From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject We Must Dismantle the War Machine to Avoid the Climate Catastrophe
Date November 7, 2019 5:41 AM
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[ The U.S. military has released 1.2 billion metric tons of
greenhouse gases since the start of the global war on terror in 2001.
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WE MUST DISMANTLE THE WAR MACHINE TO AVOID THE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE  
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Jodie Evans
November 7, 2019
Independent Media Institute
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_ The U.S. military has released 1.2 billion metric tons of
greenhouse gases since the start of the global war on terror in 2001.
_

Jodie Evans being arrested in Washington, D.C. climate protest.,
CODEPINK

 

Here we are, a full three decades after NASA scientist James Hansen
raised the specter of a looming climate crisis with Congress
[[link removed]],
looking at the first generation of severely impacted youth and telling
them they’re right: We have completely squandered their future. For
too long, our dominant culture has practiced unsustainable growth and
consumption, ushering in the end of a habitable planet and with it
civilization as we know it. Those most impacted are the communities
who have contributed the least to climate change, a direct extension
of the settler colonization project that has unfolded across the globe
over hundreds of years.

Jane Fonda and her Fire Drill Fridays are linking social movements
across issues, eyeing the connections between the myriad problems we
see causing climate chaos, many of them rooted in capitalist consumer
culture. From the need to tease apart incarceration from profit to
outrage at our treatment of asylum-seekers at our southern border,
we’ve witnessed rapid wins
[[link removed]] in
the movement to divest public dollars from the private prison industry
after years of hard work behind the scenes. The same asylum-seekers
who are fleeing nations ravaged by wars and conflicts—many driven
directly by U.S. policy—and the impacts of climate crisis
[[link removed]] are being held in
appalling conditions in concentration camps and prisons, many of them
run by the private prison industry. We are encouraged by
intersectional organizing, and thrilled that Jane is connecting the
dots that link militarism, weapons corporations, migration, and the
climate crisis. We are clear on the impact: the Pentagon is the
single largest consumer of oil on the planet
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but the nationwide call for a Green New Deal has not yet given
attention to our military spending as either a massive driver of the
climate crisis that cannot be ignored, nor as a source of much-needed
funding for a project as massive as the Green New Deal.

Movements to divest from the military and movements to divest from
fossil fuels often face the same bad actors. Recent actions
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the massive asset manager BlackRock are drawing attention to their
investments in companies behind Amazon deforestation. Investing in
these companies undermines our ability to maintain a livable planet,
namely by destroying the forests that are the lungs of the earth in
the Amazon basin. Here at CODEPINK, we have also given considerable
attention to BlackRock because they are the world’s top investor in
weapons manufacturers, but even this more explicitly anti-war action
connects to the climate crisis. The same weapons that are used in wars
and conflicts all over the world are a crucial component of the war
machine that makes up a significant portion of the Pentagon’s fossil
fuel use—the U.S. military has released 1.2 billion metric tons of
greenhouse gases since the start of the global war on terror in 2001
[[link removed]].
Moreover, those same weapons are a major factor in conflicts that lead
to migration by asylum-seekers—weapons that are in turn produced by
corporations that are propped up by our public dollars, to the
detriment of our communities
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When our public institutions invest public money in weapons
corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics,
and Northrop Grumman, they are underpinning the war machine
that draws public dollars away from projects benefiting our
communities
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puts them into an already bloated defense budget. There is a clear
thread running from the Pentagon budget to weapons corporations to our
impoverished communities to migrants fleeing wars and drought to
greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis. Imagine a snake
consuming its own body: that is the war machine’s connection to
climate breakdown. We must begin rapidly removing our public dollars
from the war machine if we are to save humanity and the
planet—which, like the climate crisis and the war machine, cannot be
separated.

The time has arrived to build the next big divestment movement made up
of people coming together across the planet to divest from the war
machine—by withdrawing our public dollars from weapons corporations
and putting them into local needs, including local green new deals,
housing, health care, and education. The path to divestment has been
laid by successful movements before ours; it is paved with the South
African Apartheid regime, with coal and gas extraction companies, with
gun manufacturers and tobacco companies, and with the private prison
industry. The opportunities for divestment from the war machine
abound. Cities, public pension funds, and university endowments invest
public dollars in private corporations that often include weapons
corporations, and elected public servants often accept campaign
contributions from weapons-makers. Together we can demand that they
divest because it is morally unacceptable to build our communities on
top of global conflicts. At the same time, we must demand that we
instead invest our public resources in projects that positively impact
our communities, starting first with a rapid response to the climate
crisis that is exacerbated by endless wars.

Join Jane Fonda Thursday night, November 7, for her teach-in on the
connections between war and climate chaos. On Friday, I will bring
this message to the Fire Drill Friday rally on the east lawn of the
U.S. Capitol to call on all of us to engage to Divest from War
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to call out the current resident who just took steps to pull out of
the Paris Climate Agreement. Join in person or on the Fire Drill
Friday livestream [[link removed]].

_Jodie Evans is an activist and co-founder of CODEPINK
[[link removed]]._

_This article was produced by Local Peace Economy
[[link removed]], a
project of the Independent Media Institute._

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