The American climate movement must also be a peace movement
Veil Nebula, Image: NASA/ESA/HHT
no climate justice without u.s.-china peace
It’s hot. It's really hot–about 1,000,000,000 degrees celsius at the time of the explosions. Stars 50 times as massive as our sun, which itself could contain 1.3 million earths, explode and seed the elements that have formed in their cores across space. Some elements form the next generation of stars, others spread as gasses, while others form asteroids which gravity will coalesce into planets. This galactic chemical evolution just keeps happening. For a reason that yet evades us, life formed on our clump of elements. We are one. We are small. We are an explosion.
Origin stories are less about accurately capturing the past, and more about who we are today, our hopes for the future. We carve images of ourselves, or who we’d like to be, from a lump of events that can extend back further than memory itself. We’re not reducible to our origins, but we can’t escape them either. We shouldn’t.
For over a century, some form or another of social Darwinism has been the organizing principle of the West’s story to and about itself. It was the latest pseudo-scientific advancement pressed into the service of white supremacy and oppression of the poor, disabled, and other so-called “undesirables.” Importantly, it was also a key justification of the modern colonial expansion of Western nations.
At every turn, our government chooses the politics of domination over the politics of human flourishing. Central to the colonial project is the conviction that resources–land, people, labor–are subject to perpetual extraction and exploitation. This has led to a world where countries are flooding, overheated, on fire. It’s hot. Most recently, Maui is smoldering.
The climate crisis tests the willingness of Westerners, especially Americans, to confront their history of domination with the greater, more fundamental history of human interconnectedness.
No area of U.S. public policy demonstrates this tension more than our relationship with China. On the one hand, our economy depends on China to function. On the other hand, we have maintained decades-long policy of military and diplomatic containment wherein we build military outposts surrounding mainland China and work to undermine its regional influence to prevent its rise as a superpower.
If there is any hope for reversing the most catastrophic effects of global warming, the American climate movement must also be a peace movement.
Dependence and Containment
In 2018, China accounted for 21.2 percent of US imports. They make our stuff. In the process, they produce emissions that are, at least in part, also ours. Let’s be adults about that. Pick up a random item in your home, find the country of origin, then argue that the emissions generated to make and transport your tchotchke, sitting in your non-Chinese home, thousands of miles away from mainland China are Chinese emissions. This is the strained logic that U.S. climate negotiators use to argue that both countries must be treated equally as we search for a solution to the climate crisis.
The false equivalence of “the world’s two greatest emitters of carbon” reduces our moral clarity. The Chinese account for 18 percent of the world’s population, more than four times the U.S. Their per capita carbon emissions are 40 percent less than ours. The U.S., which industrialized much earlier, has added nearly twice as much carbon to the atmosphere than China since the Industrial Revolution. China does, in fact, have much to contribute to the reversal of the climate crisis if we are to succeed. But climate talks will never succeed with guns drawn, as they currently take place.
Constellation of U.S. military installations off of mainland China, Today’s Military.
United States Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) is headquartered in Honolulu, HI, about 82 miles northwest of Lahaina, the recently incinerated pre-colonial capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii. USINDOPACOM boasts of having an area of command that covers half the earth’s surface and just about as much of the world’s population. There are approximately 375,000 military and civilian (38,000) personnel stationed in the region, along with its 2,460 aircrafts and 200 ships. That includes Kunsan Air Base in Gunsan, South Korea, which is about as close to coastal China as Havana is to Miami. Fighter jets can reach Beijing from Seoul in an hour. With the February 2023 addition of four new sites in the Philippines for a total of nine, the U.S. has a four-layer troop presence in the Pacific Ocean starting in every sea right off of China’s east coast and ending with the west coast of the continental United States.
Choosing Peace
We need to be able to bring together all the conversations that we have about the U.S.-China relationship because in reality, they are all connected. There are no discussions of carbon reduction that aren’t also conversations about manufacturing that aren’t also conversations about trade that aren’t also conversations about armed forces.
There is no way to cultivate egalitarian cooperation in one arena while we pursue domination in another. Life simply doesn’t work that way. We can either pursue an agenda of capacious, broad-based human flourishing or live under the constricting pursuit of global domination. We can’t do both.
Interconnectedness does not have to be a romantic sentiment inspired by looking up at the night sky. It isn’t. Our systems are as integrated as we are. The fact of our mutual economic dependence can be the insurance for peace that we need. But that requires that we abandon any inclination toward exceptionalism, and fight for policies that reflect this new consciousness.
Faith communities are especially well-positioned for the risky work of peace as we hold an allegiance to something not bound by national borders.
Our survival depends on it.
In solidarity,
Dwayne