Firebombs To Arsonists, Band-Aids To The Burned

Can't do fairer than that

Links are at the end.

I ran across a story this morning about centrist Democrats chatting with ‘moderate’ Republicans—as previously noted, the latter are the ones among their caucus walking around without shreds of an impoverished person stuck in their teeth—about how a bipartisan solution to the civic psychopath issue might work.

Democrats’ conditions were minimal and hardly left-wing: to agree to avoid a government shutdown; to pass spending bills along the lines of the fiscal accord McCarthy and McHenry themselves made with Biden in May to avert a debt default; and to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid for Palestinians.¹

Emphasis mine. Why, one wonders, do Palestinians need humanitarian aid?

The Bidennaires are seeking $100 million to fund UN and other relief efforts in Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they want about $14 billion for Israel, some significant fraction of which will be used to commit war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, and some to further immiserate, if not immolate, Palestinians in the West Bank.

The prospective $14 billion is on top of the $3-$5 billion the U.S. sends to Israel annually, mostly in the form of military aid. Israel was historically the largest annual beneficiary of U.S. foreign aid until we started dumping billions into Ukraine. We also send lesser billions to Egypt’s dictatorships as part of Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords, making that country our (now-formerly) second largest annual foreign aid beneficiary.

Of course both Israel and Egypt buy U.S.-produced weapons with the money we send them and with money above and beyond those sums. The naïve might argue that our weapons industry doesn’t constitute a sovereign entity, but its member states collectively receive more foreign aid than anyone, to the tune of trillions over the years.

On the same subject in the same newspaper (also paywall-free), Ishaan Tharoor courts email and social media death threats by suggesting that the U.S. insistence on our standing as a beacon of human rights and democracy in a fractious world may be a tad delusional, or at least reeks of hypocrisy.²

Ah well.

Speaking of delusion—or, less charitably and more accurately, reeking hypocrisy and capitalism as usual—the U.S continues to subsidize the industries most responsible for setting the planet on fire, with devastating consequences for, as usual and so far, the people least equipped to cope with them. Pakistani novelist-turned-climate-prophet Fatimah Bhutto wrote on the subject in, again, the Washington Post—an exemplar of why I don’t give up my poverty-adjusted subscription to the rag.

Across Greece, tens of thousands of people, locals and tourists both, had to be evacuated, creating harrowing scenes of fathers clutching children on their backs, mothers shouldering whatever necessities could be carried. Entire families displaced not by war or violence, but by climate change.

In September, scant weeks after the fires, came the deluge. Storms buffeted Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece, precipitating massive floods. Regions logged record rainfall — a season’s worth in a day, according to one estimate. The crescendo — for now — was the inundation of Derna on Libya’s Mediterranean coast. Whole neighborhoods were swept out to sea after rains overwhelmed the city’s aging dams. The death toll there stands at 11,300, with 10,000 people still unaccounted for.

(Climate change wasn’t alone responsible for the scale of the disaster in Libya; some, maybe most, of the blame for the failure to maintain the dams that gave way in the face of the monstrous rains and floods can be laid at the gleeful U.S.-led military campaign that ousted Gaddafi—”we came, we saw, he died, haha³”—and transmogrified the state from functional to failed. Not the worst of our sins, but right up there.)

Bhutto also notes the even larger disaster that befell her native Pakistan last year, when warming-driven floods killed, displaced and otherwise impacted tens of millions of people.

According to UNICEF, the deluge affected 33 million people, half of them children. Millions of acres of agricultural land were flooded, drowning livestock, destroying tomatoes, chiles and other staple crops, and contaminating sanitation systems. Fourteen and a half million people required emergency food assistance, while thousands of displaced families were housed in rickety tent cities, awaiting aid that only trickled in.

She doesn’t hesitate to blame government failures for exacerbating the disasters.

The Sindh province, among the areas hit hardest during last year’s monsoon, has long been run by the Pakistan People’s Party, currently led by Asif Ali Zardari, once nicknamed “Mr. Ten Percent” for the allegations of engaging in graft during the tenure as prime minister of his wife, my aunt Benazir Bhutto. It is notable that in the many decades the PPP has ruled the province, it has never managed to cobble together a functional sanitation system. No disaster preparedness plan was in place in Sindh, where government hospitals remain understaffed and underfunded, perennially short of medicines⁴.

What Bhutto doesn’t do is place any blame on our regimes. Americans are prone to scoff at corruption and incompetence in nations of the Global South, but we’ve known for decades what the consequences of global warming could be and we’re still going hell for leather to find out what they’ll be in the worst case. That’s the product of insouciant corruption on a scale that dwarfs what can be documented in most other countries.

Geoff Mann wrote about humanity’s approach to global warming in the September issue of The London Review of Books; specifically, what climate models can and can’t tell us about our future. The thrust of his piece—not paywalled and well worth reading—is that we don’t have sufficient data to make good predictions, and modellers are using guesswork to fill in the gaps, and that’s fine with politicians and polluters who can point to the most generous assessments while claiming that the direst ones are just guesswork for which we needn’t prepare.

We have reached a stage of global warming at which every decision is critical: we don’t know when our last chance will have been. So when, for example, we base the vast part of our climate policy on offset markets and carbon taxes, as we are doing, and proceed to calculate the social cost of carbon to determine an ‘optimal’ carbon tax that ‘efficiently’ manages the ‘trade-offs’ between the costs and benefits of emitting [greenhouse gasses], we are doing something much more dangerous than is usually acknowledged. A precise calculation of the ‘optimal’ carbon tax is nothing more than a claim that the best way forward is to perch the gargantuan machine of contemporary capitalism as close as possible to the precipice without tipping us all over the edge. That is neither efficient nor optimal. It is a myopic and recklessly arrogant approach to the unknown fate of life on earth.

What we need is a much more honest assessment of what we do not or cannot know, which is, among other important things, where the edge is. We might, in fact, be past it already, treading thin air like Wile E. Coyote before the fall. Today’s politicians don’t like uncertainty: it introduces doubt. Yet we are in desperate need of a politics that looks catastrophic uncertainty square in the face. That would mean taking much bigger and more transformative steps: all but eliminating fossil fuels, for a start, and prioritising democratic institutions over markets.

Quite the comic, is our Geoff.

Elsewhere on the carbon offset front, climate reporter Heidi Blake has a mammoth story in The New Yorker about the extent to which offset projects are, as Greta Thunberg and, increasingly, others have said, a scam aimed at rehabilitating the images of major offenders on the global warming front. The deeply reported story shows that companies have been selling buying and selling carbon offset credits that for the most part and often deliberately do little or nothing to offset greenhouse gas production.

As one would expect, the biggest offenders deny everything despite the confessions of insiders on both the demand and supply sides of the business. (This story is also not paywalled if you have or can have a browser with no New Yorker cookies in it.)

Music: Mirah, “you think it’s like this but really it’s like this⁵” is way too mellow for me, but she’s possessed of skills. Al Kooper and Shuggie Otis are mostly more lively and maybe more apropos to today’s themes⁶. Cheap Trick with “1997” played me out.⁷

That, Comrades, is all I got. Share it if you like it, and consider subscribing if you’ve not—it’s free unless you want to pay.

Take care, be well, and mark the location of the nearest high ground.

1. The Washington Post on the bipartisan will to blow people up (no paywall)

2. Ishaan Tharoor in the Washington Post (no paywall)

3. Intriguing Clinton-on-Gadaffi remix

4. Fatimah Bhutto on our careening climate disasters (no paywall)

5. Mirah, live somewhere

6. Al Kooper & Shuggie Otis, Lookin’ for A Home

7. Cheap Trick, Surrender live from Daryl’s House