The rise of the eco-imperialists

You would think the United Nations Security Council, a principal executive organ of the UN, was powerful enough as it is. Led by its five permanent members, the US, the UK, France, China and Russia – a mix of the old and the new Great Powers – it is in its current remit to ‘investigate any dispute or any situation which might lead to international friction or give rise to a dispute’. And should it identify such a situation – and get sufficient backing from at least five of its 10 temporary member states – it is free to authorise a blue-helmeted military intervention. It’s fair to say that getting stuck into other people’s struggles, taking destinies out of other people’s hands with the barrel of a gun, has never been an issue for the UN Security Council.

But, last week, had several Western member states had their way, including Germany, the US and the UK, the security council would have been given yet greater scope for arbitrating, interfering and posturing on the world stage. In fact, had this coalition of the zealous got what it wanted – namely, a security council statement making climate change a peace and security issue – there had even been talk of decking out UN troops in words of US ambassador Susan Rice: ‘[The UN has an] essential responsibility to address the clear-cut peace and security implications of a changing climate.’

So, what does Rice mean by the ‘clear-cut peace and security implications of a changing climate’? Well,

UN chief

That the UN security council did not make climate change a peace and security issue, giving Western member states the chance literally to dress up military interventions in green garb, was down to Russia’s refusal to sanction the proposal. Russian envoy Alexander Parkin countered that making climate change an issue for the UN security council would ‘further increase politicisation of this issue and increase disagreements between countries’. In the face of this largely pragmatic opposition from one of its permanent members, the security council debate concluded with a considerably watered down

Still, despite this setback to Western eco-imperial ambitions, the drive to turn climate change into the cause and amplifier of conflicts and wars clearly remains strong if the US ambassador’s

We’ve been here before, of course. Back in 2007 the UK also proposed that climate change was an issue threatening world peace. As the then UK representative on the security council, Margaret Beckett,

Nevertheless, as David Chandler

Yet there should be objections to the substance of the persistent claim that climate change is creating a more volatile and insecure world. Not least because there is no substance. Yes, there are plenty of people willing to assert a link, whether causal or contributory, between climate change and conflict. And yes, there are plenty of shameless souls willing to exploit every disaster, every drought and every famine to substantiate this spurious assertion. So back in 2007, former US army general Gordon Sullivan, readily called climate change ‘a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions in the world’. And this time round UK climate secretary Chris Huhne has been busy

But assertion is not the same as proof. Despite the consistently dire predictions of the climate-change warmongers, a conflict born of climate change-induced resource scarcity has yet to happen. Moreover – and this must be a disappointment to doom-laden environmentalists and employment-hungry national armies – the world has actually become more peaceful and less insecure in recent years. As cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker 2009/10 Human Security Report, funded by several UN member states including the UK. This admittedly did reveal that the number of discrete conflicts since 2005 had actually started rising again, reversing a decades-long trend. However, this increase was attributed not to climate change but to the ‘war on terror’ and the various insurgencies it has generated. Besides, many of these conflicts were small and shortlived. In fact, in terms of actual ‘battle death numbers’, to use the terms of the report, the figure has been pretty constant over the past 10 years or so, and remains a mere fraction of the ‘battle death numbers’ of the 1950s. ‘Perhaps the most reassuring finding is that high-intensity wars, those that kill at least 1,000 people a year, have declined by 78 per cent since 1988′, the report concluded.

So, despite the supposed impact of climate change, despite several large-scale, media-saturated natural disasters, despite everything that the UN wants to assert, there is nothing to suggest that this has led to an increase in global conflict. Those keen to assert some sort of connection between climate change and conflict do of course have recourse to the future tense. They can talk of what is to come; they can read off potential wars from climate change models; they can rest their arguments and claims on sheer hypothesis.

But there is a more fundamental problem with such wilful postulation. The determination to make climate change the source of conflict, the eagerness to grasp a catastrophic famine as a natural fact of a warming world, reframes complex economic, social and, yes, political problems in the far simpler terms of climate change. Under green-spectacled Western eyes, it isn’t the massive economic and material underdevelopment of, say, Somalia that has left so many starving. No, it’s climate change. It won’t be a political struggle for survival and power that informs a civil war in the developing world. No, that’ll be climate change, too. Over and over again, this process of simplifying and re-representing human conflicts as naturally caused takes place. The grey area of another people’s fight, the complexities of the political and social issues at stake, is replaced by the polarised black-and-green approach of the Good War Against Climate Change.

While this might allow plenty of opportunities for the UN security council’s Western leaders to puff their chests out and demonstrate strident purpose to their domestic audiences, for the people of Somalia or Sudan or wherever the battleground for this militarised assault on climate change is deemed to be, the actual solutions to their famished plights – economic and social development – will be tragically out of sight. Such is the blindness of those who see climate change everywhere.

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.