Elephant In The Climate Room: Rocket Launches

As many readers of this blog know, I've spent years collecting research and reporting on the climate harms of militarism. When I began this was an obscure perspective shared by few; it is now mainstream in climate movements (as long as they are not controlled by the Democratic Party, that is).

Sept. 17, 2023, New York City. WW PHOTO: Monica Moorehead 
Source: Workers World "Mass march targets Biden for an 'End to fossil fuels'"  

So it is gratifying to see this fact of modern life represented at last weekend's big climate march in New York City.

Sept. 17, 2023, New York City. WW PHOTO: Monica Moorehead 
Source: Workers World 

Other points of view also trend in that direction.

Sept. 17, 2023, New York City. WW PHOTO: Marsha Goldberg
Source: Workers World

If capitalism is the root cause of rapidly warming oceans and extreme weather events, then the wars that are necessary to sustain capitalism are implicated.

But what about war in space, which is already well underway even if few realize it? The proliferation of rocket launches in recent years and the accompanying environmental damage are almost never mentioned in reporting on either space topics or military topics.

This coming weekend I'll attend Maine's biggest annual green lifestyle event, the Common Ground Fair. It draws thousands from all over the region for a "celebration of country living" sponsored by the Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association.

On Sunday morning in the political and social action tent a group of us will update fairgoers on plans to build a rocket launch site on the coast of Maine. Steuben is within sight of Acadia National Park, and the floating launch pad proposed would sit amid lobster fishing and seaweed harvesting activities already generating jobs and providing sustenance for the last several decades.

The town of Steuben is outlined in red. The proposed launch site would float just off the coast.

The plan is for up to 30 launches each year between Memorial Day and Labor Day of rockets roughly the height of a mature White Pine. 

Noise from tests of the proposed engine developed by blueShift Aerospace in Brunswick is so loud that parents report their child woke up frightened and crying after hearing it in his sleep. Toxic fallout from rocket launches reaches as high as the stratosphere, where soot particles linger and damage ozone. Toxic fallout from rocket launches in other states has polluted wetlands, breeding grounds, and beaches. And when rocket launches fail -- as they often do -- forests burn and areas several miles wide are littered with debris like concrete.

All rocket site construction involves toxic substances, including the PFAS foam used for fire fighting and stored in vast quantities on site until it may be needed. And when rockets and satellites fall from the sky, they disintegrate into a chemical soup that then falls to Earth. Mass deaths of birds and other animals have been observed at rocket launch sites in other states.

Maine was once considered Vacationland because of its deep forests, clean water, beautiful shoreline, and abundance of foods like lobsters, trout, and clams.

Although organized lobster fishermen in Jonesport blocked the construction of the toxic launch site in their fishing grounds, Steuben has not been so lucky. Resident Larch Hanson is ready to sue blueShift's CEO for trampling on the democratic process and putting his seaweed harvesting business at risk. The town government of Steuben has squelched discussion of the rocket launch site plan and silenced critics, according to Hanson.

It's worth noting that a bill rushed through supposedly as "emergency" legislation and passed under the gavel (i.e. without a roll call vote) established a private-public partnership called the Maine Space Corporation to support just this kind of project. So undemocratic methods are a signature of bringing rocket launches to Vacationland.

SOURCE: The Independent "Fire at SpaceX launch site burns 68 acres at protected refuge, killing wildlife"

But isn't space cool? you may ask. And educational?

All space programs are inherently military in nature, no matter what NASA or the University of Maine tell you. Every rocket launch site built on other pristine coasts such as Kodiak, Alaska or Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand was sold to local residents as non-military but once built has been used extensively and repeatedly to launch military satellites. (More details on that here.)

As a retired educator, I know STEM fans will enthuse about how much science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education will be advanced by projects such as this one. STEM educators in Australia are currently excited about how middle school students will be involved in projects connected to nuclear submarines the U.S. is forcing on them despite considerable pushback from the public. 

STEM can be a force for good, but not when it's used as a cover up for militarizing education and other public resources.

I have been astonished at the lack of interest among environmentalists who I might have expected would oppose building a rocket launch site on the Maine coast. No doubt it's partly attributable to the slavish reprinting of bluShift press releases as "news" in corporate media. 

I'm hopeful that we can raise some awareness of this issue at the Common Ground Fair this weekend. 

Destroying The Ozone Layer, One Rocket Launch At A Time

Sharing a guest post today by a long time activist around the environmental threats of militarism. (Images added.) Newspapers local to Vandenberg SFB didn't want to publish this fine op-ed, preferring instead to regurgitate government and corporate press releases that boost militarized space programs.

Vandenberg Space Programs Threaten Santa Barbara

by Nina Beety

 Why is the ozone layer deteriorating despite international action such as the ban on CFCs? The misleading green and blue on NASA’s maps actually signifies low ozone.

The aerospace industry is a major factor. Dallas et al (2020): [O]zone depletion is one of the largest environmental concerns surrounding rocket launches from Earth.” NASA discovered in 2007 that UV-C and UV-B were already reaching the Earth but failed to act. UV radiation is having lethal effects on species now.

Rockets destroy ozone. Rocket emissions from the four principal fuel types “cause prompt and deep ozone loss (approaching 100%) in the immediate plume wake, caused by the radical emissions, over areas of hundreds of square miles lasting several days after launch. These stratospheric ‘‘ozone mini-holes’’ have been well observed in situ by high altitude aircraft plume sampling campaigns.”(Ross et al, 2009) Radicals are oxides of hydrogen, nitrogen, bromine, and chlorine. “Stratospheric ozone levels are controlled by catalytic chemical reactions driven by only trace amounts of reactive gases and particles…A single radical molecule emitted into the stratosphere, for example, can destroy up to ~10⁵ [100,000] ozone molecules before being deactivated and transported out of the stratosphere. ..[D]irect injection into the stratosphere over a limited area (a rocket plume, for example) will cause a prompt, localized, ozone ‘‘hole.’’

Vandenberg is damaging the ozone layer locally over Santa Barbara County now. Yet the Coastal Commission in June quietly approved SpaceX’s expansion there to 36 launches per year, and in September, will likely approve a new Phantom Space Company space complex at Vandenberg and allow 48 rocket launches per year. That’s 1.5 launches per week, and more projects are coming. Commission staff claim their hands are tied.

The shockwave of de-orbiting debris, satellites, and rockets creates nitric oxide which also destroys ozone.

Further, the sun makes ozone and replenishes the ozone layer in the stratosphere, but rocket pollutants there, including exhaust, water vapor, soot, and alumina, block the sun’s rays from repairing the ozone layer. And those rocket byproducts accumulate with every launch, persisting for up to three years before falling out.

Researchers including Martin Ross, Darin Toohey, and James Vedda have repeatedly warned the industry that public awareness could curtail rocket launches.

The long-lived aerospace pollution also acts like an insulating blanket, trapping Earth’s natural and human-made heat from venting into space. This will cause planetary warming and destabilize the climate.

Other serious problems exist. Aerospace pollution and explosions contaminate land, air, water, and ocean, harming wildlife. Nuclear spacecraft are being developed. Orbital congestion has created collision risks. And when rockets and satellites de-orbit, they burn and disintegrate into dust, gases, and flaming debris that fall down; the FCC proposes a 1 in 10,000 casualty risk from fall-out as “acceptable”.

Results of a SpaceX launch fail that caused a forest fire in Texas

Satellite systems also increase RF-EMF radiation exposure globally, damaging health and disrupting wildlife’s ability to navigate by Earth’s natural EMF fields. Bees, insects, and birds are particularly vulnerable. The U.S. Department of Interior warned in 2014 about this radiation’s devastating impacts to birds, and in 2020, a New Mexico 5G “live fire” drill by SpaceX and the military may have killed up to several million birds in the region. Emissions just discovered from SpaceX equipment may also interfere with the magnetosphere and Earth’s natural electric circuit, leading to extreme weather.

Federal and state legislators ignore this toxic reality.

In 2020, there were 2000 satellites total in the sky. By 2021, the number rose to 4800, the FCC approved 17,270 low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, with 65,912 more applications pending, while governments and private companies planned an additional 30,947+ (Firstenberg, 2022). More are coming. These numbers don’t include medium earth orbit (MEO) satellites or rockets into space.

LEOs are short-lived, needing frequent replacement. Science author Arthur Firstenberg: “In 2021, there were 146 orbital rocket launches to put 1,800 satellites into space. At that rate, to maintain and continually replace 100,000 low-earth-orbit satellites, which have a lifespan of five years, would require more than 1,600 rocket launches per year, or more than four every day, forever into the future.”  Aleksandr Dunayev of the Russian Space Agency said in 1991: “About 300 launches of the [space] shuttle each year would be a catastrophe, and the ozone layer would be completely destroyed.”

This is a worldwide problem. There is no environmental oversight. That is unacceptable.

It’s long past time to strip back the curtain and expose the aerospace industry, including space tourism and military programs. Those who want to stop climate change and protect the ozone layer and the Earth must take action.

More information:

freethesky.org

safetechinternational.org

space4peace.org

bbilan.org/hhtisatellites

Burning Man Or Drowning Man? Climate Apparently Can't Change Human Behavior

My friend and neighbor is a past chief of the Penobscot Nation here in Wabanaki territory. He's been on social media recently harshly criticizing indigenous elders who fly in to big conferences about -- well, anything really. His point: flying harms the climate significantly, and anyone who claims to be concerned about the environment should not be flying.

I thought of his long-standing advice when hearing about the Burning Man festival this year being inundated with rain and then immobilized by mud. One person has died out of approximately 70,000 who are locked down in the campsite since motoring, bicycling, or even walking through the thick, soupy mud is nearly impossible. And there's more rain on the way.

Mud photos by Trevor Hughes/USA Today Network

This made me think of another friend, an adventurous grandmother who traveled to Burning Man this year. I hope she's okay. When she told me she was finally going to attend after years of wanting to, I realized how much I avoid large crowds that I would have gleefully joined in my youth. Maybe it was the experience of attending a solar eclipse festival in India in 1980 with one million people? Or maybe it was traveling to big antiwar demonstrations in various U.S. cities that led me to reflect on why my political advocacy carbon footprint was so big.

"Phoenix" was the first of several burnings at the festival this year, with a trident emerging from the ashes that creators said represents the resilience of Ukrainian people.

Another notable thing about Burning Man 2023 is that the festival opened with an homage to Ukraine. From Evan Haddad writing in the Reno Gazette Journal:

The project was funded by Come Back Alive, a foundation that provides support to service members in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The organization, which was created by Ukraine's deputy minister of defense, Vitality Deynega, purchases equipment to help equip Ukrainian service members.

The creators probably knew it would play well with a wealthy audience that is heavily invested in the military-industrial complex: "Charter planes are descending on the Nevada desert -- and the pop-up Black Rock City airport -- as tech bros and billionaires gather for Burning Man" wrote Grace Kay in Business Insider.

One of the estimated 2,000 private plane flights to Burning Man, which has its own pop-up airport each year. Credit: FlightAware.

 

But what it reminded me of was this piece I had just seen in Canada's Globe and Mail: “Ukraine’s substandard medical supplies are endangering soldiers as the war intensifies.” 

Vladyslav Wolovin and Anton Skyba posting from Kyiv wrote:

“This guy should have survived,” Dr. Sobolevskyy said, as he recounted treating an injured soldier at a stabilization point in Orikhove, less than five kilometres from the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Despite the short distance, it took several hours for the soldier to be safely evacuated to the medical post. He arrived with three tourniquets that had been tightly wrapped around his legs by fellow soldiers. One was broken. None of them created enough pressure to prevent blood loss. “Simply put, he bled to death because of these substandard tourniquets”

Nowhere in the article is corruption named as a contributing factor, but medical volunteers shared that they've tried in vain to go through official channels in Ukraine to remedy the problem of sub-standard medical supplies. Ironically, the very corrupt Biden administration scolded Ukrainian officials over corruption this week and invoked the rule of law (doubtful if the Ukrainians brought up Julian Assange).

We aren't going to burn, fly, or bomb our way out of climate catastrophe. NATO's proxy war on Russia in Ukraine has been terrible for the environment, including climate. But hey Lockheed Martin made a lot of money off the Ukrainian people's suffering! Never mind the globally widespread flooding and off the charts temperatures this summer in the northern hemisphere. Gaze upon your stock portfolio instead!

Book Review: The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War

The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions by Dr. Neta Crawford (MIT Press, 2022) could have been called Fully Burdened: The True Cost Of Energy Consumed by the Pentagon. "Fully burdened" is a concept that comes up repeatedly as Crawford examines what raw data she can find on military fuel use and its greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).  

Pentagon white papers define the Fully Burdened Cost of Fuel as:

The commodity price for fuel plus the total cost of all personnel and assets required to move and, when necessary, protect the fuel from the point at which the fuel is received from the commercial supplier to the point of use.

Did you notice that GHG emissions are not included in the Pentagon's definition of full cost? Therein lies the thesis of Crawford's book.

As a full professor at Oxford University in Politics & International Relations, and as co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University here in the U.S., Crawford's research has focused on an attempt to quantify military GHG emissions mostly by extrapolating from fuel purchase and usage data. This is necessary because, in a process detailed in her book, the U.S. has long insisted that the emissions of its military (and even intelligence sector) are privileged information not for the likes of us.

The Pentagon has steadily reduced its GHG emissions over the last two decades (mostly by closing bases and ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), it has developed many alternatives to fossil fuel use, and it extensively studies and prepares for climate crisis events that affect its installations and functions. However, Crawford and the rest of us are unable to account for why an obsession with "security" threatened by global climate change does not translate into an awareness of how the military itself -- still, and for years, the biggest consumer of fossil fuels in the federal government AND the biggest single institutional consumer of fossil fuels on the planet -- contributes to insecurity.

Crawford writes: 

In the late 1990s, U.S. political leadership had a choice to make. The United States could emphasize national security, which had traditionally been understood as requiring military force to protect national power and shape world events. This is security understood as the capacity to project power everywhere, essentially any time, to preserve U.S. global military dominance and promofte[sic] its economic interests. This was the familiar path, rooted in deep cycles of consumption, fossil fuel demand, military forces to protect access to fossil fuels..and back again, recursively, to ever higher levels of fossil fuel use and emissions.

Or the U.S. government and military leaders could have chosen an alternative path -- to take advantage of the end of the Cold War to emphasize human security, which depends on ecological security.

Put this way, it sounds like nationalism is the problem, but that is not something Crawford addresses in her book. Indeed, her apparent acceptance of some of the whoppers told by the U.S. government about its wars e.g. 9/11 was an al-Qaeda operation, or that the U.S. fought, even defeated, ISIS in Iraq and Syria (without mention that with its other hand the U.S. was funding ISIS), reduce Crawford's credibility as a political scientist.

The fact that she thinks Democrats offer meaningful solutions to the problem also strains credulity. Granted that anthropogenic climate change deniers among Republicans in Congress make it difficult to speak clearly about mitigating the effects of Pentagon emissions, but empty words about greening the military while simultaneously issuing new drilling permits on federal land do nothing to pull us back from the cliff of fatal climate chaos.

Crawford thus accepts some of the Pentagon's pronouncements about our forever wars but not others. She writes:

Recall that in 1997, the Department of Defense warned the White House of the dire consequences that could flow, not from global warming, but from the Kyoto Protocol. They said that "imposing greenhouse gas emissions limitation on tactical and strategic military systems would...adversely impact operations and readiness."

Now in 2023, we're living with the reality of a U.S. Space Force that is hugely polluting, especially in the upper atmosphere where climate effects are longer lasting and more dire (Crawford touches on this briefly). 

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race, said in a recent podcast shared on Truthout: 

The environmental damage that the contemporary space race is doing is one of the most under-discussed crises of our contemporary moment.

..Billionaires like Elon Musk have promoted fantasies that humanity’s best hope, in the face of an apocalyptic crisis, lies in the colonization of space. Jeff Bezos has argued that the extractive industrialization of space will ultimately make life on Earth sustainable.

So again we find that the solutions offered to climate catastrophe are actually driving us ever faster toward...climate catastrophe.

Some international scholars and journalists think the solutions lie elsewhere. From the blog and podcast Chronicles of Haiphong on the recent BRICS summit:

Pepe Escobar: In a room in Johannesburg, you have a Cuban who's the leader of the new non-aligned movement, with all these leaders from the developing world, most of them Africans, meeting exclusively with Xi Jinping to discuss sustainable development. Everything about sustainable development. So this is something that you obviously won't read in the New York Times or the Washington Post..

Michael Hudson: You also pointed out quite correctly that the key to all of this is indeed oil and energy. That's what the Western press cannot discuss [emphasis mine] because the center point of all U.S. foreign policy since 1945 has been the international oil industry.

Crawford's work on computing the true and fully burdened costs of continuing to do business in this fashion will remain useful. I especially appreciated her analysis of the climate impact of military air shows which are frequent insanely polluting prestige events for the military that contribute nothing to national security.

But real solutions to climate chaos will require stepping out of the box of conducting foreign policy as if the U.S. were the center of the world and not just a mere 6% of the total global population. Is U.S. military or political leadership capable of this kind of planetary thinking? I doubt it.

Connecting The Dots With A Global Environmental Antiwar Perspective

I'm excited to welcome Koohan Paik-Mander to Brunswick, Maine this weekend. She and I are both on the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (GN) board together, but we've not met in person. This is typical of the GN as its directors, advisors, and members are found around the world e.g. South Korea, India, Japan, Russia, Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and U.S. 

Where there is military degradation of the environment, including space and the planet's oceans, GN's  members are paying attention and reporting back, as well as often organizing resistance locally to military bases, rocket launch sites, and colonizer warmongering.

From Hawai'i, Koohan focuses on the oceans we all share. I got to know her better when we collaborated on a webinar during the 2021 People's Summit for Climate Justice at COP26  organized by Veterans for Peace. 

She's also been reporting from the U.S. war on China beat for a while now.

I've learned a lot from Koohan, a journalist who is also a strong researcher (remember when the two went hand in hand?). She wrote to me last fall when warplane jet fuel leaking into drinking water in Hawai'i was getting a lot of attention from environmental activists:

Even though the military is Hawaii's biggest economic driver after tourism, the preparation for war with China is tangibly scary, even for the rah-rah corporate media. When the local community saw that the Pentagon has been more than willing to forego safe drinking water from Oahu's only aquifer in order to push for war, articles started to appear that were more realistically critical. 

I'm glad the Global Network is here to connect these articles with you and others.

A big benefit of GN membership is the curated news feed. Koohan shared the photo above with us in November, 2022 and commented:

Aloha Friends,

We were overjoyed this morning by this sight. 

This photo was taken the first night of the first eruption since 1984 from the world's largest live volcano. Apparently, Madame Pele, the Fire Goddess, has decided that it's EVICTION TIME for the U.S. military. 

The 125,000-square-mile Pohakuloa Training Area is the largest live-fire training ground in the Pacific"

 

Despite the fact that its lease (for the whopping sum of $1.00) expires in 2029, some believe Pohakuloa might become the site of a U.S. Space Force base. Stay tuned for more on that.

If you're lucky enough to be in Maine, join us Sunday August 13 in Brunswick at the Curtis Memorial Library from 4-6pm. Light refreshments and an opportunity to hear from Koohan Paik-Mander, a unique and dedicated defender of the oceans!

Imperial Truth Decay

Source: r/MapPorn

I'm devouring the new Orhan Pamuk book Nights of Plague, an historical novel about an imaginary island where plague management challenges the decaying Ottoman Empire. He's one of my favorite authors on the power of ideas in contradiction to facts on the ground, and he always makes me laugh as when the nonstop spying of the island's mythical Department of Scrutinia is headed by a Chief Scrutineer.

Just yesterday I read that a big hospital in the SF Bay Area reinstated a mask mandate due to a surge of covid cases there, and that an average of ten people are still dying of covid in California every day.

Cue the chorus of covid is a hoax, people masking are sheep easily led, more people were injured by the covid vax than saved by it, and so on. The divisiveness of the U.S. empire's response to this pandemic is a subject I've written about before. Originating in a lab, it's not the first but only the most novel of pathogens weaponized by those who would wield power over restive populations. It turns out that the purpose is murky: smear China via its Wuhan lab? Divide and conquer the U.S. masses seething for change that never comes? Or hasten the information control that kicked off with the post 9/11 Patriot Act and may be cemented into place by claiming free speech can be "weaponized" against the ruling class?

Pamuk writes:

Anyone who joined the Empire's 65 year old quarantine establishment would quickly realize that their first and most important duty to the Sultan and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was not so much to stop outbreaks of cholera, as to stop the news of those outbreaks from spreading.

Which reminds me that I was busy with family and did not manage an Earth Day post bemoaning the deadly assault of the empire of capitalism on climate and life. Politically motivated information management abounds in this arena, too, where a billionaire's rocket uses taxpayer funding to crash and burn on liftoff, allegedly because key safety equipment was deemed too costly by the billionaire himself. Even if Starship had not exploded over the Gulf of Mexico its effect on both climate and coastal environs would have been terrible. All rocket launches, now proliferating rapidly, are terrible for the environment. So space is constantly sold to kids as hooray for science, technology, engineering and math.

Pentagon Planet by Anthony Freda

Meanwhile, liberal rags like Common Dreams provide sophisticated information management around military harm to the environment, well-documented but largely unaddressed as the U.S. military budget continues to metastasize (Space Force requested a 100% increase in its annual budget to pollute and militarize outer space). I noticed and disliked the subtle bias of CD's Earth Day article with the ironic headline: "Can you fight for climate justice without being antiwar?" No, you cannot --  as some of us have been pointing out for years. 

But the author used tried and true grammatical sleight of hand to shield some culprits while vilifying others. The U.S. and NATO conspired over the biggest release of methane, the worst of the greenhouse gases, into the Baltic Sea off Denmark, but that act of war on the environment just happened in the passive voice: "the sabotage of the underwater Nord Stream pipelines." Ditto "the shelling of Ukraine's nuclear power plants, particularly the Zaporizhzhia plant" as if the shelling had mysterious origins rather than emanating from Ukraine.

The U.S. public has been told in both cases via its subservient corporate press that "Russia did it." That is, destroy its own newly completed gas pipeline and attempt to blow up a nuclear power plant its military had captured quickly. These lies are easily refuted, but you won't read about it in Common Dreams or the New York Times.

What you will read or hear in every imperial media "news" channel is the active voice when it comes to their current favorite villain. Common Dreams again: "Russia's invasion of Ukraine has mutated the global fuel market."

See the difference? Grammar matters.

Truth, however, is merely an inconvenience to our imperial rulers. If evidence of the president's deep involvement in corrupt energy schemes in Ukraine might threaten his election, the press stampedes to suppress it and silence those who don't go along.

Similarly, if the national conversation is about how best to respond to a deadly pathogen, social media platforms obediently silence dissenting voices at the behest of the federal government. The Twitter files are largely, though not exclusively, about sharing evidence of this.

When Pamuk has an Ottoman public health doctor say, "Quarantine is the art of educating the public in spite of itself, and of teaching it the skill of self-preservation," he might also be thinking about empires and their strategies for preserving their reign.

Nowadays you can be silenced for pointing out enforcement of the preferred narrative, or just for not agreeing with the imperial version of their destructive, expensive wars.

Prior to Earth Day the FBI and DOJ collaborated on the indictment of four members of the African People’s Socialist Party for allegedly colluding with Russia to affect the outcome of an election. Hmm...

According to HandsOffUhuru.com:

On April 18, 2023, indictments were issued by the U.S. Department of Justice against African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela, African People’s Solidarity Committee Chair Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel.

Donate to our legal fund at HandsOffUhuru.org/Donate.

“I ain’t ever worked for a Russian. Never ever ever ever,” said Omali Yeshitela. “Their problem is, I’ve never worked for them.”

Pamuk is a writer from the last bit of the once powerful Ottoman Empire who knows: not working for the imperial forces is the ultimate crime.

COP-OUT27 Hastens Climate Catastrophe #COP27

Source: "Estimating the military's global greenhouse gas emissions"
report by Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOB), November, 2022

Following international climate summit COP26 in Glasgow, with a parallel People's Summit I participated in, the focus on military emissions and their lethal undercount has faded in the war fever of the alleged battle for "democracy" and "freedom" in Ukraine. 

COP27, held in the especially brutal police state of Egypt (thanks, "Arab Spring" color revolution) was swarmed by both fossil fuel lobbyists and private jets. 

Activists temporarily blocked private jets from taking off for Egypt from Amsterdam as an expression of the new climate focus that says billionaires and their greenhouse gas emissions are THE problem.

I disagree.

Multi-millionaires who "lead" the big weapon systems manufacturers are THE problem when it comes to climate. Because the revolving door between U.S. government and the military-industrial complex is always spinning, and this ensures non-stop spending on war planes and bombs which both contribute massively to climate disaster. (And that's just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg.)

I've been following this thread for years and compiling a collection of links I find especially useful. Groups like the Veterans for Peace Climate Crisis and Militarism Project and researchers like Dr. Neta Crawford continue to focus on the military aspect of the larger climate problem: wealthy nations cause the crisis while people living the Global South suffer the most dire impacts.

CEOBS researchers have taken on the task of monitoring military emissions by nation, reporting on this in a database we can all use.

Since U.S. military spending is so excessive compared with all other nations, it's not surprising that the Pentagon fears what the chart at the top of this blog post would look like if military emissions were included in the national total.

It used to be said that the first casualty of war is truth.

In the 21st century, the first casualty of war might be climate.

Drought, Heat & Energy Nightmares -- But U.S. Climate Bill Favors Fossil Fuel Extraction?

I recently saw a joke that Germans were down to one shower a week and tourism had fallen off. Now I can't find it again, and I'm not sure anymore that it was a joke.

Did Germany foresee the Rhine River drying up when they gave in to U.S. pressure not to certify the NordStream 2 gas pipeline from Russia? The U.S. told them: no problem we will sell you fracked gas which we'll deliver via shipping. "German energy nightmare," indeed.

Of course, it's not just Germany. England is also in a drought exacerbated by record high temperatures.

Drought in the western part of the continental U.S. is also reaching epic proportions, 

and fire season is a thing of the past because now it's pretty much year round.

The “everything is fine” gif in real life. https://t.co/qWaSb9PKx6

— Anne with an "e" (@mrsmaris) August 11, 2022

https://twitter.com/mrsmaris/status/1557733365314306049

Drought in eastern Africa is also at life-threatening levels.

Source: Flickr "1.5 million livestock heads have been lost in southern Ethiopia already. The migration of people and livestock from drought-affected areas is straining already scarce resources in host communities. 285,000 people are displaced."

 

© European Union, 2022 (photographer: Silvya Bolliger)

So, what does the U.S. government do? Pass a "climate" bill with provisions to expand fossil fuel extraction! Congress at this point in history can only pass legislation if it benefits their wealthy donors. (The bill also extended the Unaffordable Care Act for three years. Because that will definitely bring down the global temperature.)

It's a major reason that Democrats and Republicans are rapidly losing the consent of the governed, and we are running out of time to take action designed to protect life on Earth.

The other anti-climate bill is, of course, massive military spending authorized for FY23. 

To name just one small part of the problem, what's the climate impact of all those weapons the U.S. is sending to Ukraine for use in a war they can't win? Reporting from your state-affiliated corporate media doesn't dare ask that question.

Also increasingly evident is massive expansion of (militarized*) space exploration. From "Increased Spaceflight Will Warm Earth's Stratosphere 4 Degrees, Study Finds" by Caroline Delbert in Popular Mechanics:

In new research published earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) simulates the effect of greatly increased spaceflight on the stratosphere. The results show that planned spaceflight over the next few decades could raise Earth’s temperature, change global air currents, and dampen the ozone layer. The study appears in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere.

* All U.S. space exploration and development is military in nature, no matter what NASA says.

But not to worry, everything is fine.