The Blood-Dimmed Tide
Climate change is poised to alter the face of global conflict.
It’s the year 2100. The nationalist ideology popularized by Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson has not only retained its hold on industrialized nations, but also expanded amid conditions of climate upheaval. Many of the world’s major powers have spent the last several decades focusing on themselves. Borders have closed. International investments in education and technology have declined. The divide between the developed and undeveloped world has widened.
No sane soul denies now that the world is warming, though some keep trying. Still others in the camp of nationalist reaction have taken to insisting the earth’s wrath is God’s punishment instead of humanity’s folly. But the evidence is all too crushingly plain that the violent, convulsive new world order taking shape in this moment of climate reckoning is entirely the handiwork of a fatal set of preventable human system failures. It’s been an excruciatingly slow-motion disaster, engineered by shortsighted, power-obsessed leaders hell-bent on denying scientific truths—and blocking the basic measures to mitigate carbon emissions and stave off drought, rising ocean tides, and mass migrations of climate-traumatized populations to higher ground in increasingly xenophobic and belligerent rich Western nations.
With all these catastrophic scenarios now daily facts of life, the specter of climate upheaval—long held forth as the urgent, and quite possibly final, imperative to overcome tribal political divisions and the human race’s retrograde hoarding instincts—is acting as an accelerant of global conflict, plunging nationalist powers into a regressive rivalry to seize scarce resources and deny access to putative outsiders of all descriptions. The lineaments of a more equitable, sustainable, and cooperative world sketched out by advocates of a Green New Deal have given way, in stunningly short order, to a race to a new global bottom, equal parts Thomas Hobbes and Mad Max.
Thanks Ivan
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