by Suketu Mehta
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, more than 57,000 Yemenis, the majority of them civilians, have died in the war, mostly through American-supplied weapons. More than 2 million have been displaced, hundreds of thousands have left the country, 1 million people have cholera, and 14 million human beings are facing starvation. It is the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis.
In June 2017, the Senate voted to clear the first part of the deal, an amuse-bouche of half a billion dollars in “precision-guided munitions” to drop on the desperate Yemenis. That same year, Trump announced his “Muslim Ban” on citizens of countries forbidden to enter the United States. Prominent on that list is Yemen.
* * *
War causes refugees, and it is important to follow the chain of responsibility. Millions of people have died in Muslim countries in recent decades as a direct result of our adventures abroad. We bomb them from the air and ground and from our warships. We kill indiscriminately and then lie about it; as a 2017 New York Times investigation of the casualties from coalition airstrikes in Iraq showed, the death rate is 31 times greater than officially acknowledged.
The United States has justified this by saying, We’re taking the war to them before they bring it to us, like they did on September 11, 2001. But in the United States, the vast majority of terror attacks are by white supremacists, not Muslims. In Europe, the vast majority of terror attacks are by native-born Europeans, not immigrants. In the wake of a terrorist strike, “Why do they hate us?” is a legitimate and useful question. Because unless we get the true answer, we won’t be able to stop the next strike, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Who created Islamic terror? Let’s follow the money. It was largely bankrolled by the most extreme faction of the religion, the Wahhabis, in Saudi Arabia. It’s one of the most rigid and dogmatic forms of the religion on the planet today, and for decades it had the full backing of the Saudi ruling family. In Pakistan, if you’re a poor parent, you can send your child to a Wahhabi madrassa funded by the Saudis, and your child will get a Koranic education, and you will get a few thousand rupees a month. And your child might grow up and join the Taliban.
This ideology isn’t just the greatest threat to the West today; it’s the greatest threat to all Muslims today. But why has the Saudi strain of the religion triumphed over all others, such as the peaceful, syncretic Islam long dominant in Indonesia? It is in part because Americans like to drive big SUVs. Big SUVs need a lot of gasoline, which Americans buy from the Saudis. The Americans have propped up the Saudi royal family against all domestic and foreign opposition—even when they murder a Washington Post columnist like Jamal Khashoggi—because we are addicted to a regular supply of oil, which the royals guarantee.
Why are Syrians and Iraqis desperate to move out of their countries? Not for the lights of Broadway or the springtime charms of Unter den Linden. It is largely because the West—particularly, the Americans and the British—invaded Iraq, an illegal and unnecessary war, and set in motion the process that destabilized the entire region, which had already been chopped up by earlier colonialists under the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. The Americans disbanded Saddam Hussein’s army, and the demobilized soldiers went back to their villages, dispirited, desperate. Meanwhile, the Americans installed a Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and the ex-soldiers made common cause with the most extreme Islamists to form ISIS, which blitzed across a huge chunk of Syria and Iraq with frightening dispatch. Millions had already fled Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on his citizens; now many more had to flee.
They have reaped what the West has sown. If there were any justice, the sixteen-hundred-acre Bush family ranch in Texas should be filled with tents hosting Middle Eastern refugees. You break it, you own it.
8
CLIMATE CHANGE
In 2009, Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, put on a wetsuit and air tanks, ordered his ministers to do the same, and dove to the seabed for a cabinet meeting held entirely underwater. It was a preview of what is to come, very soon, for the half million people who live on the island nation: in a few decades, all of them will have to move, or live underwater.
“You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much,” the Maldivian president appealed to the industrial countries. “Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in. Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can shoot us. You pick.”
In the twenty-first century, the number one driver of migration might be climate change. According to the UN, a fifth of the world’s population will be affected by floods by 2050. And so, many of them will move to dry land. According to the International Organization for Migration, at least 200 million people will be displaced by climate change by 2050. The figure could be as high as 1 billion, which would be one out of every 10 people.
Aromar Revi, the director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and an author of a recent IPCC report, predicted, “In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant. You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million.”
The prognosis is not good. “Toward the end of this century, if current trends are not reversed, large parts of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Vietnam, among other countries, will be under water,” says Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change at Columbia Law School. “Some small island nations, such as Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, will be close to disappearing entirely. Swaths of Africa from Sierra Leone to Ethiopia will be turning into desert. Glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes, on which entire regions depend for drinking water, will be melting away. Many habitable parts of the world will no longer be able to support agriculture or produce clean water.”
But migration driven by climate change isn’t something that’s safely in the future; it’s been dramatically increasing in the recent past. Since 1992, 4.2 billion people have been affected by droughts, floods, and storms. Today, 1.8 billion people are suffering the effects of drought, land degradation, and desertification.
People think of the Syrian civil war as a conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, or a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. But another way to look at it is the natural result of a three-year drought, the worst in the region’s history, between 2007 and 2010. The wheat withered in the fields; the cattle died of thirst. A million and a half villagers swarmed into the cities, there to be recruited by militias, the only jobs many of them could get. The country exploded. When you can’t make a living by your ploughshares, you’ll beat them into swords.
As the world gets hotter, the hotheads grow angrier. According to a 2009 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there are “strong historical linkages between civil war and temperature in Africa, with warmer years leading to significant increases in the likelihood of war. When combined with climate model projections of future temperature trends, this historical response to temperature suggests a roughly 54 percent increase in armed conflict incidence by 2030, or an additional 393,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent wars.”
Migrants come to work because they can’t work at home. Heat waves took almost a million people out of the global workforce in 2016, half of them in India alone. They come to eat because they can’t eat at home. For every degree Celsius increase in temperature, wheat yields have been falling by 6 percent and rice yields by 3 percent. At 1.5 degrees, corn yields shrink by 10 percent.
They come to drink because they can’t drink at home. In 2018, India experienced the worst water crisis since it became a country. Six hundred million Indians—half the population—deal with high to extreme water scarcity. Every year, 200,000 Indians die because of a lack of water or unsafe water. And it’s only going to get worse; by 2030, Indians will need twice the amount of water that is available. The deficit in water for irrigation, the government projects, wil
l lead to a 6 percent drop in the country’s GDP by 2030. India’s going to get a lot thirstier, a lot poorer.
A recent study in the journal Science Advances makes a horrifying prediction. The Indian mortality rate from heat-related deaths rose two and a half times in fifty years, due to a temperature increase of under 1 degree Fahrenheit. But this is just the beginning. India’s going to get hot—very hot; some experts predict that its temperature will increase by anywhere from 4 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. The choice, for many Indians, will be between staying in place and roasting to death or moving.
And where should they move to? To their former colonizers, or to the country most responsible for the heating of the planet? Americans are only 4 percent of the world’s population but are responsible for one-third of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Next comes the European Union, which put another quarter of the existing CO2 in the atmosphere. America creates a third of the world’s solid waste and consumes a fifth of the world’s energy. The average American uses as much energy as 35 Indians, or 185 Ethiopians, and consumes as many goods and services as 53 Chinese.
But America was the first and only country to walk away from a global attempt at a solution: the Paris Agreement. The Trump administration is an existential threat to life on the planet today. The most damning indictment against Americans: we ruined the planet and then elected a government that will stop any last chance we have of saving it.
But let’s not just blame it on Trump or the Republicans; all of us Americans are complicit. In National Geographic’s Greendex study, Americans rank dead last of eighteen nations in sustainability, and are also the least likely to feel guilty about it. The study surveyed 18,000 consumers about energy conservation, food purchases, transportation habits, preferences in terms of organic and conventional products, and environmental knowledge and attitude. Indians and Chinese have the most sustainable lifestyles, but also feel the most guilty about their impact on the environment. The 2014 study noted, “American consumers’ behavior still ranks as the least sustainable of all countries surveyed since the inception of the Greendex study in 2008.”
Entire island states may disappear under rising seas as soon as the middle of this century. After Hurricane Maria, half a million Puerto Ricans—one in seven people on the island—are expected to move to the mainland. By the end of the century, land that is currently home to 650 million people may be underwater. At the other extreme, by 2050, much of the world—up to 30 percent of the earth’s surface, home to 1.5 billion people—could be a vast desert, according to a study in the journal Nature Climate Change.
No force on earth is going to keep their desperate inhabitants from moving. And, logically, they should be given a home in the countries that are most to blame for the inundation. “Twenty million people could be displaced in Bangladesh by the middle of the century,” the Bangladeshi finance minister pointed out. “We are asking all our development partners to honor the natural right of persons to migrate. We can’t accommodate all these people—this is already the densest populated country in the world.” He called for the UN convention on refugees to give climate refugees the same protection as those fleeing political repression.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, since 2008, 22.5 million people have had to flee their homes because of climate-related extreme weather events, like hurricanes or droughts. El Salvador, for instance—the source of many of the people desperate to come to the United States—has been badly affected by climate change. Since the 1950s, the average temperature in the country has risen by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to severe droughts; the seas have risen three inches and are going to rise another seven inches by 2050. The region has also been battered by increasingly frequent hurricanes. In the 1980s, Central America experienced fifteen hurricanes. Between 2000 and 2009, there were thirty-nine.
And it’s going to get worse, much worse, for all of us. Research published in the Journal of Climate shows that, under middle-of-the-road estimates of global warming, Category 3, 4, and 5 hurricanes will increase by 11 percent in frequency between now and 2035, and 20 percent by the end of the century. Hurricanes of super-intense force, which might call for a new designation, Category 6, with winds above 190 miles per hour, will become much more common. The research also shows that hurricanes will jump in intensity, bringing us a number of storms that will speed up by over 115 miles per hour in twenty-four hours, leaving very little time for people to be warned and evacuate.
* * *
Climate change is a “threat multiplier”: it makes a bad problem, like ethnic conflict, worse. Between 2008 and 2014, 184 million people had to run away from their homes because of floods, earthquakes, tropical storms, and volcanic eruptions—an average of one human being per second. With continued climate change, this number is set to rise dramatically. For each meter of sea level rise, 150 million people will have to flee their homes.
The water in Lake Chad has shrunk by 90 percent since 1963. This has had disastrous consequences for the countries that depend on it for water, like Nigeria. The disappearance of the water is a key factor in the Boko Haram bloodbath, which made 3.5 million people take to their heels.
Twelve million people are at risk of starvation in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia right now. The region has suffered four massive droughts in two decades, and has dried faster than at any time in the last two millennia. A drought every five years is the new normal; three-fourths of Kenya is “water-stressed.” What does this mean for the people on the ground? “Pastoralists have walked these lands for centuries,” reports Somini Sengupta of The New York Times.
The older ones among them remember the droughts of the past. Animals died. People died. But then the rains came, and after four or five years of normal rains, people living here could replenish their herds. Now, the droughts are so frequent that rebuilding herds is pretty much impossible …
These days, shepherds … range further and further, sometimes clashing with rivals from Turkana over pasture and water, other times risking a confrontation with an elephant or a lion from the national park next door. Almost every night, park rangers can hear gunshots. Herders raid each other’s livestock to replenish their own. At the Isiolo health center, everyone kept precise count of their losses. One woman said she lost all three of her cows last year and was left now with only three goats. A second said her husband was killed a few years ago in a fight with Turkana herders over pasture, and then, last year, the last of her cows died. A third said she lost 20 of her 30 goats in the last drought.
In China, the desert has advanced south and east twenty-one thousand square miles since 1975. Hundreds of thousands of the people living where there were fields have been resettled by the government farther south. Most of them are culturally quite distinct from their new neighbors. Something’s going to blow.
In Peru, as the Andean ice caps melt under the increasing heat, there’s less and less water available for local farmers. So they move, down to the river, to the Amazon, to prospect for gold and grow coca, and join armed gangs for survival. Or move into Lima; or directly to Queens.
Climate change affects everyday life, in every area of life, big and small. In the sweltering summer of 2018, daytime temperatures in the Colombian coastal city of Santa Marta had regularly been climbing past 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Hospitals in the city of 600,000 were overwhelmed with people complaining of heatstroke and nausea. So the city’s health secretary issued an unorthodox appeal: To avoid heat exhaustion, please don’t have sex in the daytime.
Whether it’s Somali fishermen turning to piracy because there are fewer fish now that the oceans are boiling over or Latin Americans growing coca because the coffee crops are withering in the heat, a large percentage of the world’s conflicts—and the flight to the cities—are happening because of climate change.
The Pentagon acknowledged as much in a 2014 study:
The impacts of climate change may cause instability in o
ther countries by impairing access to food and water, damaging infrastructure, spreading disease, uprooting and displacing large numbers of people, compelling mass migration, interrupting commercial activity, or restricting electricity availability. These developments could undermine already-fragile governments that are unable to respond effectively or challenge currently-stable governments, as well as increasing competition and tension between countries vying for limited resources. These gaps in governance can create an avenue for extremist ideologies and conditions that foster terrorism.
Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal. Per capita, Australians are among the biggest polluters on the planet; at 0.3 percent of the world’s population, they emit 1.8 percent of its greenhouse gases. The Indian mining magnate Gautam Adani, a close friend of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is expected to open a giant new coal mine in Australia. It will cost $16.5 billion and proposes to extract 2.3 billion tons of coal. It is shit coal—low quality, high ash—and will pump 130 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. The emissions from the coal out of that one single mine will be larger than the entire carbon emissions from fuel combustion in entire nations, including the Philippines, Qatar, and Vietnam.
And guess where most of the Australian coal will be burnt? India, where Adani is building many of the fifty-five coal-fired plants that are under construction. So Australia partners with a notorious Indian businessman and sells the product that destroys the Indian environment—causes little Indian children to develop the highest asthma rates on the planet—and then puts refugees fleeing from the results of such sales in hellish camps in Papua New Guinea.
