Internationalism or Extinction

Noam Chomsky, Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, Paul Shannon, Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, Paul Shannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000751819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Controllo degli armamenti

In his new book, Noam Chomsky writes cogently about the threats to planetary survival that are of growing alarm today. The prospect of human extinction emerged after World War II, the dawn of a new era scientists now term the Anthropocene. Chomsky uniquely traces the duality of existential threats from nuclear weapons and from climate change—including how the concerns emerged and evolved, and how the threats can interact with one another. The introduction and accompanying interviews place these dual threats in a framework of unprecedented corporate global power which has overtaken nation states' ability to control the future and preserve the planet. Chomsky argues for the urgency of international climate and arms agreements, showing how global popular movements are mobilizing to force governments to meet this unprecedented challenge to civilization's survival.

1 The Twin Threats

Extinction and internationalism have been linked in a fateful embrace ever since the moment when the threat of extinction became an all too realistic concern, August 6th, 1945. It’s a day that will never be forgotten by those who were alive then and had their eyes open – a day I personally remember very well. On that day, we learned that human intelligence had devised the means to bring the human experiment of 200,000 years to an end.

It was never seriously in doubt from the first moment that the capacity to destroy would escalate and it would diffuse to other hands – increasing the threat of self-annihilation. In the years that followed, the record of near misses is appalling, sometimes from accident and error, a few shocking cases from recklessness, and the threat is growing ominously. A review of the record reveals clearly that escape from catastrophe for 70 years has been a near miracle and such miracles cannot be trusted to perpetuate themselves.

On that grim day in August 1945, humanity entered into a new era, the Nuclear Age. It’s one that’s unlikely to last long: either we will bring it to an end, or it’s likely to bring us to an end. It was evident at once that any hope of containing the demon would require international cooperation. By the fall of 1945, a book calling for world federal government reached the top of the bestseller list – it was written by Winston Churchill’s literary agent, Emery Reves.¹

Albert Einstein was only one of those who reacted by calling for a world government – that is what he called the political answer to the shattering events of August 1945. They recognized these to be a turning point in human history and, perhaps, the opening of its final stage. Hopes that the United Nations might begin to fulfill [the world government] function were quickly dashed – in itself an important topic but one that I do not explore here.

It was not understood at the time, but a second and no less critical new era was beginning at the same time – a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. It’s an epoch defined by extreme human impact on the environment. Now it’s understood that we are well into this new epoch, but there have been disagreements among scientists about just when change became so extreme as to signal the onset of the Anthropocene. In April 2016, the Anthropocene Working Group, an official geological organization, reached a conclusion on the onset of the epoch. They recommended to the 35th International Geological Congress that the dawn of the Anthropocene should be given the time frame that begins after the end of World War II.²

According to their analysis then, the Anthropocene and the Nuclear Age coincide; it’s a dual threat to the perpetuation of organized human life. Both threats are severe and imminent. It’s widely recognized that we have entered the period of the sixth mass extinction. The fifth extinction, 66 million years ago, is generally attributed to an asteroid – a huge asteroid that hit the Earth destroying 75% of the species on Earth. It ended the age of the dinosaurs and opened a way for the rise of small mammals – and ultimately humans about 200,000 years ago.

It hasn’t taken us long to bring about the sixth extinction, which is expected to be similar in scale to the earlier ones, though differing in an instructive way. In the mass extinctions that long predate humans, body size was not correlated with extinction. It was kind of an equal opportunity killer – independent of your body size. In the human-generated sixth extinction, which is now underway, the larger animals are being killed disproportionately.

That actually extends a record that traces back to our early proto-human ancestors. They were a predatory species that caused significant harm to large organisms, wiped many of them out, with themselves not too far in the distance. The human capacity to destroy one another on a massive scale has not been in doubt for a long time, and it reached a hideous peak in the past century. The Anthropocene Working Group reaffirms the conclusion that climate-warming CO₂ emissions are increasing in the atmosphere at the fastest rate in 66 million years.

The Rim Fire in the Stanislaus National Forest in California, August 17, 2013.

Source: United States Department of Agriculture (public domain).

They cite a report last July (2016) that particles of CO₂ reached over 400 parts per million (ppm) and that the level is rising at a rate unprecedented in the geological record. Subsequent studies have revealed that figure was not a fluctuation. It appears to be permanent, a base for further growth, and that figure, the 400 ppm, has been regarded as a critical danger point. It’s perilously close to the estimated level of stability of the huge Antarctic ice sheet. Collapse of the ice sheet would have catastrophic consequences for sea level, and these processes are already underway quite ominously in the Arctic regions.

The broader picture is no less ominous and practically every month breaks new temperature records; huge droughts are threatening survival for hundreds of millions of people. These are also factors in some of the most horrendous conflicts, Darfur and now Syria. Some 31.5 million people are displaced by disasters such as floods and storms every year; that’s a predicted effect of global warming, that’s almost one person, every second. These are considerably more than those fleeing from war and terror. The numbers are bound to increase as glaciers melt and sea levels rise, threatening water supplies for vast numbers of people.

The melting of Himalayan glaciers may eliminate the water supply for South Asia, several billion people. In Bangladesh alone, tens of millions are expected to flee in coming decades simply because of sea-level rise; it’s a flat coastal plain. That’s a refugee crisis that will make today’s pale into insignificance and it’s barely the beginning. With some justice, Bangladesh’s leading climate scientists said recently that these migrants should have the right to move to countries from where all these greenhouse gasses are coming – that millions should be able to go to the United States, which raises a moral issue here of no slight triviality.

Puerto Rico, the morning after Hurricane Maria, September 19, 2017.

Photo: Roosevelt Skerrit (public domain).

Well I won’t take time to review the larger record; I presume most of you are pretty familiar with it, but it should be deeply alarming and to anyone concerned with the fate of the species and the other species that we are destroying with abandon. It’s not in the far future; it’s happening right now – it’s going to escalate sharply. It’s always been evident that any effective measures to contain the threat of environmental catastrophe would have to be global in scope.

International efforts to avert catastrophe were advanced in the Paris negotiations with COP 21 in 2016. It should have gone into force in October 2016. The date was brought forward out of the concern that a Republican victory in 2016 might dismantle what had been achieved – not very much, but something. In fact, Republican denialism already had a significant impact. It was hoped that the Paris negotiations would lead to a verifiable treaty, but that hope was abandoned because the Republican congress would not accept any binding commitment.

What emerged was a voluntary agreement – evidently much weaker. In October 2016, a very significant agreement was reached to phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbons.³ HFCs are super-polluting greenhouse gasses. It’s delayed for a time for India and Pakistan, where increasing heat and awful poverty make cheap air conditioners which use HCFs a desperate necessity. The right response is evident. The rich countries should provide subsidies to accelerate the provision of non-HFC devices, the kind we use. Nothing like that seems to have been proposed, and if it were, its fate would probably have been the same as that of a verifiable treaty.

We might stop for a moment to ponder a most extraordinary fact: a major political organization in the most powerful country in the world’s history is quite literally dedicated to the destruction of much of life on Earth. That might seem to be an unfair comment, but a little reflection will show that it’s not. Right now, [in October 2016] we are reaching the end of the quadrennial electoral frenzy. In the Republican primaries, every single candidate denied the facts about climate change.

There was one exception, the “sensible moderate” John Kasich, who said, “Yes, it’s happening, but we shouldn’t do anything about it” – which is arguably even worse. So that’s a 100% rejection. The winning candidate, as you know, calls for more use of fossil fuels, including coal, the most destructive. He is also for dismantling regulation, and for refusing funds to developing societies that are trying to move to sustainable energy such as, for example, non-polluting air conditioners in India – in every possible way, accelerating the race to disaster.

A house burns during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, November 2018.

Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images.

When you consider the stakes, it’s a fair question whether there has ever been a more dangerous organization in human history than today’s Republican Party. It’s a fair question, and I think the answer is pretty clear. It’s equally remarkable that these astonishing facts pass with virtually no comment. The campaign commentary about it proceeds at a level of vulgar triviality. We’ll hear more of it in the presidential debates, with scarcely a glance at policy issues and almost nothing about the most critical questions that have ever arisen in human history – questions of literal survival in the short term. This is amazing blindness as the lemmings march to the precipice! In the past years, there has been extensive euphoric coverage of the prospects for energy independence – “a hundred years of energy independence” – with occasional comments on the local impact of fracking but scarcely a word pointing out that the euphoria amounts to an enthusiastic call for the sixth extinction to swallow us up as well.

Floodwaters continue to inundate southwest Iowa. Floodwaters surround corn under a collapsed grain bin in this aerial photograph over Thurman, Iowa, on Saturday March 23, 2019. The deluge devastated much of the Midwest, making 2019 one of the worst years for flooding in the US.

Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

August 31, 2005, a man pushes his bicycle through floodwaters near the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina left much of the city under water. Some of those who took shelter from Hurricane Harvey (2017) in Houston’s Convention Center may have had flashbacks to this previous storm. Elected officials in Texas promised to heed the lessons from Katrina, which resulted in hundreds of deaths and tens of billions of dollars in damage.

Photo: AP Photo/Eric Gay, File

Similarly, the growing threat of nuclear disaster, which is real and severe, barely elicits a comment. The two most important issues in all of human history, on which the fate of species depends, are virtually missing from the extensive commentary on the choice of leader for the most powerful country in world history and from the electoral extravaganza itself. It’s not easy to find words to capture the enormity of this extraordinary blindness and perhaps words like these,

… my imagination will not set bounds to the daring depravity of the times as the stock jobbers will become the pretorian band of the government, at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations.⁴

Well, as you can tell from the quote’s style, that’s not from today, it’s James Madison, in 1791, wondering about the fate of the new democratic experiment – not a bad description of the state it has reached 225 years later.

From the dawn of the nuclear age, there have been halting steps towards an international response that could contain the threat of nuclear war – or better maybe terminate the threat by eliminating these monstrous devices. One major step was the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. In that treaty, the five nuclear states committed themselves to what were called good-faith efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. Other signers pledge...