Climate and a Looming World War
By Julian Spencer-Churchill
July 11, 2024
U.S. Marine Corps
With a Looming World War, It is Time to Link a Grand Climate Bargain to Democratization
Bargains work best when both parties desperately want something from the other. Much of the developing world, where 6.7 billion (or 83 percent) people live, live in climates and soils under the greatest climate stress, and are desperate for a solution to global warming. By 2100, the projected average increased global temperature range of 1 to 5.7 degree Celsius, will inflict an agriculture drought on thirty percent of the world’s soils. Coupled with desertification, it will result in food deficits in selective areas of up to sixty percent, contributing to resource conflicts and state collapse, triggering in turn a scale of maritime migration heretofore unseen. Already, Africa, with a population of 1.5 billion (a ten-fold increase since 1900, and a seven-fold increase since the end of the Second World War), imports 30 percent of its food supply. By 2100, Africa’s population will more than double to 4 billion (or almost 40 percent of the wold’s total population), magnifying its vulnerability to a disruption of imports caused by a world war. China and India, two candidates for future global hegemon, are also under severe climate stress. Having already passed the de-carbonization point of no return, by some estimates, the world is in the damage control phase of addressing the consequences of a return to Malthusian economics and demographics.
The world’s liberal democracies, because of their attractive economic, political and cultural systems, especially in the areas of personal liberties and individual conscience, pose an existential threat to the world’s authoritarian regimes. Given the ease of societal comparison through social media, even in North Korea, these militarily powerful states are suffering from the steady erosion of their legitimacy. Fearing a color revolution, they have started or are threatening wars against local democratic exemplars in their region. Russia has already invaded Ukraine, and China’s Communist leader Xi Jinping has alerted the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) to be prepared to invade Taiwan starting in 2027. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-Un, is fully aware that the wealth and success of South Korea poses an existential threat to the Pyongyang regime. The unprecedented and converging threats of color revolution in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran, has brought these countries closer together, and led to threats of war from every single one of their leaders.
The modality of such an agreement should include an international conference under the auspices of the United Nations, which is already the host to isolated negotiations on non-proliferation (1968/1995 NPT), The Paris Agreement addressing climate change, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a sound basis for mandating the requirements of liberal democracy. The fundamental global illegitimacy of authoritarian systems of government is obvious in the constancy with which these types of governments pretend to hold elections for legislatures, or refer to the term “true” democracy in their constitutions and laws. Making climate negotiations conditional on progress in state liberalization and preservation of non-proliferation objectives, compensates the developed economies from the tremendous costs of industrial restructuring, and protects them from being exploited by aggressor states who seek to take advantage of weakness during the transition period. Already we see critical disjunctures, where the Canadian government refused to take steps to provide gas to Europe during the opening stages of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because it chose to prioritize climate goals over democratic unity.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/11/climate_and_a_looming_world_war_1043765.html
