18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY september 7-13, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com Extinction Agenda As the world loses time to act, American foreign policy is working to dominate a ruined planet. By Spencer Ackerman FORUM In April 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the sort of warning that would galvanize a sane society into historic action. Unless greenhouse gas emissions cease rising by 2025, humanity will not be able to limit the warming of the planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which the worst ravages of climate change might still be avoided—though not all of them, just the most catastrophic. The choice is between a globe-spanning initiative to halve emissions by 2030, thereby giving us a chance of remaining within the 1.5-degree threshold, or a 21st century defined by an increasingly uninhabitable world. Seventeen months have passed since the IPCC’s warning. Summer 2023 featured the hottest July ever recorded. Lahaina, once a paradise, lies in ruins from the worst U.S. wildfire in over a century, with at least 115 people dead. As horrific as the blackened ruins of Maui are, it’s a prologue of what nature has in store for our communities if nothing changes. Yet American foreign-policy thinking operates as if none of this is happening—or, rather, as if foreign policy has better things to do than mitigate the advance of global devastation. Advocates of the great-power-competition framework typically argue that there is no inherent trade-off between competition and addressing the climate crisis. The Biden administration’s 2022 national security strategy, which built on the 2018 defense strategy of the Trump administration, pledges cooperation with rival powers “to address shared challenges in an era of competition.” Among all of our shared international problems, it calls climate change “the greatest and potentially existential.” The language is revealing. There is nothing remotely “existential” to Americans or anyone else about the U.S. losing geopolitical primacy, which for Washington (if not Beijing) are the stakes of great-power competition. There is most certainly something “existential” to Americans and everyone else about less of the world being habitable. On paper, it’s easy to exempt from imperial struggle the mutual challenges that the great powers face. It’s less feasible in practice. In July, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry visited Beijing to restart climate talks after Biden took measures to restrict China’s access to semiconductors, a crucial component of economic and military growth. Kerry wanted China to accelerate phasing out its carbon emissions, but as the economist Dean Baker explained, the argument that Beijing “must be denied the opportunity to improve the living standards of their people because we messed up the planet so badly” is unlikely to sway anyone in China. Averting mass death and even civilizational collapse ought to be the central organizing principle of U.S. grand strategy. To do otherwise, as both major parties and the security apparatus prefer, is to pursue an agenda that marches toward extinction. And there aren’t many months on the IPCC’s calendar left. Spencer Ackerman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is the author of Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. OPINION It’s a prologue of what nature has in store.
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