The Damage Report / The Young Turks (10/25/19)
“According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes.
The senior US government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA. The study called on the Pentagon to urgently prepare for the possibility that domestic power, water, and food systems might collapse due to the impacts of climate change as we near mid-century.
The report was commissioned by General Mark Milley, Trump’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the highest-ranking military officer in the country (the report also puts him at odds with Trump, who does not take climate change seriously.)”
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )
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Why The Climate Crisis Is The Most Crucial Story We Cover In America
By John Mulholland
The Guardian (10/16/19)
In the 18 months I’ve lived in America, as editor of the Guardian’s US edition, this country has been hit by a string of natural disasters.
Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, killing 3,057 people. The Camp fire, the most destructive wildfire in California’s history, leveled 18,000 buildings, displaced 50,000 people and left 86 dead. Since March, record floods in the midwest have swamped a million acres of farmland, threatening the nation’s grain supply.
In the White House there is a president who denies climate science even though Americans can see the climate is changing. In Iowa, in the heart of the midwest, farmers who have tended the land for centuries now openly talk about the impact of the climate crisis. They have no choice – it is threatening their livelihoods. In California, drought in recent years has been so severe that groundwater depletion means the land has sunk under their feet. Florida is planning to spend $4bn to counteract the effects of sea-level rise.
And yet the public debate about the climate crisis is much less evident here than in Europe. One of the most surprising observations of my first year in America is the gulf in coverage between the US and Europe. And not just climate, but a host of other environmental threats, from the scourge of ocean plastic to toxic chemicals in the US food supply. When the UN released a landmark report last October warning we have just 12 years left to radically slash global carbon emissions and stave off disaster, only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in America covered it.
The US media has, in some cases, a lot of ground to make up. As Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope have noted, US news organizations fell for the fossil industry’s PR playbook in the 80s, 90s and into the 00s when they successfully repositioned “global warming as theory, not fact”. …