UN report: Afghanistan “on the brink” of universal poverty
Noah Garfinkel
Afghanistan is close to universal poverty, according to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report released Thursday.
Why it matters: The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan along with the COVID-19 pandemic and severe drought have set up the poverty rate to balloon. As much as 97 percent of Afghans could be below the poverty line by mid-2022, according to the UNDP.
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The myriad of challenges facing the country “form a crisis that demands urgent action,” UNDP Director of the Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific Kanni Wignaraja said.
By the numbers: UNDP analyzed four possible scenarios that could cause the country’s GDP to plummet as much as 13.2%. In the worst-case scenario, the report estimates that poverty could increase by about 25%.
72% of the population currently live in poverty, UNDP reports.
What they’re saying: “We are facing a full-on development collapse on top of humanitarian and economic crises,” Wignaraja said.
“Half of the population is already in need of humanitarian support. This analysis suggests that we are on course for rapid, catastrophic deterioration in the lives of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable people,” Wignaraja added.
What’s next: The UNDP is proposing an aid package aimed at helping the most vulnerable people and communities in Afghanistan.
The 24-month community development program would support “close to nine million vulnerable people” and would prioritize women and girls’ rights.
It would also include a cash-for-work plan, grants for small and medium enterprises and temporary basic income through monthly cash transfers for children, elderly citizens and the disabled.
Some Afghans evacuated from Kabul struggle to find help in U.S.
Merdie Nzanga
Fahima, 30-year-old a refugee from Afghanistan, sits in her sister’s apartment in Virginia
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Reuters) – After Fahima, 30, stepped off a plane at Dulles international airport in Virginia on Aug. 26th, she asked an immigration official what would happen to her next. He shrugged, she said, and told her to find a lawyer.
Like many among the thousands of Afghans who were hurriedly evacuated by the U.S. military from Afghanistan last month, Fahima is now facing an uncertain future in the United States.
“I was a little confused,” Fahima said through an interpreter. “I didn’t know that we had to talk to a lawyer and do all these things by ourselves. I thought the American government was going to take care of this.”
The next day, Fahima was picked up at a convention center near the airport by her older sister Hakima, whose own experience as a refugee resettling in the United States four years ago was markedly different and underscores the challenges now facing recent arrivals like Fahima.
When Hakima arrived in 2017, she received the traditional benefits of a resettled refugee, such as cash assistance, health insurance and food stamps. Because Fahima was evacuated without a visa, she entered the country on urgent humanitarian grounds, a temporary reprieve that doesn’t come with the same resettlement resources or path to citizenship.
“We don’t know how she is eligible for any resettlement services,” said Hakima, 37. “We haven’t received any instruction or services,” she said in an interview.
Both sisters asked to be identified only by their first names to protect their family in Afghanistan.
“The problem is people had to come on a short notice with nothing but clothes on their back,” due to the nature of the rescue operation, said Erol Kekic, senior vice president at Church World Service’s Immigration and Refugee Program. The lack of benefits “is a huge issue,” he said.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the vast majority of special immigrant visa (SIV) applicants and other vulnerable Afghans are transferred to military bases upon arrival, where they receive help applying for work permits and with applications for immigration statuses they may be eligible for. There are about 45,000 Afghans at military bases in the United States, he said.
Afghan parolees will also be eligible for a State Department program that provides limited relocation assistance.
UNCERTAIN FUTURE
In Afghanistan, Fahima worked as an administrator for a U.S. organization and had a pending refugee application, she said. When the Taliban took over, she rushed to the airport in Kabul, fearing for her life. She sent her sister text updates when she got through the gate and eventually onto a plane first to Qatar, then Europe and a few days later, to the United States. Their parents and brother remain in Kabul.
Hakima, who works for a think tank in Washington, D.C., took Fahima back to her two-bedroom apartment, which she shares with a roommate. Hakima, Fahima and her cousin, who also recently arrived from Afghanistan, share Hakima’s room in a high-rise in Alexandria, Virginia.
At dinner, the women discuss their living situation. Hakima’s lease ends in October and she started looking at three-bedroom apartments, but found her income from the think tank wouldn’t cover the rent. Hakima has started looking for a second job.
Fahima has been searching for English classes at a nearby community college as well as jobs online, but doesn’t know what she needs to do to be allowed to work or study. The humanitarian parole status under which she entered the United States does not confer work privileges, but she can apply for a work permit, a process that takes time, said Church World Service’s Kekic.
Hakima has looked into getting Fahima a lawyer, but said she worries about the cost.
“I have to support my family in Afghanistan, too,” said Hakima. “I have to consider everything.” But she is happy to have her sister with her.
Fahima has stayed close to home since arriving, she said, sleeping in and going for walks nearby.
On Fahima’s walks she marvels at the greenery and how empty the streets are compared to Kabul. But most of the days she spends at home, helping with cooking and cleaning, and waiting for her parents in Kabul to wake up so she can call them.
Last week, the sisters got some news that made them hopeful. Their brother had found somebody who said they could smuggle his family and their parents to neighboring Tajikistan for $1,100 per person. A dangerous trip, but they feel they have no choice.
“We’re trying to get them out to any country which is safe,” Fahima said.
While they wait to see whether their parents make it out of Afghanistan, Hakima wants to make sure Fahima is not putting her own life on hold. She tells her to leave the house and meet people.
“It takes time finding friends, she doesn’t know anybody here,” she said. “We all need our friends and our connections.”
(Reporting by Merdie Nzanga, editing by Kristina Cooke, Ross Colvin and Nick Zieminski)
California Moves Forward on First Building Code to Encourage Electric Heat Pumps
Laura Agadoni September 08, 2021
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California’s mission to discourage the use of natural gas to heat homes and water is coming to fruition, as the Golden State’s energy commission recently approved the nation’s first building code to help accomplish this. If passed by another commission, starting in 2023, new homes and buildings in the state are encouraged to have electric heat pumps installed instead of gas furnaces.
The new California law
As part of the climate change movement, California has been trying to make its homes and buildings more energy-efficient by getting them off fossil fuels.
In August, the California Energy Commission (CEC) voted to approve the nation’s first building codes of its kind, published in the 2022 Building Energy Efficiency Standards (Energy Code). The new codes apply to both new construction and renovated buildings to “produce benefits to support the state’s public health, climate, and clean energy goals.”
The Energy Code must now pass approval by the California Building Standards Commission. If approved, it will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, giving builders and contractors some time to adjust.
Encourages the use of electricity but doesn’t ban natural gas
Regarding heat pumps, the Energy Code says this of its goal: “Encouraging electric heat pump technology for space and water heating, which consumes less energy and produces fewer emissions than gas-powered units.”
Notice the use of the word “encouraging” instead of “requiring” electric heat pumps. This means the new building code, if passed, won’t ban natural gas — which is what environmental groups prefer — it instead makes electric heat pumps the default choice by giving builders incentives if they install heat pumps. In other words, California will make sure it will be cheaper overall to install heat pumps.
For example, if builders want to install natural gas appliances, they’ll have to meet “complex efficiency mandates,” says Pierre Delforge, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. And if incentives and efficiency mandates don’t work, we can probably expect to see requirements replace encouragements.
The ramifications: heat pumps vs. gas furnaces
What California is doing to get homes and buildings off fossil fuels could set a precedent for the rest of the nation. But switching from natural gas to heat pumps isn’t energy-efficient in every locale.
Heat pumps pull external heat from outside or from the ground, which then flows into the home. These pumps also provide cooling, acting as both air conditioners and heaters. They might be ideal for the temperate California climate, since heat pumps work best when there’s not a great differential between indoor and outdoor air. In the right environment, like California, they save energy, meaning they save homeowners money. But they don’t work well in climates that experience extreme cold.
Gas furnaces use a pilot light to combust gas to provide heat. In climates that get below 25 degrees Fahrenheit, gas furnaces are more efficient than heat pumps. In fact, if a heat pump system is installed in a cold climate and can’t heat the home, an auxiliary heat source kicks in, which costs up to five times more than the regular heating mode.
The Millionacres bottom line
Whether buildings across the country will be switching to electricity to heat homes or not, there’s a push throughout the country, with California leading the pack, of the electrification of buildings. “The writing’s on the wall,” says Bob Raymer, technical director of the California Building Industry Association. Invest wisely.
Laura Agadoni, author of “New Home Journal: Record All the Repairs, Upgrades and Home Improvements During Your Years at…,”
Thousands of flood-damaged cars may float back to market after Ida. How to spot one
Tanasia Kenney
Cars damaged in floodwaters caused by Hurricane Ida could soon be on the resale market, putting would-be buyers at risk.
Carfax spokesman Chris Basso estimates “378,000 flood-damaged autos were already on the roads” before Ida made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Southeast Louisiana last month, according to CNBC. The system left a trail of destruction stretching from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the Northeast, leaving parts of New York City underwater.
“If history holds true, we’re looking at several thousand more [flooded] vehicles,” Basso told CNBC, “and a decent percentage of them will make it back into the market.”
Flood-damaged cars can be repaired and resold. However, potential buyers aren’t always privy to a vehicle’s history. This is largely because waterlogged cars “are often transported well beyond their original region after major storms,” according to Consumer Reports.
If flood damage is disclosed on a car’s title, it can be legally resold once it has undergone the necessary repairs and a re-inspection, the consumer watchdog agency said. Still, some water-damaged cars will float back on the market with a clean history.
That’s why experts encourage consumers to do a thorough inspection before buying a new ride — or pay a trusted mechanic to take a look.
How to spot a flood-damaged car
When determining if a car has flood damage, the Better Business Bureau said shoppers should always ask to see the title.
“If the title is stamped ‘salvage’ or has arrived from a recently flood damaged state, ask questions,” the BBB’s website states. “[Also] consider purchasing a vehicle history report of the vehicle, which includes information [on] if the car has ever been tagged as ‘salvage’ or ‘flood damaged’ in any state.”
The vehicle’s dashboard and electronic components, such as lights, radio and turn signals, should be checked carefully to ensure everything is in working order, according to the BBB. Over time, water can make its way into vital systems, corroding metals, short-circuiting wires and warping brakes or rotors, says Consumer Reports.
Carpeting and upholstery should also be checked for signs of dampness, mud or silt.
A smell-test is also necessary, Carfax says. If a car smells of mold or mildew, it’s likely been underwater. Other tell-tale signs of water damage include:
Mud, dirt or debris under the seats or in the glove compartment
Visible rust around doors, under the dashboard, on the pedals or inside the hood
Brittle wiring under the dashboard
Fogging or moisture beads in exterior and interior lights
All in all, experts say it’s best to pass up a car with potential signs of flood damage, “even if [it] looks acceptable and may be working when you inspect it,” Consumer Reports chief mechanic John Ibbotson said.
The interior of a car damaged by the flood is seen covered in mud, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021, in Mamaroneck, N.Y. More than three days after the hurricane blew ashore in Louisiana, Ida’s rainy remains hit the Northeast with stunning fury on Wednesday and Thursday, submerging cars, swamping subway stations
Who to blame for Taliban takeover? Former Afghan envoy points finger at Kabul
Phil Stewart
FILE PHOTO: Afghan Ambassador to the United States Roya Rahmani speaks during an interview with Reuters in Washington.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Roya Rahmani, Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the United States who left her post in July, is clearly horrified by the Taliban takeover of her country. But she is not surprised.
In an interview, Rahmani accused the former U.S.-backed government in Kabul of a failure to lead the country and of widespread corruption that ultimately paved the way for the Taliban’s victory last month.
She also warned the United States, still smarting from its defeat, that the rise of the Taliban would have far-reaching geopolitical consequences.
“I, as an Afghan, was not surprised by the fact that the Taliban took over Afghanistan the way they did and how quickly they did, partly because of the lack of leadership by the Afghan government that was in place at the time,” Rahmani said.
President Joe Biden acknowledged he and other officials were aware of the risk that the Afghan government could collapse following the U.S. military withdrawal.
But they say they were caught off-guard by the speed of the Taliban victory, a miscalculation that helped lead to a chaotic U.S. military airlift of U.S. citizens and vulnerable Afghans. Thirteen U.S. troops and scores of Afghans were killed in a suicide bombing during the operation.
Biden, in a speech last month, accused Afghan troops of lacking “the will to fight” for their country’s future.
Rahmani saw things differently.
“It was not the Afghan forces, that they were not willing to fight for their freedom and for protection of their people. It was the leadership that was corrupt. And they handed over, basically, the country to the Taliban,” she said, without providing specific allegations.
In particular, Ashraf Ghani’s decision to abandon the presidency and leave Afghanistan on Aug. 15 was “extremely disappointing and embarrassing,” she said.
Ghani said on Wednesday he left because he wanted to avoid bloodshed. He denied allegations he stole millions of dollars on his way out.
“Leaving Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life,” Ghani said.
Rahmani, who is 43, left the job as ambassador to the United States after nearly three years in the role. During her posting she wrestled with what she believed was a politically-motivated case over an embassy construction project.
She denied any wrongdoing and an anti-corruption court found flaws in the case, sending it back even before the Afghan government crumbled.
“I invite any investigative body to look at all the documents,” she said.
But Rahmani’s accusations of broad corruption and mismanagement in Kabul carry echoes of warnings by current and former U.S. officials for years. Experts say corruption was steadily eroding ordinary Afghans’ faith in the U.S.-backed government and even turning some of them to the Taliban.
Rahmani described being cut out of discussions between Washington and Kabul, including during the Trump administration. Neither capital appeared to be fully preparing for consequences of the U.S. withdrawal, she said.
She warned of geopolitical shifts that will impact the United States and its allies.
Pakistan – a prickly U.S. ally that is close to the Taliban – will have gained leverage in its dealings with the Washington, she said.
“I believe that the United States will be facing a new Pakistan,” she said, while cautioning the Taliban’s takeover will have ripple effects on India, China, Turkey and beyond.
LAUDS AFGHAN WOMEN PROTESTERS
The last time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, girls could not attend school and women were banned from work and education. Religious police would flog anyone breaking the rules and public executions were carried out.
The Taliban have urged Afghans to be patient and vowed to be more tolerant this time.
But Rahmani says the Taliban’s decision to exclude women from all of the top government positions announced on Tuesday was proof that dark times may be ahead for women.
On Tuesday, a group of Afghan women in a Kabul street had to take cover after Taliban gunmen fired into the air to disperse hundreds of protesters.
“I salute all the brave women of Afghanistan. It is quite risky to do what they are doing,” Rahmani said. “And it’s also an indication to the rest of the world that they have everything to lose at this point.”
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Mary Milliken and Angus MacSwan)
An expert says the Taliban have ‘almost no chance’ of getting their hands on the Afghan central bank’s nearly $10 billion in reserves that’s mostly stashed in New York
Natalie Musumeci
Taliban on patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan. Rahmat Gul/AP
The Taliban have “almost no chance” of getting the Afghan central bank’s reserves, an expert said.
“It’s all but impossible, to tell you the truth,” Cornell University professor Robert Hockett said.
The majority of Afghanistan’s reserves are reportedly held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The Taliban have “almost no chance” of getting their hands on the nearly $10 billion in reserves in Afghanistan’s central bank – and it’s likely that most of the assets will remain frozen in US bank accounts for decades to come, a legal and financial expert said.
“It’s all but impossible, to tell you the truth, both practically and legally,” Robert Hockett, a Cornell University professor of law and finance, told Insider on Wednesday of the likelihood that the Taliban obtain those reserves.
Hockett said it was essentially legally impossible because the Taliban are “not recognized as a legitimate government by the United States.”
“And the United States has the legal authority to freeze assets that were held by a government when that government is replaced by a nongovernment,” he added.
The “only way” that the Taliban could see the billions of dollars in reserves, according to Hockett, is “if it ceases to be the Taliban.”
“Because only if they were to cease being the Taliban, might they come to be viewed as a legitimate government of Afghanistan,” Hockett said.
Shortly after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan following the stunning collapse of the Afghan government last month, the US froze most of the roughly $9.5 billion in assets in the country’s central bank.
And the majority of those reserves are reportedly held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where many governments and foreign central banks hold assets.
The former acting governor of the Afghan central bank, Ajmal Ahmady, previously told The New York Times that a stash of about $7 billion of the central bank’s reserves was held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, while $1.3 billion was held in international accounts.
Those assets, Hockett said, could sit frozen in the US “indefinitely.”
“There’s no sort of time, date, or limit on how long that can be. It could literally be for hundreds of years, legally speaking,” Hockett said.
He added: “Afghanistan held assets in other countries, too, and they’re without a doubt all doing the same thing.”
Hockett pointed to how the US froze billions in Iranian assets after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini took control of the government. Iranian assets, in that case, were frozen for decades.
“With Iran, of course, it has gone on for decades,” Hockett said. “And with the Taliban, it could also go on for decades, if the Taliban itself goes on for decades.”
Another possibility with regard to Afghanistan’s reserves, Hockett said, is that the frozen assets are one day be used to pay damages from lawsuits filed by Afghan refugees who were airlifted out of the country by US and allied forces in the lead-up to the completion of the US military withdrawal from the region.
“I think it’s more likely than not that a bunch of those refugees will end up becoming plaintiffs in suits brought against the Taliban,” Hockett said. “I can imagine class-action suits … brought against the Taliban, or the sort of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, in US federal courts and seeking compensation out of those assets.”
It is likely lawsuits would “succeed,” Hockett said, “given that the US hasn’t even recognized the Taliban as a government, as distinguished from a sort of terror group.”
“I don’t think there’s any chance at all that the Taliban gets this money back through any kind of legal argumentation or legal process,” Hockett said.
The cash-strapped Taliban could “finance themselves in the way that they have over the last 20 years, which is through the illicit drug trade” or rely “on some sort of financing help from rogue elements in the world that have money,” Hockett said.
Additionally, the US could use the frozen assets “as a kind of bargaining chip in negotiations with the Taliban to prevail on the Taliban to do certain things,” Hockett added.
“This is yet another case in which the importance of the US in the global financial system ends up conferring a great deal of power on the US,” Hockett said. “It’s exactly in cases like this where you see just how important or how much power that role the US in the global financial system plays.”
The US Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department did not return requests for comment for this report.
A New York Fed official told Insider in a statement: “As a matter of policy, we do not acknowledge or discuss individual account holders.”
To Meet Paris Accord Goal, Most of the World’s Fossil Fuel Reserves Must Stay in the Ground
A new study in Nature reports that oil, gas and coal production must begin falling immediately to have even a 50 percent chance of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Nicholas Kusnetz September 8, 2021
Oil pump jacks operate at the Inglewood Oil Field in Culver City, California, on July 11, 2021. Credit: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images
After a summer of weather extremes that highlighted the urgency of limiting global warming in starkly human terms, new research is clarifying what it will take to do so. In order to have just a 50 percent chance of meeting the most ambitious climate target, the study found, the production of all fossil fuels will need to start declining immediately, and a significant majority of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves will have to remain underground over the next few decades.
While the research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is only the latest to argue that meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement goals to limit warming requires a rapid pivot to clean energy, it lays out with clear and specific figures exactly how far from those targets the world remains.
“The inescapable evidence that hopefully we’ve shown and that successive reports have shown is that if you want to meet 1.5 degrees, then global production has to start declining,” said Daniel Welsby, a researcher at University College London, in the United Kingdom, and the study’s lead author. As part of the Paris Agreement, nations agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
The study found that nearly 60 percent of global oil and gas reserves and about 90 percent of coal reserves must be left unexploited by 2050, though a portion of those fuels could be produced in the second half of the century. Total oil and gas production must begin declining immediately, the research said, and continue falling at about 3 percent annually through 2050. Coal production must fall at an even steeper rate.
While the authors noted a few signs of change, including that coal production is already on the decline, the current course is far off what’s needed. In March, the International Energy Agency warned that oil production was on track to rebound from a pandemic-driven dip and would surpass 2019 levels within a couple of years. That projection came on the heels of a separate report in December by the United Nations Environment Program, which said energy producing countries are set to expand fossil fuel output for years.
The new paper builds on these studies and other related work to estimate the “unextractable” portion of the fossil fuel stores that are currently considered profitable to exploit—so-called proven reserves. Put another way, the research effectively says that most of the fossil fuels that energy companies currently list as financial assets, or that governments report as strategic ones, would be rendered worthless if the world is to have a shot at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“It is abundantly clear from this and other work that the conversation now is about declining production, it’s about leaving fossil fuel reserves in the ground,” said Greg Muttitt, senior policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank. Muttitt was not involved in the new research, though he is working on a separate paper with some of the authors.
A 2015 study, which shares a co-author with the new paper, ran a similar experiment geared toward limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit)—the amount that countries in the Paris Agreement committed to keep global warming “well below.” The new work shows that roughly twice as much oil would have to be left unexploited by 2050 to have a 50 percent chance of reaching the more ambitious 1.5 degree target.
Regions Vary in How Quickly They Must Slow Production
By looking primarily at the cost of production in different parts of the world, the new research provided regional estimates, too, and found significant variation. The Middle East, with its vast stores of oil and gas, would have to leave massive quantities undeveloped. But because its reserves are so large, and its production costs so low, the region would take on an even more dominant role in the world’s future supply.
Canada—where most of the oil reserves are found in the tar sands, which are expensive and polluting to produce—would see more than 80 percent of its reserves go undeveloped, by far the largest share.
The United States is the only region that would see oil production increase from current levels, to about where it was before the pandemic, before peaking within a few years and then declining steadily. U.S. natural gas production, however, would see an immediate and sharp decline in the paper’s scenario as renewable energy sources displace gas for generating electricity.
The paper found less regional variation for coal, which emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than oil or gas. The vast majority of coal reserves would need to be left underground in nearly every region.
The authors said their findings make the case for restricting production by removing subsidies, imposing new taxes or even by prohibiting mining and drilling.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to end new fossil fuel leasing on public lands, and his administration is currently conducting a review of the nation’s oil and gas leasing program that could result in higher royalty rates and other restrictive measures. Congressional Democrats are considering legislation that could scale back or eliminate federal subsidies for fossil fuel production, or even implement new fees or taxes on major producers. Other countries, including Denmark and Costa Rica, have begun banning or phasing out production.
The paper also highlights the risks to governments that are highly dependent on fossil fuels for revenue if they don’t diversify their economies.
The same could be said for private companies and investors in the fossil fuel industry, said Mike Coffin, who is a senior analyst at the climate and financial think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative, which has conducted similar research but was not involved in the new paper.
“The drastic change that’s going to have to happen is going to make those business models unviable,” Coffin said.
At a briefing covering the research, co-author James Price said their findings, as dramatic as they may seem, probably underestimate the volume of fossil fuels that must be left unexploited. Their modeling is aimed toward achieving only a 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, he said.
“If we want a higher chance,” Price said, “then we have to of course keep more carbon in the ground.”
Beyond probabilities, however, he said their model assumes that carbon capture technologies and natural processes like forest regeneration will be able to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere later this century to compensate for some of the fossil fuels the world continues to burn, even though there remain significant questions about the scale of those practices that is feasible.
“This dependency introduces a risk of underestimating just how rapid the decarbonization needs to be,” Price said.
Nicholas Kusnetz, Reporter, New York City
Nicholas Kusnetz is a reporter for Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN, he worked at the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. His work has won numerous awards, including from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including The Washington Post, Businessweek, The Nation, Fast Company and The New York Times.
Imagine If We Had Spent the Last 20 Years Fighting Climate Change Instead of the War on Terror
At the dawn of the new millennium, we directed our national resources in the exact wrong direction. But it’s not too late to turn things around.
Sarah Lazare September 7, 2021
Catera Whitson (C) and Kyler Melancon (R) ride in the back of a high water truck as they volunteer to help evacuate people from homes after neighborhoods flooded in LaPlace, Louisiana on August 30, 2021. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES.
Twenty years into a nebulous “War on Terror,” the United States is in the grips of a full-fledged climate crisis. Hurricane Ida, whose severity is a direct result of human-made climate change, flooded cities, cut off power to hundreds of thousands, killed at least 60 people, and left elderly people dying in their homes and in squalid evacuation facilities. This followed a summer of heat waves, wildfires and droughts — all forms of extreme weather that the Global South has borne the brunt of, but are now, undeniably, the new “normal” in the United States.
The U.S. government has turned the whole globe into a potential battlefield, chasing some ill-defined danger “out there,” when, in reality, the danger is right here — and is partially of the U.S. government’s own creation. Plotting out the connections between this open-ended war and the climate crisis is a grim exercise, but an important one. It’s critical to examine how the War on Terror not only took up all of the oxygen when we should have been engaged in all-out effort to curb emissions, but also made the climate crisis far worse, by foreclosing on other potential frameworks under which the United States could relate with the rest of the world. Such bitter lessons are not academic: There is still time to stave off the worst climate scenarios, a goal that, if attained, would likely save hundreds of millions of lives, and prevent entire countries from being swallowed into the sea.
One of the most obvious lessons is financial: We should have been putting every resource toward stopping climate disaster, rather than pouring public goods into the war effort. According to a recent report by the National Priorities Project, which provides research about the federal budget, the United States has spent $21 trillion over the last 20 years on “foreign and domestic militarization.” Of that amount, $16 trillion went directly to the U.S. military — including $7.2 trillion that went directly to military contracts. This figure also includes $732 billion for federal law enforcement, “because counterterrorism and border security are part of their core mission, and because the militarization of police and the proliferation of mass incarceration both owe much to the activities and influences of federal law enforcement.”
Of course, big government spending can be a very good thing if it goes toward genuine social goods. The price tag of the War on Terror is especially tragic when one considers what could have been done with this money instead, note the report’s authors, Lindsay Koshgarian, Ashik Siddique and Lorah Steichen. A sum of $1.7 trillion could eliminate all student debt, $200 billion could cover 10 years of free preschool for all three and four year olds in the country. And, crucially, $4.5 trillion could cover the full cost of decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid.
But huge military budgets are not only bad when they contrast with poor domestic spending on social goods — our bloated Pentagon should, first and foremost, be opposed because of the harm it does around the world, where it has roughly 800 military bases, and almost a quarter of a million troops permanently stationed in other countries. A new report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that between 897,000 and 929,000 people have been killed “directly in the violence of the U.S. post‑9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.” This number could be even higher. One estimate found that the U.S. war on Iraq alone killed one million Iraqis.
Still, the financial cost of war is worth examining because it reveals something about the moral priorities of our society. Any genuine effort to curb the climate crisis will require a tremendous mobilization of resources — a public works program on a scale that, in the United States, is typically only reserved for war. Now, discussions of such expenditures can be a bit misleading, since the cost of doing nothing to curb climate change is limitless: When the entirety of our social fabric is at stake, it seems silly to debate dollars here or there. But this is exactly what proponents of climate action are forced to do in our political climate. As I reported in March 2020, presidential candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary were grilled about how they would pay for social programs, like a Green New Deal, but not about how they would pay for wars.
In June 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) estimated that the Green New Deal would cost $10 trillion. Her critics on the Right came up with their own number of up to $93 trillion, a figure that was then used as a talking point to bludgeon any hopes of the proposal’s passage. But let’s suppose for a moment that this number, calculated by American Action Forum, were correct, and the price of a Green New Deal came to 4.43 times the cost of 20 years of the War on Terror? So what? Shouldn’t we be willing to devote far more resources to protecting life than to taking it? What could be more valuable than safeguarding humanity against an existential threat?
The reality is that warding off the worst-case scenario of climate change, which the latest IPCC report says is still possible, will require massive amounts of spending upfront. Not only do we have to stop fossil fuel extraction and shift to decarbonized energy, but we have to do so in a way that does not leave an entire generation of workers destitute. Several proposals for how to achieve this have been floated: a just transition for workers; a revamping of public transit and public housing; public ownership of energy industries for the purpose of immediately decarbonizing them; global reparations for the harm the United States has done. Any way you look at it, meaningful climate legislation will require a huge mobilization of public resources — one that beats back the power of capital. And of course, dismantling the carbon-intensive U.S. military apparatus must be part of the equation.
In our society, it’s a given that we spend massive amounts of these public resources on military expansion year after year, with the National Defense Authorization Act regularly accounting for more than half of all discretionary federal spending (this year being no exception, despite President Biden’s promise to end “forever wars”). Over the past 20 years, the mobilization behind the War on Terror has been enabled by a massive propaganda effort. Think tanks financed by weapons contractors have filled cable and print media with “expert” commentators on the importance of open-ended war. Longstanding civilian suffering as a result post‑9/11 U.S. wars has been ignored. From abetting the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction to the demonization of anti-war protesters as “terrorist” sympathizers, the organs of mass communication in this country have roundly fallen on the side of supporting the War on Terror, a dynamic that is in full evidence as media outlets move to discipline President Biden for actually ending the Afghanistan war.
What if a similar effort had been undertaken to educate the public about the need for dramatic climate action? Instead of falsehoods and selective moral outrage, we could have had sound, scientifically-based political education about the climate dangers that Exxon has known of for more than 40 years. We could have spent 20 years building the political will for social transformation. It may seem ridiculous to suggest that the war propaganda effort could have gone toward progressive ends: After all, the institutions responsible — corporate America, major media outlets and bipartisan lawmakers — were incentivized against such a public service, and would never have undertaken similar efforts for progressive ends.
But this gets at something crucial — if difficult to quantify — about the harm done by 20 years of the War on Terror. The push for militarization has been used to shut down exactly the left-wing political ideas that are vitally needed to curb the climate crisis. As I argued in February 2020, U.S. wars have repeatedly been used to justify a crackdown on left-wing movements. World War I saw passage of the Espionage Act, which was used to crack down on anti-war protesters and radical labor organizers. The Cold War was used as pretext for crackdowns on a whole host of domestic movements, from communist to socialist to Black Freedom, alongside U.S. support for vicious anti-communist massacres around the world. The War on Terror was no different, used to justify passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was used to police and surveil countless protesters, including environmentalists. The Global Justice Movement was sounding the alarm about the climate crisis in the late 1990s, and was not only subjected to post‑9/11 government repression, but was then forced to refocus on opposing George W. Bush’s global war effort.
The War on Terror also makes it nearly impossible to attain the kinds of global cooperation we need to address the climate crisis. It is difficult for countries to focus on making the transformations needed to curb climate change when they are focused on trying to survive U.S. bombings, invasions, meddling and sanctions. And it’s difficult to force the United States to reverse its disproportionate climate harms when perpetual war and confrontation is the primary American orientation toward much of the world, and the vast majority of U.S. global cooperation is aimed at maintaining this footing.
Such grim reflections on the climate harms wrought by 20 years of the War on Terror do not amount to a nihilistic “I told you so.” We vitally need to apply these grisly lessons now, as the nebulous “War on Terror” is still being waged, from drone wars in Somalia to the bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, while Biden claims to be “ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” he is overseeing an increasingly confrontational posture toward China, an approach championed by members of Congress in both parties. As dozens of environmental and social justice organizations noted in July, it is inconceivable that the world can curb the climate crisis without the cooperation of the United States (the biggest per-capita greenhouse gas emitter) and China (the biggest overall greenhouse gas emitter). Instead of militarizing the Asia-Pacific region to hedge against China, the United States could acknowledge this stark reality and launch an unprecedented effort for climate cooperation with China.
The possibilities for an alternative global orientation are both vast and difficult to know. What we do know is that the status quo of the War on Terror is not working. In addition to the hospitals the United States has bombed, the homes it has destroyed, the factories it has obliterated, and the people it has terrorized, the American military project has deeply worsened the climate crisis. And that crisis is now, undeniably, on our shores.
Sarah Lazare, is web editor and reporter for In These Times.
“I owe the Afghan people an explanation”: Ashraf Ghani apologizes for fleeing Kabul
Zachary Basu
Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani issued a statement Wednesday apologizing to Afghans for fleeing Kabul on the day the Taliban entered the capital city, calling it “the most difficult decision” of his life.
Why it matters: Ghani’s decision to flee Kabul and seek asylum in the United Arab Emirates on Aug. 15 precipitated the collapse of the Afghan government.
In a White House address the day after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, President Biden criticized Ghani and the Afghan security forces for choosing not to “fight for their country.”
Ghani was also accused of stealing millions of dollars worth of public money as he fled Kabul, allegations he has vigorously denied. He said Wednesday that he and his top aides would submit to an independent investigation or audit to prove his innocence.
The big picture: Ghani’s statement — his most extensive public remarks since the fall of Kabul — comes one day after the Taliban announced the formation of an acting government that features top loyalists and several internationally sanctioned terrorists.
What they’re saying: “I owe the Afghan people an explanation for leaving Kabul abruptly on August 15th after Taliban unexpectedly entered the city. I left at the urging of the palace security who advised me that to remain risked setting off the same horrific street-to-street fighting the city had suffered during the Civil War of the 1990s,” Ghani said.
“Leaving Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life, but I believed it was the only way to keep the guns silent and save Kabul and her 6 million citizens,” he added.
“Now is not the moment for a long assessment of the events leading up to my departure — I will address them in detail in the near future. But I must now address baseless allegations that as I left Kabul I took with my millions of dollars belonging to the Afghan people. These charges are completely and categorically false.”
“Corruption is a plague that has crippled our country for decades and fighting corruption has been a central focus of my efforts as president. I inherited a monster that could not easily or quickly be defeated.”
The bottom line: “It is with deep and profound regret that my own chapter ended in similar tragedy to my predecessors — without ensuring stability and prosperity. I apologize to the Afghan people that I could not make it end differently,” Ghani concluded. “My commitment to the Afghan people has never wavered and will guide me for the rest of my life.”
Go Ahead, Worry! A Worst-Case Scenario for American Democracy
The American far right has transformed politics in unprecedented ways. Can this be reversed?
By Robert Crawford September 1, 2021
With Trump no longer president and the January 6 insurrection thwarted, the danger may appear to be behind us. “Democracy survived.”
Yet few observers and activists on the left are sanguine about what the future holds. Most alarming are the bald attempts by Republican state legislatures to suppress likely Democratic voters, along with redistricting and other moves to control or even override elections. President Biden called these machinations an “assault on democracy.” However Republican voter suppression might be the tip of a much larger iceberg. Are Americans now be living in the last years of a hard-fought democratic project?
Could the United States be on the cusp of a far-right takeover of the federal government—as early as 2024?
Like climate catastrophe, the signs of severely compromised democracy and impending political disaster are present everywhere in our political life. Shouldn’t we have seen the emergency earlier? The racial justice movement has long directed attention to how racism and racialized structures of power have undermined American democracy from the beginning. Historical amnesia engenders continuing somnolence on the perverse influence of money, radical inequality, obstructed social democracy, militarism and impunity for human rights violations abroad and at home.
The last six years have shocked many of us into a new apprehension. We need to listen to historians like Timothy Snyder and others who have researched the final years of democracy in Weimar Germany before the Nazi takeover. If the peril we face is remotely similar to 1933—a more apt comparison might be Orban’s authoritarian takeover of Hungary—all progressive movements should put this threat at the forefront of their strategic calculations. Yet, with some notable exceptions, what is lacking is a comprehensive grasp of the dangers we still face.
I offer here a tentative map of the multiple and interlocking dimensions of the threat from the contemporary far right. Most are already familiar to readers of The Nation. My intent, however, is to help us avoid reductionist explanations and strategies.
An assessment of the American far right should at minimum pay close attention to the following dimensions—which taken together compose the threat we face.
1) A popular, authoritarian leader who transformed the political landscape during his four years in office and who still retains broad public support, the loyalty of a radicalized “base” and Republican activists and leaders who either ideologically identify with Trumpism or who instrumentally choose to align themselves with it. Donald Trump popularized and legitimized a violent, authoritarian, and cruel style of politics that now reaches far beyond the question of whether he will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024.
2) An attempted coup on January 6, orchestrated by the sitting president and his Republican party and militia collaborators, aimed at overturning the election and preventing the peaceful transfer of power. Republicans have blocked or undermined official investigations which would have laid bare their party’s complicity with Trump. The “Stop the Steal” movement—backed by a network of far-right funders—and other attempts by the president and Republicans to negate the results of a free and fair election strike at the heart of the democratic system. Bitterness and resentment about the election continue to be widespread among Trump supporters. As of late May 2021, a Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates that 61 percent of Republicans still believe the election was stolen. The myth of a fraudulent election is also used to justify ongoing voter suppression maneuvers.
3) Dangerously faltering commitments to nonviolent, democratic values. Millions of Americans now think the use of force is a legitimate option. In a January 2020 YouGov poll of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 50.7 percent agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Over 40 percent agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” Making clear the connection with racism, the poll also found a high correlation between “ethnic antagonism” and the acceptance of violent acts. Further, a CBS/YouGov poll reported on January 13, 2021, found that one in five Republicans—that is, millions of Americans—approved of the January 6 perpetrators. When asked what words would best describe the actions of those “who forced their way into the U.S. Capitol,” 43 percent of Republicans chose “patriotism” and 50 percent chose “defending freedom.” Those percentages remained at that level and slightly higher in a July 20 CBS/YouGov poll.
4) A proliferation of preexisting and new white-supremacist/far-right militia and other groups training for violence. They have organized armed “gun rights” and anti-lockdown demonstrations at state capitols, confrontations with antifa, the “defense” of communities against imagined invasions of antifa or Black Lives Matter activists, and openly racist rallies. In October 2020, a militia group, inspired by Trump’s tweet from the White House to “liberate Michigan,” plotted to kidnap its Democratic governor. Many of the January 6 participants were militia members, demonstrating their willingness to overthrow the government. One week later, the FBI issued a warning that “armed protests are being planned in all 50 state capitols…and at the US Capitol.” The federal and state security mobilizations that followed dampened such plans—but for how long? A barrage of death threats against election officials over the 2020 election continued into 2021. Acts of domestic terrorism by far-right/white supremacist groups and individuals have soared in recent years, climbing to new highs in 2019 and 2020. Targets have included Blacks, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQs, Asians and other people of color.
5) Far-right/white supremacist radicalization within, or infiltration of, state institutions that exercise “legitimate” (law-protected) violence—a critical element of state capture used to control populations and suppress opposition. These include police, military, ICE, and Customs and Border Patrol. In an era of Black Lives Matter protests and demands for constraining police violence, the protection of prerogatives to use violence (even for private citizens, as in the various Stand Your Ground laws) has become a key mobilizing issue on the right.
6) A thriving far-right media juggernaut dominated by Fox News on cable, along with print media, talk radio, and internet sites. Right-wing groups effectively use social media to amplify messaging and create followers. Social media is also well-suited for rapid dissemination of conspiratorial other kinds of disinformation. Encrypted messaging platforms such as Telegram operate as recruitment and organizing vehicles for underground organizations. Tucker Carlson’s recent broadcast from Hungary, after meeting with and praising Viktor Orban, the country’s authoritarian leader, is just one indication of what far-right media personalities have in mind for America.
7) A steady acceleration of right-wing political movements since the election of Barack Obama, shifting further to the right with Trump. Dating back at least to the late 1970s, “pseudo-populist” and “America First” narratives have been advanced by Republicans and right-wing media (although Bernie Sanders demonstrated that the left could also draw on populism’s long history to respond to economic precarity and dislocation, concentrated wealth and corporate control). Trump’s pseudo-populism—after all, his singular legislative achievement was a tax cut for the rich—promotes a hateful and militant politics of resentment, displacing economic anxieties onto to social, religious, and racial antagonisms. Nativism and white fears of demographic “replacement” dominate the Trumpian world-view, followed by anti-tax/anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-gay views and hysteria about the left. The success of Trumpism as far-right ideology, including a cult-like loyalty to the leader, has facilitated the tectonic shift to the right among people who identify as Republican.
8) The Republican Party’s transformation into a far-right party, currently controlled by Trumpists but extending beyond Trump to right-wing and white supremacist politicians who came out of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus. The party’s racist Southern strategy has gone national. In addition to its long-standing subservience to money and a corporate agenda, the GOP is backed by various right-wing interest groups and foundations, evangelical religious groups, and wealthy dark-money donors. At the state level, Republicans already control 30 state legislatures; in 22 states they control both legislature and the governorships. In several of these states, the party has already taken steps that must be described as authoritarian and repressive, enacting measures that criminalize protest; suppress the teaching of anti-racist history and diversity or the struggle for social justice; ban transgender people from public spaces; further restrict abortion rights; and oppose local and federal public health measures.
9) The Supreme Court and many appellate and local courts falling under the control of right-wing judges. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority is poised to rule or has already ruled on several cases that will likely block key progressive policies such as Biden’s eviction moratorium extension, union access to workplaces, restrictions on gun rights, abortion rights, and Biden’s efforts to reverse Trump administration immigration policies. The chances for campaign finance reform remain nonexistent. Ominously, the court has further weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and has demonstrated its hostility toward other federal government efforts to ensure free and fair elections.
10) Last, but not least: voter suppression, gerrymandering and related initiatives enacted by Republican state legislatures, all designed to undermine Democratic-leaning, especially Black, voting blocs and ensure favorable electoral outcomes in 2022 and 2024. In a transparent authoritarian turn, Republicans are also passing legislation aimed at giving state legislatures the power to overturn election results they don’t like. As of July 14, 18 states had enacted 30 laws restricting access to the vote. On the national level, two major voting rights bills put forward by Democrats remain stymied by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
So many contingencies make the future impossible to predict. Yet, taken in full measure, the transformations outlined above call for a sober assessment of possibilities. Two scenarios point to the 2024 election, which is why most progressives are so focused on protecting the vote. Most likely, the Republican nominee will be Donald Trump.
In one scenario, Trump wins and with the Supreme Court and a Republican Congress behind him takes the country as far to the right as he can. The electoral system will be further reworked to ensure long-term Republican control. Steeped in a media-fed rhetoric of fear and hate, America will become a fortress state. Police, with the likely help of militia groups, will suppress resistance mounted by progressive movements.
Another scenario is a closely contested presidential election, marked by intimidation of voters and possible violence. If a Democrat narrowly wins, Republicans are likely to declare the election illegitimate and attempt another coup, this time more carefully executed. If the nation descends into violence or mass civil disobedience, the military and police would then move to restore order in support of their own version of the legitimate claimants to power, likely backed by the Supreme Court.
My purpose in highlighting these 10 dimensions is to urge that we grasp the contemporary far right as a totality. No matter how loosely integrated or internally conflicted, today’s far-right movement aims to capture power and is frighteningly close to achieving that end. The far-right/white supremacist movement must be confronted in all its interconnected dimensions. If we fail to rouse ourselves to oppose the threat, we may easily fall into a racist and brutal autocracy lasting generations. Our present may come to be understood as “The Before”—the period when history might have taken a different turn but, because of inertia and lack of political will, did not.
It’s time to summon up that political will. The choice is still ours to make.
