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Jane Braxton Little, Becoming a Climate Refugee

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Last month, I wrote a piece, “My Extreme World and (Un)Welcome to It,” about the shock of finding myself in what might be thought of as World War III, or perhaps World War(m) III; that is, already living in a country experiencing unbelievably extreme weather. July had just been declared the warmest month ever recorded in human history. And that was before Tennessee experienced historically record-breaking rainfall and flooding; the Caldor fire — an unstoppable inferno of flames and smoke — descended on Lake Tahoe; and Hurricane Ida swept across the ever hotter waters of the Gulf of Mexico, another result of climate change, suddenly powering up from a category 1 to a category 4 hurricane to blast New Orleans with 150 mile per hour winds. (Amid sweltering end-of-summer heat there, forget air conditioning, tap water, or refrigerators for possibly weeks to come.) And then it even came north to clobber New York City and the Northeast.

I started that mid-August piece with the California mega-blaze, the Dixie Fire, one of 100 across the West at the time. It was sweeping through northern parts of that state and making headlines nationally. (Weeks later, as I write this, it’s still blazing, having burned more than 800,000 acres of land.) It had essentially obliterated a small town, Greenville, where I had spent time in the 1970s.  As I wrote, “Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived.”

That put me back in touch with my old pal, journalist Jane Braxton Little, who’s written today’s vivid TomDispatch piece on what it feels like to be a climate refugee. (Her house, in fact, survived in devastated Greenville, though her office elsewhere in town was left in ashes.) You may know climate refugees, too, if, for instance, you happen to be friends with someone who fled New Orleans as Hurricane Ida approached (and whom the governor of that state has begged not to return home yet). Or maybe you have a friend among the tens of thousands of people who had to flee the Lake Tahoe area as the devastating Caldor Fire bore down on them. It’s long been clear that, on a planet where someday whole regions may become uninhabitable, such refugees, in the tens or hundreds of millions, will become the everyday reality of our world. Consider, then, Little’s account and take a deep breath. It could be you or me next.  Tom

The Dixie Fire Disaster and Me

Can My Town Rebuild After Losing It All?

GREENVILLE, CA — At 10 a.m. on July 22nd, I interviewed a New York University professor about using autonomous robots, drones, and other unmanned devices to suppress structural and wildland fires. I sent the interview to an online transcription service, walked down the steps of my second-floor office and a block to the Greenville post office, where I mailed a check to California Fair Plan for homeowners’ fire insurance. I then drove 25 miles to a dental appointment. I was lucky to make it home before burning debris closed the roads.

That night I became a climate refugee, evacuated from my house thanks to the Dixie Fire. Since then, it's scorched a landscape nearly the size of Delaware, destroyed 678 houses and decimated several communities in Indian Valley, where I've been for 46 years. One of them was Greenville, California, a town founded in the Gold Rush era of the nineteenth century, where I happen to live. I never imagined myself among the 55 million people worldwide whose lives have already been upended by climate change. Maybe no one does until it happens, even though we're obviously the future for significant parts of humanity. Those of us who acknowledge the climate disaster -- especially those who write about it -- may be the last to picture ourselves fleeing the catastrophes scientists have been predicting.

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Engelhardt, Post-Afghanistan, Nation (Un)Building Comes Home

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: TD is back and, as always, I’m urging you, its faithful readers, to take a moment to visit our donation page. Whatever you can contribute will help keep this website heading into a future that it’s been all too sadly accurate about. Very simply, you’re what keeps us going in good times and bad and we’re in a country where TomDispatch-style coverage of our world and its perils is needed now more than ever. Let me also thank those of you who have contributed in these last weeks. I always see your individual donations and feel deeply appreciative (even if also regretful that I don’t have the time to thank you each individually). And now, back to that world of ours. Tom]

The Decline and Fall of the Roman… Whoops!… American Empire

What Really Matters in the U.S. of A.

They weren't kidding when they called Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires." Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn't pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is.

In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington over these last weeks shouldn't have been surprising, given our history. After all, we were the ones who prepared the ground and dug the grave for the previous interment in that very cemetery.

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Michael Klare, Is a Cold War Still Possible in an Overheating World?

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This will be the last TomDispatch piece until September 7th. As always, I’m taking these two weeks off.  I hope, in the (quite literal) heat of the moment, some of you get a break, too. As always, I urge TD readers to do what you’ve done so movingly all these years: visit our donation page and consider contributing something to the site so that it can continue to wander into our ever-stranger future. Tom]

Think of it as an irony of the first order that Joe Biden’s foreign-policy team came into office promoting new cold-war policies against the rising power on this planet, China. After all, even if it is that, it’s rising in a world that only recently experienced its warmest month on record. The very term “cold war,” in fact, seems like an artifact of ancient history at a time when, among other places, the U.S., Europe, and Canada have all been setting new heat records and experiencing fires of a sort seldom seen before. In this sense, the Biden foreign-policy team and the Pentagon, as they maneuver to confront the Chinese Navy not off the California coast but from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea to the Taiwan Strait, couldn’t seem more out of touch with the deeper realities of our world.

I guarantee you one thing: at the moment, they’re doing their planning for forming alliances against a rising China in air-conditioned rooms, because it’s been hot as hell in Washington — or by Zoom because it’s still a pandemic country. Yes, against all reason and sense, the U.S. continues to build ultra-expensive new nuclear weapons (having in recent years dumped several nuclear treaties), while fretting eternally about China’s upgraded but still relatively modest nuclear arsenal. As it happens, though, the future “battles” the U.S. and China might find themselves in, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, writes today, could be of a very different, even if still world-endangering nature. To be won, they would have to be fought not against each other, but together.  Welcome to a new-style hot-war world.  Tom

China, 2049

A Climate Disaster Zone, Not a Military Superpower

In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China’s ever-expanding air, naval, and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country's current capabilities, which remain vastly inferior to those of the U.S., than the world they foresee in the 2030s and 2040s, when Beijing is expected to have acquired far more sophisticated weaponry.

“China has invested heavily in new technologies, with a stated intent to complete the modernization of its forces by 2035 and to field a ‘world-class military’ by 2049,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testified in June. The United States, he assured the Senate Armed Services Committee, continues to possess “the best joint fighting force on Earth.” But only by spending countless additional billions of dollars annually, he added, can this country hope to “outpace” China's projected advances in the decades to come.

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