DS

To map out an effective prevention program to avoid catastrophic climate change, it is necessary to address both the message of the climate justice movement and its stated goals. This includes identifying the potential blind spots and even the bad prescriptions being offered by both climate groups and individual climate activists.

One of the major blind spots of the climate justice movement is its insufficient attention to how fossil-fuel combustion and the lack of clean energy are killing millions of people across the globe every year, especially in Asia. As a result, recent estimates point to 3 to 7 million people per year dying from air pollution, with 1.6 million in China alone.

In the US, numerous epidemiological studies have found a strong linkage between air pollution and childhood asthma, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Indeed, it’s difficult for even climate change deniers to dismiss the harmfulness of air pollution. Connecting the dots between fossil-fuel consumption and adverse health impacts from air pollution is a fertile strategy for highlighting environmental injustice and strengthening the movement against climate change both in the US and especially in the Global South.

Even more important is grappling with the critical obstacles posed by militarism and imperialism, both of which are integral to actually existing capitalism in the twenty-first century. Aside from the “No War, No Warming” initiative during the Iraq War, the climate justice movement has overlooked the central role of militarism and imperialism in both contributing to climate change and blocking the implementation of a prevention program.

The major culprit in climate change is not only the fossil-fuel industry but also the military-industrial complex, which sits at the center of capital reproduction on the planet. The phenomenon Dwight Eisenhower warned of in 1961 is a hundred times bigger now; more than a mere lobby, as Eisenhower conceived, it is a globally integrated system of production, powered largely by fossil fuels — even as the American military goes “green” by adopting solar power in its global bases.

The importance of the military-industrial complex in climate change is largely ignored by leaders in the climate justice movement like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein. While Klein’s This Changes Everything is a very valuable contribution, especially as a critique of neoliberal capitalism, it fails to identify and map out a plan to overcome the military-industrial complex and its imperial agenda, which prevents the establishment of a global cooperative regime to rapidly curb carbon emissions and create a wind and solar power infrastructure.

Klein briefly alludes to the imperial obstacle when she identifies the US military as the biggest consumer of petroleum on the planet and points to its budget as a potential source of revenue for a prevention program to avoid catastrophic climate change. But she fails to confront why the military-industrial complex is such a huge roadblock.