Military Industrial Complex responsible for huge greenhouse gas emissions

Change the Military-Industrial Complex, not the Climate, America’s Program By Alfredo Acedo | 31 / August / 2015 This year, the governments of the world will meet in Paris for the 21st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21). Their goal will be to try to come to a binding universal agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They will negotiate a new protocol—the Paris Protocol—this time obligatory for all nations. And just like in the debates leading up to it, during the meetings of COP21, two incompatible positions will be represented:

To keep doing business with the climate crisis, without substantially reducing emissions nor questioning the dominant economic and social model, at the risk of changing the climate dangerously and irreversibly past the border of the oft-cited 2 degrees Celsius…or to change the system.

The first position will be dominant at the COP21, represented by the governments aligned with Washington and corporations. The second will be defended by social movements and civil organizations around the world, through massive demonstrations and representatives who will attend the alternative space of the People’s Summit, also in Paris. The People’s Summit will be surrounded by the geopolitical-military interests of the United States that revolve around oil..

The United States government, after historically staying on the sidelines of the international agreements to reduce emissions, now intends to lead the process. But President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the recent US domestic policy proposal regarding climate change that was announced as “the biggest step yet to combat climate change” leading up to the Paris Summit, has proved to be the mountain in labor: a mouse that will try to limit carbon emissions from coal power plants (truly anachronistic beasts), by 32 percent in comparison with 2005, over the next 15 years.[1] A government that makes such ineffectual efforts domestically will offer only ineffectual leadership to the international effort to stop climate change.

If the new standards for energy production put forward in President Obama’s Clean Power Plan (which have unleashed the hysteria of the Republican right), many plants will be forced to close. However, these plants should have closed years ago; by virtue of not being subject to regulation, they have been able to contaminate with impunity and have continued operating for double their life expectancy.

Beyond nice-sounding phrases (“we are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last generation that can do something about it”), the Plan’s diagnostic element, which corresponds to scientific consensus, does little more than underline the huge gap between the seriousness of the issue, which Obama admits, and the insufficient measures that the Plan contains. It does not look at the contaminating industry as a whole, and it does not take back the administration’s actions that led to fracking and gave a green light to Shell for Arctic drilling.

The Pentagon and Petroleum

Obama used a meeting with the Pentagon to argue that climate change presents national security risks, but he would never even consider including the armed forces in his emissions reduction plan.

The military-industrial complex that holds power in the world is the principle levee holding back the currents that are trying to limit and eventually do away with our civilization’s addiction to fossil fuels.

What is the institution that consumes the most petroleum in the world? The Yankee army.[2] Who guarantees the continued hegemony of the global system led by oil companies (and others)? The Yankee army.

This is why the transition to clean and renewable energy sources is so difficult. …….

There is no time to wait for renewable energy to achieve the density that the military industrial complex requires. The change needs to take place in the short term—in the current decade, let’s say—and this means reducing not only emissions but also energy consumption itself, and radically transforming our transportation systems, production and consumption.

Background Changes

The climate crisis obligates us to make deep changes in the development model, the capitalist system and in civilization itself. In order to avoid the worst climate effects, it is urgent that we abandon the logic of infinite growth (unviable in a finite world), that we reduce consumption of energy and that we accelerate the transition to clean and renewable sources.

But it is also necessary to do away with poverty. Close to one billion people in the planet go to sleep every day near the limits of survival. If there is something that characterizes the global capitalist world—in addition to planetary militarization—it is the enormous gap between rich and poor, which has grown tremendously in the last 30 years. Militarism and poverty are two sides of the same coin. It is estimated that with close to 5% of current military spending, extreme poverty could be eradicated.[6]

A new model of development, one that would correct the deviations that have brought humanity to a dead end, should be based on economic solidarity, food sovereignty and Good Living. The economy should produce wellbeing for all without destroying the environment. The society would create harmony to the extent that all benefits would have an equal impact, without exploiting workers, discriminating against women, or violating social rights and individual guarantees.

This crisis demands that we put a stop to free-market globalization and simultaneously end militarism, two very expensive elements of the current dominant system. http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/16005