Wealthy nations should divert 5% of their military budgets to climate finance, advocates argue.
The call comes as global leaders at Cop28 in Dubai gather for a special-themed day on “relief, recovery, and peace” on Sunday, marking the first time climate-fueled conflict has ever been on an international climate conference agenda.
Participants will discuss the need to direct aid to “highly vulnerable, fragile, and conflict-affected communities” as evidence mounts that climate disasters put regions at greater risk of war, and amid ongoing conflict in Palestine as well as Ukraine, Sudan, and other areas.
But truly protecting communities from climate and conflict will require a shift in priorities, says the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy group.
Nation-states: but we’re gonna need that military budget to fight our climate wars, we can’t spend it preventing climate change! Climate wars are gonna be the first opportunity in like 80 years to try large-scale annexations, what the fuck is your problem!!
Everybody else: :o
Also a massive percentage of the world’s freshwater supply? Canada geese though so they’re safe.
How is the war in Ukraine a climate war? Also the next ones seem to be Ethiopia vs Eritrea and Venezuela vs Guyana. Ethiopia wants sea access and Venezuela oil.
You actually want to compare Ukraine and a couple regional conflicts to, say, World War II in terms of scale? Do go on!
So you are saying that we only had one time for large-scale annexation in history? There is literally no larger scale war of annexation as WW2.
Context counts, “large” is a relative term, my comment was about hypothetical future climate wars that could in fact be global-scale, and in context of my comment, I did specifically reference 80 years ago to give a sense of the scale of climate war that I think is possible. It’s insipid and quite literally begging for a participation trophy to come in and cry that I’m not validating that Ukraine is fighting over a lot of land, when in context I was having a completely different discussion.
But if you really need your participation trophy – yes, regional conflicts count, yes, Ukraine is fighting over a lot of land and it is a quite significant conflict. But, like you indignantly figured out all on your own, because it is not a global-scale climate war, the general possibility of which is what I was talking about in my comment, Ukraine was not exactly pertinent to my comment, and I’m not obligated to satisfy the chauvinism of every single nationalistv whose favored nation-state is involved in a war at any given moment in every single comment I make online. Not every comment you see online is, in fact, about the specific regional conflict that is close to your heart.
Since the UN was founded we had three wars of annexation. Israel taking Palestine, China invading Tibet and Iraq annexing Kuwait. That is somewhat ignoring squabbles after the withdrawal of colonial powers somewhat.
So when we see Russia invades Ukraine that is rather simply the largest annexation attempt since the UN was founded. With two more attempts likely, that really speaks towards a massive shift in the geopolitical landscape. That was why I was confused.
What the actual fuck is happening here? It’s like you are commenting on a completely different thread. Are you smelling any burnt toast right now? You are being weird as fuck, sir.
Sincerely,
Concerned
Basically I was trying to explain, why I misunderstood the context of “no large scale annexation wars being possible for 80 years”.
Other then that just consider me an idiot, you are propably right.
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Especially if anyone’s serious about decarbonizing the military, things like manufacturing synthetic aviation fuel, moving logistics to electric vehicles, or finding alternatives to diesel generators at temporary bases are all liable to be hugely capital intensive upfront, even if many of them will have maintenance benefits.
The US for instance could pay for all of this and a lot more by simply ending the 2017 tax cuts, which by some estimates cost the government more each year than it spends on the the entire military, and which have had no economic impact distinguishable from random market noise.
Or maybe, the US could do something really crazy like bump capital gains from 15 percent to even Canada’s current 50 percent, or historical 75 percent.
Of your actually want to do something actually radical and not just obvious, tax stocks, private bonds, and securities, like they are physical assets with a federal sales tax when they charge hands. That might actually return the stock market into something more than a gambling by forcing investments to actively be investments if they want returns, and not just be dependent on line go up.
You cannot balance a govement buget without rasing govement income though taxes, and the idea of tax cuts paying for themselves has been widely discredited for decades, even if most neoliberals pretend otherwise.
Sorry if most of this comment turned out to be about budgeting, but cuting x to pay for unrelated y is incredibly absurd logic for a government. If x needs funding is dependent on x, it doesn’t stop need doing just becuse you don’t want to pay for it.
