Water, Energy and Future Peace (Part II)

This is Part II in a series of writings that study global patterns and how - by transforming to a Circular Economy - we can transform the old win-lose Paradigm of Scarcity into a new win-win Paradigm of Abundance that enables us to navigate our way out of the treacherous waters in which the human family currently finds itself ...

Take, Make, Use, Waste

Technology innovation in the?Industrial Revolution?of the 18th?and 19th?centuries made consumer products plentiful, accessible, and affordable.? As production grew to satisfy growing demand, wages increased, people moved from rural to urban areas, and our traditional economy and society - previously centered on agriculture - transformed into something else.

To support this new manufacturing-centered and consumer-driven model, a linear economy emerged. The linear economy was based on?extracting?resources, producing?and?consuming?products,?and throwing the leftovers away.??

Over time, the society that evolved with this model led us to believe that maximum?Production?+?Consumption + Growth = Wealth + Power + Happiness.?

The principles underlying this equation have served to fuel the fear-driven?Paradigm of Scarcity, poisoned the flow of spiritual wisdom from our ancestors, and devastated the natural ecosystem upon which our collective future as a species depends.??

In the?linear economy?paradigm, natural ecosystems – and the spiritually whole communities these ecosystems once hosted – drifted into the recesses of the modern consumer’s mind. They became a hazy abstract dimension whose only purpose has been to keep delivering a steady flow of finite resources to the companies racing to make the things we hungrily consume.?

To sustain this linear paradigm, the world’s leading companies and nations – those we aspire to – have worked relentlessly to extract, produce and sell as much as possible, as fast as possible, while skillfully preventing other companies and nations from doing the same.? Our infrastructure, trade policies, financial systems, and security policies between nations changed as our hunger for new products grew exponentially.??

In 2012, Dave Tilford of the Sierra Club described America’s position in this?linear economy?reality:?

With less than 5 percent of world population, the US uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper … per capita use of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat – and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world.[1]

In the buildup to World War I – as the power in the linear flow of oil became clear – the Paradigm of Scarcity?and hunger to control finite resources in foreign lands intensified.??

Tension grew as the voracious powers of Britain, France, Germany and others maneuvered to take control of colonial territories – a key factor in motivating the?Great War?that claimed 20 million lives, wounded 21 million people, and injected inter-generational trauma into the DNA and psyche of the families, communities, and nations involved … deep emotional wounds that continue to flood our societies, souls, and strategic decisions with the burning acid of distrust that flows freely between us today.[2]

There is an old Chinese saying that says simply:??the real cost of war is not the rivers of blood, but the ocean of tears.??Modern psychologists explain how painful memories are cemented by emotions.??The burning flow of these painful fluids carry trauma, fear and distrust from toxic tributaries far upstream of our own lives to pollute the downstream rivers of our soul - and the lives of our children - with the hard acid pellets of confusion we see strewn across the globals landscape today.

In?Cuirassiers of the Frontier, Robert Graves, a survivor of brutal trench warfare in World War I, captures the emotional catastrophe of war.??His bitter words painted Britain’s political and religious establishment of the day in the same colors of the morally bankrupt institutions that precipitated the collapse of Rome.??These same feelings of disenfranchisement, disintegration, and distrust have flowed from the corrupt spiritual underbelly of subsequent wars – leaving broken nations, broken communities, and broken hope in their wake.?

Goths, Vandals, Huns, Isaurian mountaineers,

Made Roman by our Roman sacrament,

We can know little (as we care little)

Of the Metropolis: her candled churches,

Her white-gowned pederastic senators,

The cut-throat factions of her Hippodrome,

The eunuchs of her draped saloons.

The Christ bade Holy Peter sheathe his sword,

Being outnumbered by the Temple guard.

And this was prudence, the cause not yet lost

While Peter might persuade the crowd to rescue.

Peter renegued, breaking his sacrament.

With us the penalty is death by stoning,

Not to be made a bishop.

The greatest consequences of the violent wars and conflicts that lie scattered across our shared path through history is broken trust – and the future conflict it seeds.??Like water, trust never goes out of fashion – and no technology can produce it.??Unlike water, trust is not infinitely renewable.??

Yet, we have no option but to rebuild trust if we hope to continue to feature as a viable species on a planet growing more weary each day of the patterns of waste and destruction we leave in our collective wake. Today, the ugly intertwined jewel of linear resource acquisition, broken trust, and war hangs around our necks like a twisted fossilized snake – rusted into our confused souls.??

Unless the rust is broken free and washed away, the cycles of madness will continue – as we are dragged closer to the powerful currents of the circular whirlpool we have created.

Follow the Flow: Oil, Money, Information and War

At 4 am in the morning on 26 May 1908, British explorer George Reynolds struck oil at 1,180 feet below ground in Masjid-i-Suleiman in modern day Iran.[3]??It was the first oil discovered in the Middle East – and it changed the world as we knew it.?

At 1 am in the morning, 111 years later and 600 kilometers northwest of this site, a vehicle carrying Iranian General Qasem Soleimani from Baghdad International Airport was struck by a missile fired from an American drone overhead.??A villain to some and a hero to others, Soleimani had designed and spearheaded the Iranian regime’s proxy war strategy in the Middle East … the net result of a century of broken trust and fear-driven?Paradigm of Scarcity?thinking.???

The tightly interlaced flow of oil, money, information, narrative and war in the Middle East in the 111 years between these days is one of the clearest modern-day stories of the catastrophic consequences of decisions driven by the?Paradigm of Scarcity?… deceit, treachery, intimidation, violence, the discarding of core values, and the destruction of opportunities to build bridges, share cultural wisdom from the past, and work together to weave a new story of lasting peace.??

On 19 August 1953 – forty-five years from the day oil was discovered in Iran – the nation’s democratically elected Prime Minister was overthrown by gangsters and traitorous members of his own regime.??

The coup was engineered by the CIA and MI6 to give Britain unrestricted access to Iran’s oil via the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) – the same company that struck oil in 1908.??Fifty-seven years later this same company – now called BP – would be responsible for the largest marine oil spill in human history in the Gulf of Mexico.??

When Iran would not agree to AIOC’s one-sided oil terms, Britain used the same?logic of intimidation?it applied in 1839 – when it chose to invade China to force narcotics onto its people.??In 1953, only a few years after World War II, Britain was much weaker as a nation.??It needed a partner in crime.??It turned to the United States – convincing it to compromise its core values and engineer the overthrow of Iran’s democratic and legitimately elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh.??The compliant monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the?Shah), was installed in Mossadegh’s place as a puppet.???

Mossadegh was a patriotic leader with a secular vision for Iran that aligned with the new democracies of the free world.??Like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and others in the decades that followed in this new era of forced regime change, Mossadegh believed that the nation’s resources belonged to the nation – and should serve the nation’s interests.??

Harry Truman, US president until seven months before the coup, strongly opposed overthrowing Mossadegh.??A son of the American soil – Truman had old school American values and would not succumb to the British government’s manipulations.??He wisely warned of the strategic consequences involved in “cloak and dagger” operations that abused America’s newfound power on the global stage.??He had foresight and vision – the critical intuitive ability of a leader to predict what lay ahead of key forks in the great flow of the river.??Ten years after the coup, he harshly criticized the CIA he had established.??He called for it to return to its core function of intelligence and to scrap the use of paramilitary operations to interfere in the internal politics of sovereign nations.??His calls went unheeded.[4]

For some time, I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment.??It has become an operational – and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.??I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime “cloak and dagger” operations.[4]

At the time of the coup, the US government manipulated Western media into crafting a deceitful narrative of Mossadegh as an “intemperate, unstable, and otherwise unreliable ally.”[5]??Sixty years later, in 2013, the CIA finally admitted its role in this catastrophic strategic move on the chessboard of global competition for control of finite resources.

The target of this policy … Mohammad Mosadeq, [sic] was neither a madman nor an emotional bundle of senility as he was so often pictured in the foreign press; however, he had become so committed to the ideals of nationalism ... he was in fact defying the professional politicians of the British government. These leaders believed, with good reason, that cheap oil for Britain and high profits for the company were vital to their national interests.[5]

The “cloak and dagger” activities of the CIA and MI6 in Iran sowed the seeds of strategic catastrophe – the fruits of which we continue to eat today.??In 1979, Iranian anger erupted.??Like dominoes, the hostage crisis at the US embassy, the overthrow of the puppet leader, and “the creation of the Islamic Republic to counter the?Great Satan” quickly followed.

British subversion in the Middle East was a pattern.??Vikram Sood, former chief of India’s foreign intelligence agency, explained how Britain transferred the “divide and rule” skills it acquired in ruling the Indian sub-continent between 1757 and 1947 to support its cunning??activities to control the flow of oil in Middle East after World War II.[6]

The ‘divide and rule’ policy was honed into a fine art, leading ultimately to the Partition of India [in 1947]. This experience of the British in handling its empire and the Indian National Movement was very useful in the post-World War II global situation, especially in the crucial Middle East … regime change, military engagements and proxies were used to secure strategic and commercial interests … Britain and the US have frequently supported or aided radical Islamic forces, like the Muslim Brotherhood, at different times, in the Middle East to counter the rise of nationalism.[6]

1989:??A Fork in the Flow

In 1989, a window opened for America to lead the way in transforming the broken?Paradigm of Scarcity between nations into a new?Paradigm of Abundance?that could inspire the win-win cooperation desperately needed to solve the fountain of toxic problems from which the whole world was increasingly being forced to drink.??

With the invention of the World Wide Web and opening of the?Information Age?in 1989, an opportunity that had never existed, suddenly emerged.??It was an opportunity to reshape the broken?win-lose game?between nations.??In this new and changing world of information sharing, level playing fields, and interconnectivity, the new equation was quickly becoming?win-lose = lose-lose.?

As the Cold War ended, a volcano of suppressed issues of the past re-emerged to be mixed up with a complicated cocktail of new problems in a world that was suddenly disordered and more complex.??By 1989, a once idealistic young America had been lured into the darkest arts of international relations.??Yet, as the?Information Age?began, she was uniquely positioned to lead the creation of a new model.??

It was time for change – and only America could lead it. It was her time. ??

In 1989, the United States held in her palm a more powerful combination of economic, military, and inspirational power to reshape the world than any nation ever had before – or has since.??In his farewell to the nation on 11 January 1989, Ronald Reagan heralded this power as he spoke emotionally of a new era of global peace, opportunity, and hope.

This new year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe.??Not only have the superpowers begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons … but the regional conflicts that wracked the globe are also beginning to cease.??The Persian Gulf is no longer a war zone, the Soviets are leaving Afghanistan … and an American mediated accord will soon send 50,000 troops home from Angola … we meant to change a nation, and instead we changed a world.[7]

As he closed his speech, he painted a moving vision of America through the eyes of an early settler – a Pilgrim who was inspired to reach the shores of the “shining city upon a hill.”??

Like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.??I’ve spoken of a “shining city” all my political life … in my mind it was a tall proud city, built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teaming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace … that’s how I saw it and see it still.??After 200 years, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge – and her glow has held steady, no matter what storm.??She is still a beacon.[7]

America’s power in 1989 was awe-inspiring.??She had it all.??But she lacked vision.??She was bold, but not mature.??She was powerful, but not wise.??She thought she could lead – but she could not.??2,500 years ago, a Chinese strategist named Sun Tzu explained it best.?

Those who are victorious plan effectively and change decisively.??They are like a great river that maintains its course but adjusts its flow.

In 1989, the global chess game changed suddenly.??America was in the power position.??It was her move – her opportunity to change the game.??In that year, she failed to accurately read, reorient, and adjust her flow in response to three paradigm shattering events that suddenly converged in the rushing river of humanity’s time on earth:??

1)????The Soviet Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

2)????The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

3)????Global consensus on the existential threat to humanity of climate change.

In each case, America’s choices revealed her lack of vision, her emotional immaturity, and her dangerous inherited habit of moral compromise.??The world desperately needed her to provide vision and leadership – but she could not.??The choices America made in relation to these future-defining events has had devastating strategic consequences for her and the world in the 32 years that followed.??As we enter the 2020s, these consequences are multiplying.?

In 1989, instead of hoisting her sails to harness the powerful new winds of change, America chose the old and familiar.??She chose fear and the?Paradigm of Scarcity.?

Three Forks, Three Choices and Decades of Poisoned Flow

As an American born and raised in an era of complex, confusing, and violent intercultural and political conflict in South Africa, I first reached the shining city as a 17-year-old in the mid 1990s.??I was young, idealistic, and bold – with a vision of one day building a bridge from the shining city back to my native Africa to help heal a region of deeply rooted conflicts that once tore my own world apart.??I envisioned working across visible and invisible human boundaries to implement long-term solutions to the complex root drivers of conflict.??

For many years, a drum beating deep inside told me that future peace was possible.??

When the Twin Towers fell in in September 2001, I was a young US Marine Lieutenant training in Quantico, Virginia.??Deep in my gut I knew it was a pluck at the spider web of a million connected fibers of deceit, dysfunction, and distrust.??It was the?Paradigm of Scarcity.??9/11 was the first highly visible consequence of America’s failure to change.??Within a few days, I began to envision myself leading Marines on patrols in the mountains of Afghanistan against a hardened enemy who would not surrender.??

America’s?first strategic error?in 1989 was to abandon its?Mujahadeen?allies, including Osama Bin Laden, in Afghanistan after they had done America’s dirty work to break the back of the Soviet Union in a brutal ten-year insurgency she engineered and sponsored.??

In the 1980s, the United States took a feather from the British playbook – weaponizing religion to fuel an Islamic holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.??As explained by Ahmed Rashid in?Descent into Chaos, President Reagan’s regime partnered with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the 1980s to recruit, fund, train, arm and deploy “thirty-five thousand Islamic militants from forty-three Muslim countries in Pakistani madrassas [religious schools] to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.”??America’s religious?jihad strategy?sowed the seeds that grew into Al Qaeda, plotting a direct line of consequence to 9/11 and turning Pakistan into the “world center of jihadism.”[8]?In their hour of desperate need, America also abandoned the nation and communities of Afghanistan her proxy war had shattered.??The consequences of this choice are well known.?

America’s?second strategic error?in 1989 was to fail to rebuild broken trust and shape a strategic partnership with Russia.??

Instead, America persisted with a dysfunctional?win-lose?paradigm – the old zero-sum model that has steadily brought us to the catastrophe we watch unfolding in Eastern Europe today.?We are conditioned to seek heroes and villains to explain why things are as they are.??Heroes and villains are part of reality – but the whole reality is more complex, more important, contains less emotions, and often involves facing hard truths about our own behavior – truths that are too easy to avoid, deny or dismiss.??

Russia is the world’s largest nation and straddles the entire Asian landmass – a massive and complex region whose changes are rapidly reshaping how the world works.??Russia also has 20% of the world’s fresh water and the third most arable land of any nation.??Together with Ukraine, it produces almost 30% of the world’s wheat.??

Climate change is on course to reduce food production in arid regions in the years ahead.??In central and eastern Russia, however, climate change will increase its ability to produce food.??In a world of growing populations, increasing urbanization, and a growing shortage of food and fresh water, these are critical strategic considerations.??

Despite recent events, Russia’s security priorities have almost always been defensive – as demonstrated by the biblical level of resilience shown by its people in defending their home from Nazi Germany’s invasion across its vulnerable western border in World War II.??At least 24 million people – 12% of its population – were killed.??This traumatic and unresolved bleeding wound festers in the collective consciousness of the nation.??While hard to measure, this reality is something many non-Russians struggle to comprehend.??

The security of Russia’s western border is an extremely sensitive nerve in the nation’s soul.?

True security can only exist when you learn to look at the issues through the eyes of the other side – and develop your strategy accordingly.??US-Russia relations between 1989 and the present day are an example of devastating strategic failure in this area.

US Marine General Anthony Zinni, a cerebral?soldier scholar?in the mold of George Marshall, was the Commanding General of all US forces in the Middle East prior to 9/11.??Later, he served as US Special Envoy for Middle East Peace.??In 1989, he was part of the joint military and diplomatic effort to reach out America’s hand to Russia – to bring it into the global economy as George Marshall did with Germany after World War II.??Three decades later, Zinni explained how the US started with the right idea – before it all went wrong.??

The Supreme Allied Commander of Europe [Zinni’s boss] told us “We have got to connect to the Russians … we have got to tell them there are no winners or losers.??We have to create a relationship that is positive” … a number of us?were sent to Moscow … the Russians were very open with us and willing to share their problems.??We spent a lot of time there creating the relationship … Secretary of State James Baker assigned Ambassador Richard Armitage to form a group to work with our allies to say “Let’s embrace the former Soviet Union … in a way that is a modified Marshall Plan [when the US invested in rebuilding Germany after World War II].??Let’s show our goodwill and help them be part of the international community.”?[9]

After early success, all momentum died.??A series of short-sighted decisions followed, including increasing the size of NATO from sixteen to thirty countries.??For these and other reasons, Zinni argued that “[Vladimir] Putin is as much a creation that is our responsibility as it is Russia’s … we set the circumstances where a nationalistic Russia embraced someone like Putin.”[9]?

In 1998, George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy in the Cold War, criticized the US Senate’s decision to approve the first round of NATO’s expansion.??In a New York Times article, he warned America of the dangers involved:

I think it is the beginning of a?new Cold War …I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies.??I?think it is a?tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever.?No one was threatening anybody else.[10]

Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama had the following to say in his memoirs:

… the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after [George H.W.] Bush left office in 1993 … US agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a?needless provocation …

Gates, who replaced Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon to mitigate the catastrophic consequences following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, explained that:

trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.?

Jack Matlock, the US Ambassador to Moscow from 1987 to 1991, was one of Ronald Reagan’s most trusted advisors.??He served in Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis and was America’s key?on the ground?diplomat in Moscow navigating the final days of the Cold War.??In 1997, Matlock made the following statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as it considered expanding NATO into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence:

I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.[11]

Nine days before Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine in February 2022, Matlock made several critical points:

1)????NATO’s initial expansion into Eastern Europe continued under George W. Bush.

2)????At the same time, the US began to withdraw from arms control treaties that had tempered an arms race with Russia (including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty).

3)????Despite this, Putin was the first foreign leader to offer support to Bush after 9/11.?

4)????Putin proceeded to support the US in striking the Taliban in 2001; Islamist terrorism was a common threat and Russia was seeking partnerships with the United States.

5)????Washington continued to arrogantly ignore Russian (and other allied) interests by invading Iraq, an act of unilateral aggression that France and Germany also opposed.

6)????Obama promised a “reset” with Russia, but redoubled US efforts to detach former Soviet republics from its influence, incl encouraging “regime change” in Russia itself.

7)????US actions in Syria and Ukraine were viewed by Russia as indirect attacks on Russia.

8)????US intrusion into Ukraine’s domestic politics was deep, incl actively backing the 2014 revolution and overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government in 2014.?

9)????Trying to detach Ukraine from Russian influence – the aim of those agitating for “color revolutions” – was a “fool’s errand, and a dangerous one.”

Today, this danger has been realized.??

In March 2014, Henry Kissinger warned us of the dangerous zero-sum approach that both Russia and the West were taking in Ukraine:

Far too often, the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West.??But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other – it should function as a bridge between them.[12]

Kissinger explained that Ukraine has been under some form of foreign rule since the 14th?century.??It has only been independent for 30 years and its leaders struggle with compromise.??Ukrainian politicians – since independence – have tried to force their will on opposing ethnic groups in the country.??This has made Ukraine vulnerable to manipulation from the outside.??A wise US policy would be to encourage the internal factions to cooperate, however:??

Russia and the West, and least of all the various factions in Ukraine, have not acted on this principle [of cooperation]. Each has made the situation worse. Russia would not be able to impose a military solution without isolating itself … for the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.[12]

Today, as Ukraine stares into the abyss, the United States watches from the sidelines as Russia tries to forcefully subdue and "demilitarize" a government it views as a puppet - or potential puppet - of the United States.??The volcano that has erupted in Ukraine is a sign of what may follow elsewhere.??

The consequences of broken trust are on full display …?win-lose = lose-lose.

America’s?third strategic error?in 1989 was to deliberately sabotage global consensus for the framing and signing of the world’s first binding climate treaty to stabilize carbon emissions and arrest global warming.??

In 2019, Nathaniel Rich, author of?Losing Earth,?explained that “nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.??It was, if anything, better understood.”[13]

A decade later [in 1989], the first major diplomatic meeting to approve a framework for a treaty was called in the Netherlands.??Delegates from more than sixty nations attended.??Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead.??It didn’t.

Rich explains that if the US had endorsed the global consensus in 1989 to freeze and reduce carbon emissions by “20 percent by 2005” then global warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius.??Instead, we now face the reality of an increase in average global temperature of at least 2 degrees, and possibly as high as 5 degrees Celsius by 2100.??The projected consequences of this temperature increase include mass starvation and the submergence of coastal cities below a rising ocean.??

In 2021, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the world’s most detailed assessment yet of how human behavior is changing the world’s climate.??Three findings stood out:?

1)????Global temperatures have increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period in the last 2000 years.

2)????Many changes due to greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for “centuries to millennia,” particularly those in the ocean, ice sheets, and global sea level.

3)????A global temperature increase in the range of 2 to 5 degrees Celsius by 2100 is possible, with an increase of between 2 to 3 degrees Celsius a likely outcome.[14]

In 1989, one year after supporting the setup of the IPCC by the United Nations, the United States chose to torpedo the world’s most committed and resolute ever effort to achieve a global agreement to stabilize carbon emissions.??In November 1989, at the eleventh hour before the first major political climate conference in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, President George Bush’s Chief of Staff, John Sununu, inserted his handpicked “science advisor” into the process to derail consensus among 67 nations to sign a binding treaty.[13]

Since the Noordwijk conference, more carbon has been released into the atmosphere than “in the entire history of civilization preceding it.”??The earth today is “as warm as it was before the last ice age 115,000 years ago, when the seas were more than twenty feet higher.” In the years between 2000 and 2016, the fossil fuels industry “spent more than $2 billion, or ten times as much as was spent by environmental groups” to defeat climate change legislation.[13]??

The results have been predictable.?

In its 2021 report, the IPCC revealed that global concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2019 were “higher than at any time in at least 2 million years … concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide were higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.”[14]

The report confirmed a “near-linear relationship” between human-caused carbon emissions and the “global warming they cause,” and laid out five possible global warming scenarios (visualized above) as a function of carbon emissions.??Included in each scenario is a “socio-economic pathway” (SSP) indicator representing related population, economic, geopolitical, and technological factors.[14]

In August 2021, the National Geographic described the IPCC’s “middle-of-the-road” scenario of the future as the one we are currently on course for.??In this scenario, the world warms by 4.9°F (2.7°C) by 2100.??The global population increases to 9.5 billion and uneven economic growth and social inequality continue to grow.??The “one level worse” SSP3-7.0 scenario sees temperatures rise by 6.5°F (3.6°C) as carbon emissions keep rising, nationalism increases, global cooperation collapses, and the global population surpasses 12 billion.”[15]

In?Losing Earth, Rich notes the devastating impacts of three possible scenarios:

A 3-degree warming … is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests sprouting in the Arctic, the abandonment of most coastal cities, mass starvation … four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India, and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle … 5-degree warming prompts some of the world’s pre-eminent climate scientists … to warn of a fall of human civilization.

Part III to follow ....

[1]?Scientific American. (2012).?Use It and Lose it: The Outsize Effect of US Consumption on the Environment.??Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumption-habits/

[2]?Norwich University. (2017). Retrieved from https://online.norwich.edu/academic-programs/resources/six-causes-of-world-war-i

[3]?Alfred, Randy. (2008).?May 26, 1908: Mideast Oil Discovered – There Will Be Blood.?Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2008/05/dayintech-0526/

[4]?Truman, Harry. (1963).?Limit CIA Role to Intelligence Operations. The Washington Post, December 22, 1963. Retrieved from https://archive.org/stream/LimitCIARoleToIntelligenceByHarrySTruman/Limit%20CIA%20Role%20To%20Intelligence%20by%20Harry%20S%20Truman_djvu.txt

[5]?Scheer, Robert. (2013).?The Moment the US Ended Iran’s Brief Experiment in Democracy.?The Nation, Aug 2013. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/moment-us-ended-irans-brief-experiment-democracy/

[6]?Sood, Vikram. (2020).?The Ultimate Goal.?Noida, Uttar Pradesh: HarperCollins Publishers.

[7]?Reagan, Ronald. (1989). Reagan Foundation. Retried from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKVsq2daR8Q

[8]?Rashid, A. (2008).?Descent Into Chaos.??London: Penguin Books.?

[9]?Zinni, A. (2018).?The National Security Environment.?Speech at Bowdoin College. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VILaPj75EW4&t=1129s

[10]?Carpenter, T.G. (2022).?Ignored Warnings: How NATO Expansion Led to the Current Ukraine Tragedy.?CATO Institute, February 2022. Retrieved from - https://www.cato.org/commentary/ignored-warnings-how-nato-expansion-led-current-ukraine-tragedy

[11]?Matlock, Jack. (2022).?I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine Crisis.?Responsible Statecraft, February 2022. Retrieved from - https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/02/15/the-origins-of-the-ukraine-crisis-and-how-conflict-can-be-avoided/

[12]?Kissinger, H. (2014).?Henry Kissinger: To settle the Ukraine crisis, start at the end.?The Washington Post, 5 March 2014.??Retrieved from - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/henry-kissinger-to-settle-the-ukraine-crisis-start-at-the-end/2014/03/05/46dad868-a496-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html

[13]?Rich, N. (2019).?Losing Earth. London: Picador.

[14]?IPCC (2021).?Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.?Cambridge University Press.

[15]?Stone, M.?5?Possible Climate Futures – From the Optimistic to the Strange. National Geographic, August 2021. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/5-possible-climate-futures-from-the-optimistic-to-the-strange