The Urgent War
by Peter G. Cohen,  July 28, 09

Terrorism is a minor threat to the United States; climate change threatens the survival of civilization. 

We have expended  vast amounts of energy, lives and money in pursuit of al Qaeda (and/or access to petroleum reserves) with very little result. We could have purchased a lifetime of oil supplies for the money spent on trying to conquer Iraq and Afghanistan. The oppressive regimes of the Middle East still control the oil, and some still fund the Madrassas whose teaching of the Koran indoctrinates innocent children to become suicide bombers. 

It is critical that we face the fact that we can no longer afford this endless attempt to dominate of the world. We have exhausted our troops, our equipment,  our treasure and our international political capital. We must get out of Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible, and do what we can to repair the dreadful damage our wars have done in the region. 

The great threat to the United States and to civilization is climate change. With an almost endless supply of fossil-based heat and energy we have been able to transform the landscape, develop and accelerate all forms of transportation and communication,  entertain and feed ourselves to the point of obesity. Luxuries unknown to all but wealthiest courts of empires past are now the common expectations of people in the developed world.

But, there is a price. Now,  with relatively little warning, we find that we have so polluted the atmosphere that we are threatened by fires and heat waves, droughts and fierce storms, advancing deserts and tropical diseases. The world food supply is suffering from climate change that withers crops in some areas, while drowning them with floods in others. Melting polar ice caps are causing the oceans to rise; port cities, low islands and luxuriant delta agricultural areas are already experiencing the rising waters. And, this is happening faster than scientists expected.  

Meanwhile, most of the world is continuing business as usual. In northern Canada developers are investing billions and clearing an area of the Boreal forest the size of Florida to access the oil sands. The oil is of poor quality, uses a great deal of water for extraction, and produces two barrels of toxic waste for every barrel of not very good oil. The effect is that we are destroying the carbon sink of the forest in order to access more carbon fuel.  In Indonesia  tropical forests are being cut and burned in order to plant palm oil plants to produce biofuels and a food additive. In the Amazon the forests are being destroyed to grow soybeans for cattle feed. 

Here in the United States, we still allow developers to pave over good agricultural land for homes and malls.  We are bulldozing the tops of mountains to access coal and burning trainloads of it every day to feed our electrical generators. We are decades behind Europe and Japan in the development of high speed rail that could replace some of the  jet planes thrusting tons of CO2 into our skies.

Climate Change

We humans tend to wait until the last moment to deal with problems. Yet, we know the threats of global warming. And we know that the cost of dealing with it now is much less than the cost of dealing with it later. 

As ice melts and oceans rise, millions of people will be displaced, their low-lying fields under salt water. Where will they go? Will their higher neighbors accept the hungry refugees? Or the people displaced by drought and expanding deserts, already happening in China and Sub-Sahara Africa? Drought, devastating storms and floods are driving up the price of food grains worldwide. A UN report in April 2009 found world food prices high and food emergencies in 32 countries.

Scientists tell us that we are approaching the limits of what can be done to increase food production.  As oil becomes more expensive,  irrigation pumps and farm tractors will cost more to operate;  these costs will increase the price of food grains. People in poor and undeveloped countries will suffer the most. Will the U.S. - a major exporter of food grains - be able to help? Maybe not. A new variety of wheat stem rust from Uganda, called Ug99, is spreading across Africa and will inevitably affect most of the world’s wheat production in the next few years. Crop scientists estimate that it will take more than a  decade to develop varieties of wheat that can resist the devastation of  Ug99. USAID, responsible for  most of our nation’s foreign agricultural, health, economic and humanitarian assistance programs, has increased its budget for next year to two tenths of one percent of the military budget! 

The living world is dying

The biosphere itself, all of the living organisms and their environment, is in serious decline. Scientists reveal that we are in the process of losing half of the Earth’s species at the rate of some 30,000 a year. 

The food supply and species loss are indicators of the condition of the biosphere. Many areas of the ocean, are now without life, were once roiled by vast  schools of fish and other sea creatures. We have been slow to notice the devastation we have made, and slower still to end the use of carbon fuels, the primary cause of diminishing the once awesome abundance of Life on Earth.

We do not know what additional losses will be caused by global heating, food shortages or the loss of species as they interact with chemicals, radiation and other challenges to life in the years to come. It is because we do not know the full effects of these agents that we should be doing everything possible to reverse the downward trend as quickly as possible. 

“According to models, we could cook the planet by 4 degrees centigrade by 2100. If this happens, the ramifications for life on Earth are so terrifying that many scientists contacted for this article  preferred not to contemplate them, saying only that we should concentrate on reducing emissions to a level where such a rise is known only in nightmares.” - Gaia Vince in New Scientist, 28 Feb., 2009.    

What To Do

The greatest driver of this threat is the one least talked about: the growing number of humans is overwhelming the resources and recuperative powers of the biosphere. While we are discussing the need to drastically cut our carbon output by the year 2050, the population is estimated to increase from the current 6.8 billion people to 9.1 billion by the same date. With the acreage under cultivation declining and attacked by drought, spreading deserts, storms and flooding, how are we going to feed 2.3 billion additional human beings? The threatening tragedy of starvation and millions of half-starved men, women and children roaming in search of food could disrupt all efforts to preserve order and the fair distribution of the food grains and other commodities that remain. The result could be chaos.

We can either ignore this threat  and continue with business as usual, or we can have an intense, worldwide campaign of information and persuasion over the next forty years that will work to control the size of families everywhere to  one or two children. The more we can reduce the world population, the better we can distribute the remaining food and the better  we can care for women and their children. Fewer people need less energy, produce less CO2 and can help to return the Earth to more moderate, livable climates.

In the meantime, we need a crash program for developing and teaching methods of agriculture that require less water, fertilizer, power and chemicals, while we work to end topsoil loss and  improve the long-term structure and fertility of our depleted soils. 

The Energy Change-Over Agency

To control carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we must rapidly reduce the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal. The challenge is to increase wind, solar and other energy alternatives while we reduce fossil fuels so that there is a smooth transition from one to the other, allowing our homes and factories to continue to function. At the same time, we must create high-efficiency transmission lines to move power  from the prime areas for wind and solar to to the cities where most people live and work. To do all of this efficiently, we need an  Energy Change-Over Agency to plan and facilitate this critical transition. 

For all their efforts, most of the Congress lacks the technical and scientific background to achieve the best results with a minimum of unexpected side effects. Also, they are subject to intense financial pressure from the fossil fuel industries and others to compromise their legislation to preserve the status quo. An independent Change-Over Agency, dedicated solely to planning the change, would have the independence, authority and long-range vision to design better solutions and monitor their effects. The Agency would provide the Congress with a series of detailed change-over plans for enactment into law. 

One small example: high temperatures are usually reached in the afternoons of summer days. If all air conditioners were required to be powered by solar panels on the property, that strong solar energy would be used to cool the interior of buildings without stressing the power supply. A law could require that all air conditioners be accompanied by solar collectors of sufficient size for their operation. Such a law would eliminate the threat of brownouts during heat waves. 

The Biosphere

The preservation of the remaining species is primarily a matter of  preserving sufficient area and quality of their habitats. Large land mammals require larger preserves. This means the purchase of many privately owned lands and the elimination of poachers. Here in the U.S.  only a few small areas of the original prairie grasses remain. They may be important as future sources of food for humans and animals. It is important that they be preserved and protected from extinction. The preservation and replacement of tropical forests is essential to preserve the many species they contain and the balance of the atmosphere.  This may require an international effort to reward the nations involved for preserving their forests.

Fighting the Right War

To be effective quickly, most of these projects require a far greater investment of talent, money and energy. The hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on the military are useless against rising temperatures, storms, droughts and the flooding of low-lying areas, etc. On the contrary, the military is notorious for the pollution of its bases, the consumption of petroleum fuels and the waste of money and materials.  

We have yet to reduce the greenhouse gasses that cause climate change, even though they are a far greater threat than any likely attack on the United States. Normally, it is the job of the military to prepare for the worst imaginable situation. They pay for the development of weapons to counter other weapons that might possibly be developed in the future. But, our situation is not normal, and these preparations are stimulating other nations to prepare their own defenses and counter attacks. 

When we are now threatened by the loss of water and agricultural land, why should we spend billions to install unproved anti-missile systems in Europe in anticipation of a suicidal attack by equally threatened Iran? Is it because the anti-missile business is one of the most challenging, expensive and profitable areas in the whole military-industrial complex? We cannot afford this expensive and useless luxury.  We urgently need the brains, energies and money we are investing in possible future wars to solve the immediate problems of developing and making alternative energy systems  to replace the fossil fuels that are greatly reducing our chance for a decent future.

The Big Threat 

Climate Change is the Big Threat. With rapid mobilization and investment we can minimize global heating and the chaos that will accompany it.  And, while doing so, we will be developing a new energy industry and the production of  energy systems that are urgently needed by our people and others around the world. But we cannot succeed while devoting our primary  attention and half of the federal budget to preparing for wars, weapons and enemies that are not really threatening. 

Over and over again we are told that we must defend our ‘interests’ around the world. That we must continue to be a global power, even though our army, our treasury and our people are exhausted by war. President Johnson proved that we cannot have ‘guns and butter.’ It should be   obvious that we cannot afford the very costly effort to dominate the world and solve the urgent problems of climate change at the same time. If we forgo our largely corporate ‘interests’ and seriously invest in our nation and in limiting global warming and preserving the biosphere, we can lead the world away from the climate catastrophe to a more secure future.

Peter G Cohen, artist and activist, has been concerned about the environment since he lived among subsisance farmers in the 1930s.  In the 1980s his painting series, “Syngamy,” called attention to the toxic threats to the human gene pool. (see petergcohen.com)   A veteran of W.W.II, he was an independent peace candidate for Congress in 1968 and the Exec. Dir. of the New Dermocratic Coalition of Pa in 1969-70. He is the author of the website nukefreeworld.com and other internet articles. He lives in Santa Barbara, where he can be reached at <aerie2@verizon.net>