Catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence, and climate change

• Climate change It is already happening, and most pronounced in the tropics and subtropics. In terms of the human costs (economic costs will vary by country and wealth).
• Violence There is intense competition for increasingly scarce livelihoods (for instance)
• Poverty leads to increasingly desperate populations, violence, migration …
• Some consequences:
  • Floods, droughts, fire, disease, civil war, etc.–climate change exacerbates these
  • Climate refugees–a term you’ll hear more often
• Societal options?
  • International cooperation–‘progressive political adaptation’ (includes addressing inequalities–both economic and ecological–between ‘North’ and ‘South’)
  • Militarism rooted in North-South divides
    • Security Industrial Complex
    • ‘Secure’ the taking of natural resources (available to powerful countries with armies and leverage)
  • Technical ‘fixes’: geoengineering, lots of new generation technologies, too.
  • Climate change as (according to US Dept. of Defense) an ‘accelerant’ and ‘threat multiplier’
    • ‘Weak states’ (but sometimes ‘strong societies’)
    • Entropy and ‘civilization’–what happens to infrastructure?
    • ‘Containing and policing failed states’
    • ‘Gap’ vs ‘Core’ (according to military analysts)

Christian Parenti. 2011. The Tropic of Chaos. NY: Nation Books.