No peace on earth without wind farms and 100 mpg cars

by Mike Tidwell

In case you missed it, a massive typhoon struck the Philippines, killing 500 people the same week the Iraq Study Group released its report last fall. And the same month multi-party talks finally resumed over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, Seattle experienced record flooding, Japan saw its deadliest tornado in history, and extreme drought brought extreme human suffering across much of China. 

The truth connecting all of these events is this: There’s more than one kind of violence on this planet. Warfare and terrorism we know all about. Our fears of all-out regional war in the Middle East plus nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea plus a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan — these are well founded fears.

Yet even if a peaceful, permanent, and absolute resolution could be brought to all of these concerns – a concept scarcely imaginable – it would do nothing to solve the other rising source of real violence on our planet: Extreme weather events linked to global warming.

Yes, record flooding episodes have increased in North America in recent years. Yes, extreme droughts are happening more frequently worldwide. Yes, a record heat wave in Europe killed 35,000 people in 2003. And yes, all of the above have ties to a quickly warming atmosphere, scientists say.

And if you don’t believe the scientists, consider the insurance industry. In December, Allstate joined insurers worldwide in expressing growing concern about climate change. The company, in fact, announced it would stop issuing new policies in coastal New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia because its own independent review of the scientific data points to bigger and more ferocious future hurricanes courtesy of a warming Atlantic Ocean.

Bigger hurricanes mean more destruction – more violence – to human lives and property, perhaps even a repeat of the Katrina catastrophe with 1800 dead, 1.3 million displaced, and more than $100 billion in total losses. Those are certainly warfare-scale statistics.

Yet no peace treaty between two armies will ever solve this violence. Only the biggest peacemaker of all – the one that solves both war and weird weather – will help us here. That would be clean energy, of course.  It may seem odd, but it’s true: There will be no peace on Earth without widespread wind farms and 100-mile-per gallon cars.

Violence without hate, anyone?

Think about it this way: What if our greatest, age-old fantasy came true and we ended warfare tomorrow. Not just war in Iraq, but all wars, everywhere, now and forever.

Let’s say that, by some divine intervention, we woke up tomorrow morning to find human hate erased from every beating heart on the planet. That’s it, we’re done with hate. No more racism, sexism, ageism. No more xenophobia and religious strife. Hate is gone and thus so is war – in Iraq, Sudan, everywhere. We dismantle every nuclear bomb on the planet and Al Qaeda disappears forever. What anthropologists call “organized inter-group homicide” is over for good.

Yet even if this extreme fantasy came true in full tomorrow morning – fulfilling the yearning of 10,000 years of civilization – but we did nothing to also solve our warming climate, we would not have peace, we would not have an end to violence. Large-scale physical harm inflicted on human beings by other human beings would continue daily. That’s because we, as a species, are causing global warming through our massive combustion of fossil fuels – oil, coal, and natural gas. And we as a species, the full family of man, all of us on all continents, will experience hunger, suffering, violence and death if the warming soon accelerates, as scientists increasingly predict. The violence will come even if there’s not a single standing army or a single gun or bomb left on the planet.

Mike Tidwell and a polar friend at a fundraiser for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network in January.

A good way to comprehend this is to look at our most vital need: food. In a 2001 report commissioned by George Bush himself, the National Academy of Sciences endorsed the findings of climate scientists worldwide in predicting a planetary warming of 3-10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Yet even under a mid-range warming of 4-5 degrees, Kansas could turn into an unrecognizable scrub desert, according to our best computer modeling.

How in the world will we feed ourselves if our bread basket is a scrub desert? In Maryland, where I live, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has projected that major agricultural yields will drop as much as 40 percent from future warming. Forget Africa. Forget India. We will be food insecure right here in America under such scenarios. Hunger will happen right here. And people in a state of hunger are not in a state of peace – physically, spiritually or politically.

Let’s turn again to hurricanes. Few phenomena are more destructive in the natural world. Hurricane Katrina had the power of a 20-megaton nuclear weapon exploding every 20 minutes. The results were commensurate: the literal annihilation of 200 miles of coastline and an inland area of impact equal in size to Great Britain. From one hurricane.

Now seven major scientific studies in the last 18 months strongly link an observed warming in the Atlantic Ocean to more frequent mega hurricanes already being seen in recent decades and expected to grow in the immediate future. Which is why Allstate has stopped issuing new policies along much of the east coast.

But even these threats — rising hurricanes and falling crop yields — are but two pieces in the menu of dangers rapidly approaching from climate change. Warming temperatures could accelerate the spread of West Nile virus and even malaria in America. Growing wild fires and intensifying urban heat waves will tax public health systems even further. And droughts will deplete available drinking water worldwide.

Various versions of all of these impacts are already occurring across the planet, according to the United Nations. Indeed, the World Health Organization says at least 160,000 people now die annually on the globe due to global warming.

So even if war did disappear completely, we would have rampant violence, hunger, suffering, and death in a future world of unchecked global warming. We can beat all our swords into plowshares, but the day of tranquility simply won’t come.

The ultimate peace tools

Thankfully, though, the peace-making tools needed to address this rising threat of violence are readily available to us. We just have to pick them up and use them.

Climate scientists say we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions roughly 80 percent by 2050, with steep cuts beginning very soon. How do we do this? Well, let’s start with cars. If, ten years from now, every car and truck in America had the same electric-gasoline hybrid engine as in my Toyota Prius right now, we’d cut our national gasoline use in half.

And if, over the next decade, we adopted electricity efficiency standards and practices equal to what’s already in place in Europe today, we’d cut our national electricity use in half. We could then meet much of this reduced electricity load with “green” sources like wind power, the fastest growing energy resource in the world today.

But all of these tools – hybrid engines, wind power, efficient appliances – need national policy mandates to help rush them into widespread use. In 1961, John F. Kennedy committed America to putting a man on the moon by 1969. That tight deadline was nothing compared to the awesome fact that much of the core technology needed for a moon landing – the massive rockets, the sophisticated computers – simply didn’t exist in 1961. So we had a national policy – land on the moon – but not the technology, and still we made it in eight years.

Today, with global warming, it’s completely the opposite. We have the technology to solve the problem, we just don’t have a policy. We don’t have a committed national plan to save ourselves with the tools at our feet.

And fashioning such a policy – right now – is the highest act of peacemaking. Not only will such a program dramatically limit the violence, hunger, suffering and death that will otherwise come from climate change, it will take a huge bite out of conventional violence. If we cut our gas use in half or more, there will be no more Saudi radicals flying planes into our buildings, angry over U.S. forces occupying the Persian Gulf to protect oil markets. We just won’t be there any more. And there’ll be no more strategic need to wage war in Iraq.

Which is why the clean energy movement – gathering force in cities and states across this nation – is the ultimate peace movement. It’s fueled by the realization that there will be no reduction in Katrina-scale storms without massive wind farms in the Dakotas. There will be no peace in Baghdad without tens of millions of hybrid cars rolling out of Detroit. There will be no future farming of wheat in Kansas without high-efficiency light bulbs today.

Without a vision, the people perish

But this vision of peace is not just one of avoiding violence. Whether we realize it or not, a clean-energy world has always been the end-point destination of many of our greatest hopes and dreams. The sky is always blue in this world and the air always clean. The economy is strong and healthy and of our own making, free of foreign control over key resources. Good jobs are plentiful because our energy dollars flow to American windmill factories and bio-fuel plants instead of to OPEC sheiks and barons. Our children are healthy because solar panels don’t put mercury into our fish and asthma-causing agents into our air. And our lives are peaceful because we are entirely free to choose peace, with nothing and no one dragging us into faraway oil conflicts.

This is an exciting world based on an exciting vision. It’s a place I want to live in. It’s what gets me out of bed every morning and gives me hope despite increasingly scary signs of climate chaos.

Environmentalists are often criticized, rightly so, for practicing the “politics of complaint.” We are relentlessly negative, opposed to everything. Don’t drill for oil here. Don’t build that highway there. But what’s our vision, critics ask? What are we truly in favor of? Where do we want to go?

An Old Testament scripture says, “Without a vision, the people perish.” We’ve reached the brink of perishing in America because we’ve had no vision to unite us and excite us in the struggle against global warming.

To begin to grasp that vision, you need only recognize this fundamental truth: Virtually all of our core problems as a nation – economic, environmental, health, and national security – are directly related to our energy choices. And if you change those choices, you change everything.

The multiplier benefits of clean energy are more than exciting, they are truly mind boggling. What other investment brings prosperity plus health plus justice? And what investment solves violence in all its many forms – from hurricanes to roadside bombs?

The truth bears repeating: the clean-energy movement is the ultimate peace movement. Indeed, in the long run, it’s the only approach to peace that really matters.

Mike Tidwell is director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and U.S. Climate Emergency Council. He is author of The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities published in 2005 by Free Press.

No comments have been posted to this article.

Want to post a comment to this article? Click here.