Oxfam puts the matter all too strikingly: “The number of climate-related disasters has tripled in the last 30 years. Between 2006 and 2016, the rate of global sea-level rise was 2.5 times faster than it was for almost all of the 20th century. More than 20 million people a year are forced from their homes by climate change.” And, of course, that’s just to begin a rundown of what’s already becoming an endless list of unprecedented floods, fires, megadroughts, melting ice and rising sea levels, ever more devastating storms, and so on down a list that only gets longer by the year. And the human toll from all this, especially in the Global South, grows ever more horrifying.
Take, as an example, drought caused significantly by the overheating of this planet — and here, I’m not thinking about the 500-year record drought in Europe last summer, the heat of which is estimated to have been responsible for more than 20,000 deaths, or the 1,200-year record megadrought in the American West (now moving east), or the record-blazing temperatures in China for two months last summer. No, what’s on my mind are the climate-change-influenced droughts that have repeatedly struck the Horn of Africa after five seasons of failed rains, the latest of which is so severe that, in Somalia alone, hundreds of thousands of people (particularly starving children) could die in the resulting famine.
Yes, climate change is increasing the death toll in the rich industrial countries of the Global North, too. In 2021, for instance, the United States experienced 20 billion-dollar climate and weather disasters, the second largest group of them in its history. (You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to discover that the record — 22 — was set only the year before and will undoubtedly be broken again in the years to come.) From them came an estimated 688 direct or indirect deaths. And that is, of course, a horror, but still a relatively modest number compared to the 1,700 or more Pakistanis who died from this year’s singularly devastating summer floods alone, and if Africa’s famine turns out as expected, that number will be less than nothing by comparison.
Sadly, unlike the northern powers largely responsible for the greenhouse gases that created this growing set of disasters, as TomDispatch regulars Stan and Priti Gulati Cox explain today, the countries of the Global South can’t afford to pay for what’s happening to them. And at a time when the major fossil-fuel companies — housed, of course, largely in the Global North — are still raking in staggering profits off their oil and natural gas supplies, as that line straight out of my childhood went: there oughta be a law. Sadly, there isn’t, even though, when you think about it, those fossil-fuel companies could be considered the real terrorists of Planet Earth. Tom
Paying for an Overheating Earth
Whose Planet Are We On?
On October 29th, 75-year-old Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo Bay’s oldest detainee, was finally released by U.S. authorities and flown home to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades without either charges or a trial. His plane touched down in a land still reeling from this year’s cataclysmic monsoon floods that, in July, had covered an unparalleled one-third of that country. Even his own family’s neighborhood, the well-heeled Defense Housing Authority complex, had been thoroughly inundated with, as a reporter wrote at the time, “water gushing into houses.”
Having endured 19 years of suffering inflicted by the brute force of imperialism during America's "Global War on Terror,” Paracha, along with all of Pakistan, will now suffer through the climatic devastation wrought by the invisible hand of economic imperialism. Indeed, even as his family members were embracing him for the first time since that fateful day in 2003 when he was seized in an FBI sting operation in Thailand, governments and corporations throughout the Global North were sharpening their knives, preparing to reassert their dominance as they do at every year’s U.N. climate conference -- this one being COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.
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