Don’t Beat the Climate War Drums published in Climate Chronicle
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The beat is on. In September the CIA launched a new Center on Climate Change and National Security, reflecting growing concern in U.S. and European security circles that climate change could trigger violent conflict over scarce environmental resources in the global South, mass migrations of poor, unruly ‘climate refugees’ towards Western borders, and even wars between states. This linkage between climate and security threatens to militarise climate policy and subvert humanitarian and development aid. While environmental changes due to global warming could exacerbate already existing economic and political tensions in many locations, the threat scenarios being bandied about in security circles are wildly speculative and based on racialised stereotypes of poor people. They ignore the ways many poorly resourced communities manage their affairs without recourse to violence. Violent conflict in the global South is generally more connected to resource abundance and foreign intervention than resource scarcity – for example competition over rich mineral reserves in the Congo or diamonds
in Sierra Leone.
Unfortunately, evidence is not really the issue here. The beating of the climate conflict drums should be viewed in the context of larger orchestrations in U.S. and European national security and immigration policy. Take the notion of climate refugees. A 2003 Pentagonsponsored Abrupt Climate Change Scenario warned of the need to strengthen our defences against “unwanted starving immigrants” from the Caribbean, Mexico and South America. Fomenting fear of climate refugees adds fuel to the fire of the anti-immigrant backlash in both the U.S. and Fortress Europe.
In recent years Western militaries have moved to exercise more control over humanitarian and development aid, including emergency aid during natural disasters. In 2005 the share of US foreign aid dispersed by the Pentagon was 22 percent, up from 6 percent three years before. The Obama administration’s defense policy views aid as an essential component of stabilising restive populations, taming “ungoverned spaces” in Africa and Central Asia where terrorists may lurk, and building a “whole-of government” approach toward security, shorthand for Pentagon dominance of most aspects of foreign policy. The new U.S. military command for Africa, AFRICOM, is an example of what may lie in store. AFRICOM seeks to integrate U.S. military objectives more firmly with development ones and its staff includes senior officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Supporters of AFRICOM are already deploying the threat of climate conflict as a justification for its existence.
The climate change-national security linkage could also provide a rationale for investments in grandiose and risky schemes to control the weather. This March an official advisory group to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) convened a meeting to discuss the possibility of geo-engineering as a response to global warming.
In the climate change arena, the appeal to the “high politics” of national security is low politics. It demonises the people who have the least responsibility for global warming, turning them into a dangerous threat. Instead of bolstering militarism we should be challenging it. After all, militaries themselves are top carbon guzzlers - the U.S. Department of Defence is the largest consumer of energy in the U.S., using as much as the entire nation of Sweden. Militarism also absorbs the economic resources and shrinks the democratic space we need to find real solutions to climate change. Rather than beating the climate war drums, we need to work together across borders, in peace.
