Beyond Gaddafi: sustainable prevention in the face of environmental injustice: some words of praise but also caution!

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Sam Knight, ‘The human tsunami’, FT.com. 19 June 2009, available at: www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bb6b0efc-5ad9-11de-8c14-00144feabdc0.html, for an excellent, introduction to the interrelationships between environmental breakdown, specifically relating to local conditions in West Africa, migration flows and the debate about the degree to which this is or is not directly related to climate change, and the likely numbers of people anticipated to be affected. Nicholas Stern, ‘Review: The Economics of Climate’, October 2006, available at: www.sternreview.org.uk, puts that figure at some 250 million. However, this assumes a two per cent only rise in mean global temperature, which many climate analysts now believe is far too low. See, for instance, Wasdell, note 11. See Dave Webb, ‘Thinking the Worst, The Pentagon Report’, in David Cromwell and Mark Levene (eds.), Surviving Climate Change, The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 59–81. CNAS, ‘Climate Change Wargame’, 28–30 July 2008, http://www/cnas.org/ClimateWarGame/ Steve Wright, ‘Preparing for Mass Refugee Flows, the Corporate-Military Sector,’ in Cromwell and Levene (eds.) ‘Surviving Climate Change’, pp. 82–101. Thanks to Prof. Paul Rogers of Bradford Peace Studies for alerting me to this development. Statewatch, http://www.statewatch.org/ for updates on Schengen. Sarah Graham-Brown and Chris Toensing, ‘Why Another War? A Backgrounder on the Iraq Crisis’, MERIP, October 2002, for the inference. See Soumaya Ghannoushi, ‘Hands off our spring’, Guardian, 26 May 2011. www.desertec.org/SolarEnergy. Mark Levene, ‘A dissenting voice; or how current assumptions of deterring and preventing genocide may be looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. Part 1, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004, pp. 153–166, and Vol. 6, No. 3, 2004, pp. 431–445. David Wasdell, ‘Critical Issues in the Domain of Climate Dynamics’, http://www.apollo-gaia.org/Climate%20Sensitivity.pdf, for instance, now estimates a minimum global warming of 7.8 degrees Celsius. See Mark Levene, ‘The Apocalyptic as Contemporary Dialectic: From Thanatos (Violence) to Eros (Transformation)’, in Stefan Skrimshire (ed.), Future Ethics, Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 63–66, for my personal take on where geo-engineering is leading. See also Crisis Forum JISC-list notices, http://www.crisis-forum.org.uk, for some very illuminating recent exchanges on the consequences of going down this route.