The Climate Column

vi: The Climate Column

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil?

Patrick Dunne

Another IPCC Report lands.

But this time, it seems to have generated barely a ripple in the waters of global media.

At more than 3,500 pages no-one, and I mean no-one, can have read it yet— but even news of its launch seems to have been surprisingly subdued; its release barely topped the ten most-read environmental articles in the Guardian online. I know almost nothing about it— and I spent the best part of two years organising mass readings of its prequels, so I am more invested in IPCC Reports than most.

I‘m sure it will make for grim reading: evidencing that the state of the climate is worse than predicted, listing even more startling stats and shorter timescales, confirming more extreme changes. I will read and write more on the Report in the next edition of HN (I'm afraid the two days between the launch and this publication’s deadline was too high a mountain for me).

Meanwhile, it‘s the silence that is deafening.

It is not the biggest news story at the moment, and understandably so. As I type, there is war. People who live like us, in cities that look like ours, are experiencing the violence and horror that we collectively came to believe was impossible in mainland Europe. But Vladimir Putin clearly had other ideas: shells fall; military convoys advance; rumours and misinformation swirl; and men, women, and children die in gunfire and explosions.

It is in bad taste to draw links between this catastrophe and the climate emergency, but that hasn't stopped the fossil fuel industry. Never, as they say, let a crisis go to waste. Why not exploit a conflict to develop your own fossil fuel resources? Why not promote exploration here as a vast improvement on exploration over there? Why not conveniently ignore the well-established fact that we can't continue to explore or exploit fossil fuels anywhere?

The military industrial complex is a huge source of emissions, and it’s one that is largely left out of emission reduction models. No one has even begun to approach how one might decouple the US military (the world‘s largest military force, by some distance) from oil. Publicly at least, no military-based economy has yet been prepared to discuss how emissions reduction might impact the vast economic forces that surround warfare, and 'combat readiness'. Imagine right-wing attacks on wind-powered tanks and vegan warplanes! It would be terrible, absurd, and might even make Donald Trump's tilting at windfarms seem sound and reasonable...

One final note on war and climate brings us a little closer to home. It’s something that came to my attention this week via Scotland's Third Force News, the magazine of the third sector. They carried an article (Armour, 2022) highlighting the disturbing link between Keep Scotland Beautiful and BAE Systems, who are profiting from the war in Yemen by supplying materials and even training to that 'campaign'. Keep Scotland Beautiful has received £100,000 funding from BAE to help clean up the Clyde in Glasgow. Incredibly, in response to criticism, Keep Scotland Beautiful have praised BAE Systems‘ commitment to 'sustainability'. This is defending the indefensible. Keep Scotland Beautiful are also a grant-giving body, so we will be able to observe in real time how dirty money gets washed green, as small local organisations cheerfully apply for grants to improve their communities with money linked to the obliteration of similar communities elsewhere. I hope I’ll be able to report the end of this relationship in a future edition of Herbology News. In the meantime, we must all keep our eyes, ears, hearts, and minds open and alert in these troubled and difficult times.

References

Armour, R. (2022) ‘Scots charity accused of being unethical after accepting weapon company cash’, in TFN (Third Force News), February 14 th . Available online: https://tfn.scot/news/scots-charity-accusedof-being-unethical-after-accepting-weaponcompany-cash

You can read more about the latest IPCC Report online here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree /2022/feb/28/ipcc-climate-report-grim-hope

To find out more about the oil industry’s involvement in profiting from war, I recommend the excellent Judd Legum whose journalism is available here: https://popular.info/p/fossil-fuel-companiesare-exploiting?s=r