By David C. Hall / For The Herald
The hubris of Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine echoes the counter threats from the United States that “all options are on the table.”
The insanity and false security of so-called deterrence is blooming again. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is the closest “midnight” and the end of civilization it has ever been including the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. These scientists cite not just threats of accidental or intentional nuclear war, but also the international failures to address an inexorably warming climate in any realistic way to prevent the growing frequency of recurrent climate crises. Add to this the deeply discriminatory relationship between wealthy and poor nations that approximates a global apartheid and we have insurrections leading to failed states that flood the world with climate refugees.
Our priorities must change.
The U.S. must lead the way to abolishing nuclear weapons and commit to massive investments needed to remediate and adapt to climate change. Parallel existential catastrophes hang like twin swords of Damocles over our own and coming generations as we fail to embrace the urgency of preventing ecological devastation and global famine caused by accidental or intentional nuclear weapons use and the slower but unrelenting escalation of warming climate wild fires, hurricanes, floods and crop failures.
Congress must mandate a federal Climate Posture Review, comparable to the president’s nuclear posture review so that federal policy regarding the reduction of greenhouse gases becomes transparent and gets prioritized to meet the growing threats that current climate heating is imposing worldwide.
The recent prioritization of drilling for fossil fuels in the Willow project in an Alaska refuge followed by the auctioning of 73 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil drilling shows we are choosing to go in exactly the opposite direction from what the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, using sophisticated scientific modeling, has told us we must go, if we are to avoid escalating droughts, rising oceans, melting glaciers, warming climate driven pandemics and water wars.
What Congress can do:
• Mandate a federal climate posture review that includes every military contract so the military industrial complex is on notice we mandate their cooperation in reducing greenhouse gases.
• Legislate a rebalancing of military expansion versus climate remediation and adaptation policies and investments. The current confrontation with Russia over Ukraine takes our attention and resources away from the cooperation required to cool the planet for our long term survival.
• Meanwhile, continue to legislate and finance robust renewable energy and smart grid development, building and home weatherization, carbon capture including forests and cattle, electrification of transportation and manufacturing, protection of water air and land quality, management of nuclear and other toxic wastes, and quality health care for affected populations.
What can we, the citizens of this country, do to protect the future our children and grandchildren are inheriting? We can support and vote for congressional decision-makers who support:
• Major reductions in the military spending that provokes arms races, ie, replacement of the entire Trident sub fleet and land-based ICBMs;
• Vigorous investments in high-level conversations with all major military adversaries and climate polluting nations;
• Scientific rigor regarding global warmin; and
• Investments truly aimed at holding climate temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius to prevent what currently seems to be inevitable calamities given the chilly international response to IPCC warnings.
Our children and their children will celebrate us rather than curse us if we act now to leave them a livable world.
David C. Hall, a resident of Lopez Island, is past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
