consider this policy: Reduce all national armed forces by at least 80 percent. Re-allocate those funds and personnel to combatting global warming, famine, pandemics, and cyberattacks.
But the odds of this are almost zero at present. Why? Most people believe they need armed forces to protect their nations from attack. What alternative possibilities exist?
The United Nations was formed for the explicit purpose of abolishing the scourge of war, and it is theoretically empowered to protect weak nations. Yet hardly anyone is confident the UN would protect them—or at least they do not believe it enough to relinquish their country’s military force. If the abolition of militarism is to be accomplished, therefore, it is essential that trust be restored in the UN as a protector of every society, small or large, weak or strong.
This will require various structural changes. The Security Council, which is supposed to intervene to protect countries that are under threat, is not impartial, but reflects its member states’ alliances. Hence the Security Council must change, especially to keep the permanent five members from using their veto privilege for their own interests or to favor their allies.
A partial solution may be to create a new UN Parliamentary Assembly, to be directly elected by individual voters all around the world. It will not immediately be completely democratic because so many member countries are undemocratic, but it can initially consist of delegates who are already elected parliamentarians in their own countries. In time, the UN must become more accountable if de-militarization is to proceed.
Then the UN will need its own emergency peace service—not only a constabulary of peacekeepers, but also teams of civilian medical and humanitarian workers who can rush to any hot spot before violence erupts. Such a service will cost far less than nations now pay for their own armies. It is (or will be) the UN Emergency Peace Service.
The UN will nevertheless need independent funding sources. One promising approach is to tax the transfer of large sums. A fraction of one percent will suffice to fund the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, as well as climate change interventions and projects to reduce the threats of famine, pandemics, and climate change.
But people won’t support such extraordinary new proposals if they are financially insecure—though inequality between rich and poor has increased to absolutely intolerable levels. Moreover, more people will lose their jobs because of artificial intelligence, so the proposed reforms must include major economic reforms, such as guaranteed universal basic income for everyone.
These reforms should be introduced as a single platform or agenda for action, not promoted separately. Some of them will not be acceptable unless others occur at the same time. That is probably the difficulty with introducing de-militarization, for example. Other means of security must be adopted simultaneously or earlier.
A Platform for Survival has already been worked out, with specific plans for policies to prevent all of the six global threats. Look it over and consider how to use it in your own work. Promoting such a platform of complementary reforms will be hard. But hard is more fun than easy.
Now you have completed this mini-course with a grade of A+ so what will you do next? You need partners. Every day you meet strangers who want a chance to contribute and live thrilling, arduous lives tackling hard challenges. Just ask them. Talk every day to at least three people, telling them what you learn about these global threats and inviting them to participate in solving them. Send them to our web site: tosavetheworld.ca. And keep us posted on your progress.
Thanks, partner, for saving the world!
References for this article can be seen at the Footnotes 3 page on this website (link will open in a new page).
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An interesting article from Bellona regarding the impacts of COVID-19 on the nuclear energy industry. A number of sensitive sectors — such as nuclear power plant operators — are requesting staff member lodge on site to limit potential exposure routes to COVID-19. This further illustrates concerns over the aging and shrinking workforce of experts and technicians in the field of nuclear energy.
Title: Covid-19 Could Cause Staff Shortages in the Nuclear Power Industry
Author: Digges, Charles
Publication(s): Bellona (Nuclear Issues)
Date: 20 March 2020
Link: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2020-03-covid-19-could-cause-staff-shortages-in-the-nuclear-power-industry
Article Excerpt(s):
“As the Covid-19 virus grinds world economies to a halt, several national nuclear operators are weighing how to keep sensitive and vulnerable infrastructure chugging along in the face of staff shortages due to the illness.
A number of national contingency plans, if enacted, could mark an unprecedented step by nuclear power providers to keep their highly-skilled workers healthy as governments scramble to minimize the impact of the global pandemic that has infected more than 240,000 people worldwide.
Officials in the United States, for instance, have suggested they might isolate critical technicians at the country’s nuclear power plants and ask them to live onsite to avoid exposure to the virus. Many operators say they have been stockpiling beds, blankets and food to support staff for that purpose.
Should that fail to stem the pandemic’s effect on the nuclear work force, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it would shut down any of America’s 60 nuclear plants if they can’t be appropriately staffed.
Other operators, however, are already seeing the spread of the infection slow things down. In Great Britain, authorities announced they are shutting down a nuclear fuel reprocessing site at Sellafield after 8 percent of its 11,500-strong staff were forced to self-isolate to avoid infection. The move came after an employee tested positive for the coronavirus last week, and will lead to a gradual shutdown of the site’s Magnox facility, which is slated to close permanently later this year.
Sellafield told employees that it would work to “make best use of available people”.
France, the world’s most nuclear dependent nation, announced staff reductions at its Flameville plant in the country’s north. The EDF, France’s national nuclear operator, said that, due to high regional infection rates, it was reducing the staff at the plant from 800 to 100. As early as March 10, EDF reported that three workers at nuclear power plants had tested positive for the virus.
A spokesman for the Flameville plant told Reuters that “we have decided to only keep those in charge of safety and security” working while the coronavirus crisis runs its course.
French grid operator RTE expects nuclear availability to stay 3.6GW below the 2015 to 2019 average and likewise predicts a national drop in nuclear demand.
Taken together, the emergency responses of national nuclear operators are symptoms of a big problem that Covid-19 posed to the nuclear sector, Mycle Schneider and independent energy and nuclear policy analyst told Power Technology Magazine.
“Covid-19 constitutes an unprecedented threat on sensitive strategic infrastructure, above all the power sector,” he said.
“The French case sheds light on a fundamental societal safety and security issue that got little attention in the current Covid-19 crisis. Operation and maintenance of nuclear power plants draw on a small group of highly specialized technicians and engineers.”
Because of that very level of specialization, some in the US nuclear industry are considering simply isolating nuclear plant technicians onsite in a sort of preventative quarantine.
Maria Korsnick, head of the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute told the New York Times that plants are “considering measures to isolate a core group to run the plant, stockpiling ready-to-eat meals and disposable tableware, laundry supplies and personal care items.”
The US Department of Homeland Security is responsible for working with nuclear power plant operators to maintain their operations during a national emergency. On Thursday, the department issued guidelines that echoed the ones suggested by Korsnick.
“When continuous remote work is not possible, businesses should enlist strategies to reduce the likelihood of spreading the disease,” the DHS said in a memo, according to Power Magazine. “This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, separating staff by off-setting shift hours or days and/or social distancing.”
Roy Palk, president and CEO of New Horizons Consulting, which advises energy companies in the US, told the magazine that, “There are a lot of unanswered questions because this is not a model everyone is used to working with.”
To keep the lights on, he said, utilities and power plant operators might have to consider keeping staff onsite for the long term.
“These operators have a license to operate, they’re highly skilled, highly trained. They have to be certified.” he told the magazine. “These individuals need to be on the job, they need to be healthy. They have a big obligation to the public.”
Reuters contacted a dozen other power providers, all of whom said they were implementing plans to moderate risks to their employees and to ensure continuity of service, but who declined to comment on whether sequestering staff was a possibility.
In New York, Consolidated Edison Inc, which provides power to around 3.3 million customers and gas to about 1.1 million customers in New York City and Westchester County – both of which are under virus lockdowns – said it was taking steps to keep critical employees healthy, including separating some control center personnel to other locations where they can perform their work.
Duke Energy Corp, which provides power to 7.7 million customers in six states and gas to 1.6 million customers in five states, said it instituted additional worker screening measures, such as temperature checks, at generating and other critical facilities.
Puget Sound Energy, which serves more than 1.5 million customers in the Seattle, Washington area – a region hard hit by coronavirus – said all non-essential workers are working remotely, and the utility has limited access to facilities that provide critical operations.”
An interesting article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in regards to the impacts of COVID-19 on nuclear inspections in Iran.
Title: One potential victim of coronavirus? Nuclear inspections in Iran
Author: Moore, George M.
Publication(s): Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Date: 17 March 2020
Link: https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/one-potential-victim-of-coronavirus-nuclear-inspections-in-iran/
Notes: See article excerpts.
Article Excerpt(s):
” Should the new IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi decide to suspend inspection visits to protect the health of his inspectors, it could metastasize concerns about Iranian nuclear proliferation. The same result would occur if Iran acted unilaterally to bar inspectors based on real or manufactured concerns about further spread of Covid-19.
To date, there is no public information about whether the IAEA will continue to send inspectors to Iran under the terms of the nuclear deal. Suspending inspections, even temporarily, could potentially leave a multi-month gap that Iran could exploit if it chose to fully break out of the nuclear agreement. In early March, the IAEA reported that Iran had amassed over 1,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, nearly triple the amount allowed under the deal. Following this announcement, updated estimates of Iran’s breakout time—the amount of time needed to amass enough fissile material to produce one nuclear weapon—ranged from approximately four to six months. These estimates depend on assumptions about the type of design Iran might be capable of initially using. Implosion systems require less fissile material than gun-type designs. Whatever the exact breakout time might be, most estimates fall within a timespan that health officials seem to indicate might be the duration of the Covid-19 threat.
Whether Iran would attempt to use the cover of Covid-19 to begin a dash for a nuclear weapon is uncertain. However, the loss of “eyes on the ground” in the form of IAEA inspections would probably heighten the worst fears about Iranian proliferation and possibly worsen already dim prospects for cooperation. Even before the coronavirus breakout, Iran had expanded its production of enriched uranium, probably in an attempt to exert pressure and improve its negotiating leverage following the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the deal and its reimposition of sanctions in 2018.
A second and related danger is that, absent the IAEA inspections, there is a greater possibility of miscalculation regarding Iran and its nuclear potential and intentions. Without hard data, US policy makers could begin to fear the worst and assume that Iran was dashing toward a bomb, and it would be difficult to prove otherwise. Other nations, both Iran’s neighbors in the Middle East and other global powers, might also react in unexpected ways, based on insufficient information and fear that Iran was breaking out to produce a nuclear weapon. In any event, lack of information generally leads to instability and whenever nuclear weapons, or the threat of nuclear weapons, is involved, instability could be exceedingly dangerous.
What could, or should, Director General Grossi and the IAEA member states do about this situation to mitigate any potential risks? First, it is essential that any hazards to the health of IAEA inspectors be minimized. The agency must pre-screen its inspectors before they travel to identify those at heightened risk. In addition, inspectors should be equipped to deal with potential contact with the virus by using proper disposable clothing and disinfecting procedures. Inspectors should also be accompanied by medical personnel and should strive to be self-sufficient with food and housing. It is also possible that enhanced technical oversight systems could be installed to temporarily decrease or eliminate the need for inspectors. Although the IAEA has apparently used remote surveillance systems in Iran, the effectiveness of those systems in a situation where inspectors cannot enter Iran will need to be evaluated, and new or upgraded systems may be needed. Such installations would need to be installed by the IAEA in order to be considered reliable, and that would involve the same risks to those personnel as to inspectors in dealing with the virus.
IAEA member states should fully support such efforts so that inspections can continue. Though it might require extraordinary efforts by the IAEA and its board of governors, it is in the world’s interest to have the nuclear watchdog continue its verification programs in Iran despite whatever level of hazard the Covid-19 outbreak presents. Failure to do so could have dire consequences.”
An interesting article on nine major climate change tipping points.
Title: Explainer: Nine ‘tipping points’ that could be triggered by climate change
Author: Robert McSweeney
Date: 10 February 2020
Publication: Carbon Brief
Link: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-nine-tipping-points-that-could-be-triggered-by-climate-change
The Chimney and the Cloud
By Sean Howard | October 9, 2019
A more telling or ironic snapshot of endangered Mother Earth in the 21st century could scarcely be imagined: a naval war game by a nuclear-armed alliance delayed by a storm that drew its force from the human-caused warming of the oceans.
The hurricane, of course, was Dorian, and the war game Operation Cutlass Fury, scheduled to begin on September 9 with a saber-rattling ‘spectacular’ in Halifax harbour. With guns blazing from HMCS Ville de Québec, a fly-past led by an attack helicopter (a Cyclone!) and two fighter jets was due to roaringly salute a mini-Armada of 22 battleships and 2,500 personnel from eight NATO states (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, UK, USA), on its way to practice a range of daring maneuvers against the dastardly Russian foe. ‘Bold, strong, and ready,’ in the words of the Cutlass Fury motto. Although not, it seems, ready for climate change…
On September 3, NSVOW’s Kathrin Winkler wrote in the Halifax Chronicle Herald that the “Canadian Armed Forces would serve humanity better in building for a future, rather than manoeuvring on a dying ocean” in a manner itself deeply disruptive and damaging to marine life and the environment.
Winkler was predictably attacked on the Letters page for emotionalism and naiveté: living in a “mythical land” where everyone acts like “love children,” while in the ‘real world’ “sources of trouble” require a strong, bristling response. These ‘sources,’ according to G. Bruce Hollett of Halifax (September 7) include “the Soviet Union,” which “hasn’t really settled down,” North Korea, China, and “terrorist factions” (hopefully deterred by so many warships). The same day, Bruce Carter of Truro warned that “nuking the planet would be far more devastating than a few planes and ships practicing in order to prevent war.”
But as NSVOW was acutely aware, because both NATO and Russia are nuclear-armed – because both claim the ‘right’ to ‘go nuclear’ first in any conflict – Cutlass Fury was theater of the atomic absurd: preparation for a conflict all-too-likely to lead to the deaths of tens of millions, and the radioactive, climate-changing poisoning of vast areas of land, sea, and air. All such exercises help ‘prevent’ is peace; all they deter is disarmament.
And NSVOW is right on a deeper level too: the real ‘enemy of the people’ and the planet is catastrophic climate change caused by irreversible global warming from industrialization (‘the Chimney’); and irreversible global cooling from nuclear war (‘the Cloud’).
‘Nuclearism’ – the cult and culture of mass-destruction, the power of death over life – is the deadliest strain of the virus of militarism, and militarism an extreme, overt expression of the violence of industrialism. But though militarism is both a major polluter and vandalizer of today’s environment, and more than capable of wrecking the ecosphere in future conflict, it remains on the margins of the contemporary climate crisis debate. Or as CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin wrote on September 30:
The environmental justice movement that is surging globally is intentionally intersectional, showing how global warming is connected to issues such as race, poverty, migration and public health. One area intimately connected to the climate crisis that gets little attention, however, is militarism.
What explains this dangerous blind-spot, and how can it be fixed?
When it comes to tackling the climate crisis, we are constantly counselled to ‘listen to the scientists.’ But for more than a third of a century, scientists have warned of a ‘nuclear winter,’ the long-term smothering of the sun by radioactive smoke and soot from city-vaporizing thermonuclear firestorms.
Is such a scenario, in 2019, remotely likely? At a time of rapidly deteriorating relations between the US and Russia, the war plans and postures of both nuclear superpowers still presuppose the possibility of a nuclear-winter-scale exchange, as well as ‘options’ for supposedly ‘limited,’ ‘controllable,’ ‘winnable’ conflicts.
A new, September 2019 simulation from Princeton University’s Science and Global Security program (already viewed nearly 2 million times on YouTube, predicts over 90 million casualties (30+ million deaths) within hours of the first ‘step on the ladder.’ Hundreds of millions more would die from burns and radiation sickness. But one casualty the Princeton study doesn’t mention is surely the most important of all: the climate.
Since scientist and broadcaster Carl Sagan first sounded the nuclear winter alarm, the sophistication of scientific modelling of a climate-wrecking nuclear calamity has increased dramatically. The two most recent major studies, deploying different methodologies, manage to surpass in horror the early predictions of Sagan and his fellow ‘scare-mongerers,’ as they were initially dismissed by nuclear-climate-change deniers.
In hard, cold fact, it is now thought that the smoke and soot from a major exchange would stay in the atmosphere to a greater extent, and for far longer, than previously assumed, generating an even worse “crash in global surface temperatures,” a more radical “collapse in the summer monsoon,” and more “drastic changes to the Northern Hemisphere winter time circulation,” in plainer terms, the contraction of the annual growing season in much of United States and Europe (or what was left of them) to less than seven weeks, and much less than that in most of Russia and China.
The quotes are from the most recent study, issued just a few months ago, that concluded that “a full-scale nuclear attack would be suicidal for country that carries [it] out,” and that the “use of nuclear weapons in this manner by the United States and Russia would have disastrous consequences globally.” “To completely remove the possibility” of such an “environmental catastrophe,” the authors argue – decision makers must have a full understanding of the grave climatic consequences of nuclear war and act accordingly. Ultimately, the reduction of nuclear arsenals and the eventual disarmament of all nuclear capable parties are needed.
But is it, perhaps, equally necessary that climate crisis activists acquire such a ‘full understanding,’ and adapt their strategy accordingly, keeping in view the ‘twin peaks’ of human insanity – industrialism and nuclearism – now threatening to seal ‘the fate of the earth’? As Carlos Umaña of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) wrote on September 23:
With the world in flames, the climate crisis is, even for its fiercest deniers, impossible to ignore. However, the vast majority of people do ignore how this situation worsens the risk of nuclear war and why nuclear disarmament is more important today than ever.
But is this “vast majority” really ‘ignoring’ the nuclear question, or, rather, frighteningly uninformed about it?
When it comes to rational discussion of sustainable economics, it’s high time to take ‘the Chimney’ off the table: to embrace a Green New Deal capable of driving down to zero the emissions that have set our ‘house’ on ‘fire.’ And in any sane debate of sustainable security, it’s high time to take ‘the Cloud’ off the table: to embrace a New Green Peace driving down to zero the risk of firestorms capable of reducing land, sea and sky to ruins.
Seen from this perspective, nuclear disarmament re-emerges as an issue of climate justice: an indispensable response to the single greatest emergency in human history. The link becomes even clearer when we realize even a comparatively ‘small’ nuclear war – a tiny fraction of a full exchange – would be sufficient to trigger global environmental trauma. Take, for example, a regional nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, a scenario rendered suddenly more likely by India’s recent disgraceful lock-down, and planned ethnic cleansing, of Kashmir. Addressing the UN General Assembly on September 27, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, justifiably appalled by the lack of Western outrage, warned in clear terms:
If a conventional war starts between the two countries…anything could happen. But supposing a country seven times smaller than its neighbour is faced with the choice – either you surrender or you fight… We will fight: and when a nuclear-armed country fights to the end, it will have consequences far beyond the borders.
Here – according to a landmark 2012 study memorably entitled ‘Self-Assured Destruction’ – are just some of the consequences of an India-Pakistan exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons (20-kiloton fission bombs, used by the superpowers merely as triggers for their multi-megaton fusion explosives): “more than five million tons of smoke…lofted to high altitude, where it absorbs sunlight before the light can reach the lower atmosphere”; “ozone levels over the mid-latitudes of both hemispheres…reduced to values now found only in the Antarctic ozone hole”; steep falls in surface temperature producing “a 10 percent global drop in precipitation, with the largest losses in the low latitudes due to failure of the monsoons”; and “global average temperatures colder than any experienced on Earth in the past 1,000 years,” causing severe “disruption in world food trade.”
In such a ‘nuclear famine,’ as IPPNW warned in a separate study of such a ‘limited’ war in South Asia, “more than two billion people – a quarter of the world’s population – would be at risk.” And for this dreadful reason, the authors of the 2012 report argue, “proliferation cannot be treated as a regional problem”: “treaties must” henceforth “call for further reductions in weapons so that the collateral effects,” as “military planners” have hitherto thought of them, “do not threaten the continued survival of the bulk of humanity.”
“It is now time,” they conclude, “to add self-assured destruction to the list of reasons for ridding the world of nuclear weapons.” And since 2012, a new treaty has been negotiated (the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, TPNW, or more simply, the ‘Ban Treaty’) based precisely on such sound human reasoning – and compelling eco-logic. The Treaty is attracting strong support, particularly in the Global South, though its existence remains unknown to most Western citizens – including, alas, most climate change activists.
As we have seen, the similarity between the Chimney and the Cloud has long been acknowledged by many in the peace movement: what else, in the atomic age, is such a movement but an Extinction Rebellion?
Many anti-nuclear-weapons campaigners are also active in efforts to save the planet in the other way it most urgently needs to be saved: by radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And since 2017, the famous ‘Doomsday Clock’ of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been set at ‘two minutes to midnight’ in recognition of the double vision of disaster we now face, or what it calls soberly “the devolving state of nuclear and climate security.”
Yet, in most statements and speeches on climate change, by some of the movement’s most inspirational and influential figures, nuclear disarmament is rarely – if ever – mentioned. This is less surprising, perhaps, with a young leader like Greta Thunberg, who doubtless grew up hearing much about the effects of global warming, and almost nothing of the effects of nuclear war. But how explain the failure of older leaders like Bill McKibben, or that much-loved ‘father figure’ David Attenborough, to show both sides – Chimney and Cloud – of the climate crisis coin?
To be clear: I am not accusing McKibben, for example, of indifference to nuclearism, let alone ignorance of the clear and present danger it poses. I am, instead, wondering why the Cloud is missing from the ‘big picture’ he routinely and skillfully paints? As a snapshot of the way nuclear weapons can become (ironically) silo’d in the debate, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman – a long-time supporter of radical disarmament – recently conducted long interviews with both Thunberg and McKibben. They did not mention, and were not asked, anything about the Bomb – or militarism more generally — an omission that might have shocked two regular Democracy Now interviewees, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton and progressive commentator Noam Chomsky, who do draw Cloud and Chimney together.
Meanwhile, in the disarmament community, calls to respond to the nuclear emergency with the same urgency as the climate emergency can sometimes also fall short, giving the impression they are essentially different crises.
On September 30, for example, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, Daryl G. Kimball argued that “just as dramatic action is needed to avoid climate change catastrophe, immediate and decisive action is required to counter the growing threat of nuclear war before it is too late.” He’s absolutely right, and all-too-well aware of the atrocious environmental impacts of any use of the weapons he hates: but why not stress – for those well-versed in global warming but semi-literate (at best) on nuclear issues – that what he’s determined to ‘counter…before it is too late’ is exactly a ‘climate change catastrophe?’
In a statement issued to mark the UN’s International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons (September 26), veteran Australian anti-nuclear activist John Hallam noted:
Global Warming will take about 100-150 years to make the planet uninhabitable for humans if we don’t do anything about it. Nuclear weapons can make the world uninhabitable in 45-90 minutes.
But this is to make a good point too sharply, for although philosopher Elaine Scarry – in Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom – is right to describe nuclear war as a “far more condensed catastrophe” than global warming, global warming is already causing terrible suffering, massive dislocation, and tragic loss of bio- and cultural diversity. And according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) we only have a dozen years, not a dozen decades, to retreat from the brink of a death-spiral, the final Pyrrhic victory of ‘progress’ over planet.
The strategic search, instead, should be for ways these two wings might learn to ‘fly’ together. As a prime example, an authentically Green New Deal, however considerable the long-term savings it may generate, will cost trillions of dollars for decades, and so need all the funding help it can get; while an authentically New Green Peace, whatever ongoing costs it may accrue, will save trillions of dollars over decades, freeing fortunes best spent making the world greener – and less conflict-prone. (At the recent Climate Action event in Sydney, a single placard made this link, borrowing its inscription, “Warheads to Windmills,” from an impressive recent study of potential savings How many such messages were there at the massive events in Montreal and elsewhere?)
The demand for a Green New Deal in the US is being led by the ‘Sunrise Movement,’ a self-described ‘army’ of non-violent youth taking on the Same Old Deal establishments in both major parties. Does this ‘insurgency’ also demand nuclear disarmament, chant and sing for a New Green Peace? As Matt Korda, a brilliant young analyst with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, laments it does not:
I am a member of the Sunrise Movement, because I am scared of the existential threat that climate change poses to humanity. But I don’t work in the climate change space, because I believe there is an even scarier – and more immediate – existential threat that receives far less attention: nuclear weapons.
As Korda notes, the Cloud remains largely unseen and/or unmentioned by the 20+ Democratic candidates for the US presidential nomination. Even he, though, is here standing ‘so near and yet so far’ from making the crucial connection, for in advocating for nuclear disarmament Korda is working in the climate crisis space, is fighting the good fight for climate justice.
The point was even missed in a September 20 statement by 17 Nobel Peace Laureates, issued by the Nobel Peace-Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which described “global warming” as “the greatest crisis facing humanity today,” a virtual invitation to deal with the ‘lesser’ problem of nuclear weapons after the Big One is solved. That’s not, of course, what they meant: but equating “climate justice” with the sole goal of an end to “the age of fossil fuels” is to eclipse the efforts of those – like themselves! – seeking an end, for the sake of the health of the planet, to the atomic age.
In 1946, a group of prominent nuclear physicists, most of them deeply involved in the development of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, issued a collection of essays with the self-explanatory title One World or None. In his foreword, “Science and Civilization,” the Danish physicist Niels Bohr wrote that “the handling” of the new “precarious situation” will require above all an appreciation “that we are dealing with what is potentially a deadly challenge to civilization itself.” Fostering such an appreciation, Bohr adds, is henceforth “the gravest responsibility” of scientists. Well, in recent decades, scientists have told us something Indigenous and other marginalized voices have been saying all along: that human civilization cannot hope to survive its dependence on either fossil fuels or nuclear weapons.
One world or none? The answer to that question may depend on how we answer this: when it comes to saving the planet, what makes most sense – two movements or one?
Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and member of Peace Quest Cape Breton.
Half the pregnancies in the US are unintended. Across the globe hundreds of millions of women do not have access to modern contraception and safe abortion. In the Sahel (mainly Francophone Africa) the population will triple by mid-century, just as climate change diminishes the food supply (already in Niger 4 out 10 children are stunted due to lack of food). Meeting the unmet need for family planning in a human rights framework is a win/win situation for everyone. As measured by the OECD, only one per cent of foreign aid goes to family planning. Based on half a century of experience in many different cultures I believe that doubling the amount of foreign aid going to family planning from 1% to 2% of the total would work miracles. Please write in supporting this policy. If you disagree, please begin a much needed debate.
Malcolm Potts MD, PhD, FRCOG UC Berkeley (potts@berkeley.edu)
Canadian children face serious risks as a result of climate change and health-care providers must adopt new practices to mitigate the effects, says a guidance document from a national group of pediatricians.
Infants and children are particularly vulnerable to heat sickness, reduced air quality due to pollution and wildfires, infection from insects, ticks and rodents, and other hazards that are expected to pose greater risks as a result of climate change, according to the Canadian Paediatric Society’s document,published Wednesday.
“There is a change in children’s health issues within Canada and pediatricians are going to be dealing with conditions that they didn’t expect in their region or their area,” said Irena Buka, lead author of the guidance and clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
The CPS is urging health-care professionals who care for children to be aware of the changing risks and be prepared to provide advice to caregivers about the reality of rising temperatures, extreme weather events and infection prevention.
“Health professionals, they really need to focus on broadening their training and broadening their education,” Dr. Buka said. “It is a call to action on that.”
The CPS document is also calling on health professionals to push governments to do more to mitigate the effects of climate change and to ensure children’s unique health needs are taken into consideration during any disaster planning.
“It is a plea for doctors to get involved,” Dr. Buka said.
Susan Elliott, a medical geographer at the University of Waterloo who studies global environmental health, said many Canadians still don’t realize the health risks of climate change are already being felt across the country. And there are many unanswered questions about how to deal with the risks. For instance, the rates of obesity and asthma are on the rise among Canadian youth, but on days when it is very hot and humid, parents can’t safely send those kids outside to play, Dr. Elliott said.
She added that many physicians may not be able to recognize certain conditions that are becoming more common as a result of climate change, such as Lyme disease. Medical schools need to incorporate more of this information to help prepare the next generation of doctors and the health-care system also needs to do more to address these issues, she said.
“Can a physician recognize West Nile virus? Can a physician recognize symptoms of malaria?” Dr. Elli Courtney Howard, an emergency room doctor based in Yellowknife who wrote about the health effects of climate change in the Lancet journal last year, said the CPS statement sends an important message to the health community about the new health risks we face.
“We know that climate change is the biggest health risk of the 21st century,” she said. “From a really practical position, [health professionals] need to know what to do.”
Did I miss the section where racism and poverty are specifically addressed?
Taken together, racial and economic “minority” groups actually comprise the greater part of the world’s population. Because “otherization” (dehumanization based on group affiliation) makes these groups most expendable, marginalized populations are especially vulnerable in each of the issues in the Platform for Survival.
Depending on circumstances, any group can be subject to otherization, so addressing the way these problems impact people at the bottom of the social and economic strata will be comprehensive and globally beneficial. It is also a way to engage groups who have been historically silent or silenced.
Hi, Daisy. Yes, of course poverty and racism are important. But we cannot do everything. Our list of challenges is already overwhelming, and in the section called “enabling measures” we do propose changes that would reduce economic inequality (mainly the universal basic income idea). However, at the outset we decided to choose issues that are (a) potential emergencies rather than chronic problems, and (b) inter-dependent as a system. These six threats are all interdependent and any one of them could kill a billion people very quickly. We are dealing with emergencies, rather than the long-standing problems of humankind that we have survived for millennia. Still, the “enabling measures” do include societal structural changes that would overcome chronic problems such as poverty too. Thanks for your interest and valuble participation.
Following these subjects is probably the most important thing we can do at this moment in history. Following these subjects is also very difficult and can be disheartening. I am a single senior who has been paying attention for decades. (I put question marks and exclamation marks beside my note when an official from the Clinton administration spoke about the possibility of war with China.)
Over the years I have found that these are not subjects people have wanted to engage with. The times, of course, are a-changing, and we will deal with them, like it or not. I appreciate this invitation to engagement and encourage you to publish it more widely, and in a more accessible format.
“Okay, what shall we do?” is exactly the right question. It is off-putting, though, and overwhelming when followed by a list of 30 publications. Instead of showing the long list of notes at this point, I think it would be more empowering for readers to be met with the opening lines that they will only see if they click on “read more””
First, let’s find out what we need to know.
Second, let’s talk about it. (All the time! Bring up the subject out of the blue four or five times every day! That’s how to wake the others up.)
Third, let’s act—but act according to the smartest plans we can devise.