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Radio War Nerd EP #187 — Climate Change & Wars, with Christian Parenti (Patreon)

Published:
2019-06-28 04:10:44
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Christian Parenti, author, journalist, academic 

Recorded: June 25, 2019

With one of India's largest cities running out of water & record heatwaves torching Europe, the War Nerd talks to Christian Parenti about climate change and wars, and his remarkable book "Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence".

Buy Christian Parenti's books: "Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence"; "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror" and more. Read Parenti's articles on climate change in Jacobin magazine.

Total time: 2:04:10

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

cmb74

Hi, John and Mark. I've just begun this episode, and the topic of the Bronze Age collapse just came up. Do you guys think we could get a dedicated episode on the collapse or one on the Shining Path? Thanks for reading.

Thomas Jennings

Mark and John - Can you please have Roy Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene) on the show to to juxtapose Parenti's idea that we can solve a predicament created by growth with more growth? That was a good interview right up until he went into economist mode and the platitudes of replacing fossil fuels with "non-renewable" renewable energy as a panacea. He is stuck in promoting a system that needs infinite growth to survive and what we need is de-growth. As always, thanks for a great show.

Annibale

Great show and most of what the guest said made a lot of sense

Thomas Jennings

Did a Yahoo News commenter finally find out about Radio War Nerd?

Joseph Yachimec

Damn, you fellas are playing the hits. Loved Tropic of Chaos—if I'm not wrong, it starts with a quote from Sven Lindqvist's Exterminate All the Brutes, which is a sort of literary travel book/longform piece of journalism on European colonialism in Africa. I have a feeling that you've heard about it, and another feeling that you either thought it was great or utterly despised it. Worth a look if you haven't; if it deeply offends you, there's always the cannon...

Mark Ames

Glad you liked the interview, his book is really well done - was wondering/worrying how you'd rate it. Stamp of approval by the great Annibale himself!

Mark Ames

I remember reading Lindqvist's book and wishing there was more. That's usually a good sign. I've just been frustrated through the years by the inability to get hard numbers on victims of European colonialism, the mother countries have done a great job of obfuscating everything.

The January Storm

There's another thing that makes the Obama administrations' record on climate chang even worse than Christian let on which is that the reason no one had really been building new coal fired power plants is that the Clean Air Act has a huge loophole in it which says that the emission standards and required upgrades to plant filtration systems and the like only applied to new plants and add-ons. The solution the coal companies found was to just not build any new plants and just use the old (and incredibly dirty) ones for as long as humanly possible, which means that when Obama basically stopped new coal fired power plants he wasn't actually solving the problem at all because the emissions are basically all coming from the old plants. He could have tried to win a real political battle against the coal companies by closing the loophole but, well, this was Obama and not anyone who actually cared about dealing with climate change so instead we increased our rate of emissions and now we're all in serious trouble.

Michael S. Judge

That seasteading nonsense (Peter Thiel's floating city and so forth) is arguably of a piece with something that masquerades as techno-utopianism but is pretty blatantly a form of panic, e.g. Elon Musk's obsession with Mars, or the relentless proliferation of "smart" devices that enable more and more enclosed, insulated environments (if you've got the cash).

Michael S. Judge

P.S. Any opinion of the clathrate-gun theory? As I understand it, there's some chance – no one knows how large, because there's no historical precedent – that circa 2026 or so, enough once-frozen methane in sea ice will explode into the atmosphere at concentrations more than sufficient to reverse the carbon cycle and kill, uh, everything.

Aditya V

Listened to the first hour of the episode yesterday while driving . It weaved together a great narrative on climate change, liberalization and Maoist guerrillas. Parenti explained a complex topic very succinctly.

Joseph Yachimec

Interested in the 2026 number on this, where’d you get it? If I’m not wrong (or perhaps as Annibale would say, “if I remember well”), no hard dates have been placed on when the gun goes off; we don’t even have a good estimate of amount or location of methane clathrates. I’ve heard some fairly exotic scenarios involving very large seaborne methane bubbles (either destabilized clathrate deposits or outgassing from heaps of rotting shelly creatures decalcified by newly-acidic seawater) surfacing and being ignited by lightning; hoping that this is just overactive imaginations. Philosophically, to me the gun hypothesis seems not really worth an opinion even if true. That way lies madness. What do you think about it?

Michael S. Judge

I honestly have no idea where I got 2026, I just clearly remember that date in an article shown me by the environmentalist who told me about the hypothesis. "That way lies madness" is exactly right, but I, among my many mental health defects, cannot help thinking about exactly those things which are most likely to drive me insane.

Smutticus

I left a comment on episode #183 requesting a show on climate change and war. A mere four episodes later you guys deliver a great episode on the topic. Thanks! Also, this may be one of the depressing episodes you guys have done yet, and that's really saying something.

Gary Alexander

A few days late but I thought I'd respond, there is at least one (1) good recent American war movie: Star Wars Rogue One.

Mat K

+1 Thomas. Infinite growth in a closed system is impossible. I have never understood how people thought it could go on forever.

radiowarnerd

Thanks. Our aim, like the hard gospel preachers used to say, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted...no, we stick to the afflicting.

radiowarnerd

Yeah, this is a constant in one stream of SF/F as well. Very strange because an off-world colony is by nature(or lack thereof) going to be far harder to sustain than Earth, where we fit in rather well. The idea--dramatized in Interstellar--that it would be easier to find a new home than to fix this one is just bizarre, but it has deep strange roots.

radiowarnerd

This is where it's time to admit that I flunked chemistry in high school.

radiowarnerd

Yeah. Depressing. This is why Obama reminds me of no one so much as George McClellan.

Joseph Yachimec

Hah! So did I. Methane clathrate is water ice with stable pockets of methane inside of it. It looks like ice but is flammable, and thus makes for neat stock photos. It usually hangs out at the bottom of the sea. Since methane as a greenhouse gas is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and the seas are warming up, the amount of methane tied up in clathrates is an important number. The clathrate gun hypothesis says that there's a temperature where most methane clathrates destabilise and release their methane all at once. This would be an express elevator to a science fictional earth—one where average summer temperatures in Dublin are in the low 50s celsius.

Michael S. Judge

These also tend to be believers in a Singularity whereby technology will, implicitly, become more intelligent than nature given enough time, so I guess some of them probably assume that "smart tech" can/will result in an Earth+.

Mark Ames

"Hopeless & Unchangeable" — slogan to our 2020 campaign

Cade Jameson

I like that Parenti tries to point to some positives, and it is true that the Clean Air Act gives the federal government a lot of power but for the will to act. But we shouldn't pretend like it's a small thing to compel corporations to use all that money they are hording to invest in conservation and an alternative energy infrastructure (they tend to get really mad when the government gets ideas about their money), or that there is time to reduce emissions in a manner that is minimally disruptive (when we think of overhauling our infrastructure we also have to take into consideration the emissions generated in rebuilding). It needs to happen, but lets not kid ourselves that the opposition is just coming from the loony Koch wing of the ruling class. This isn't a rational group that thinks in the longterm.

radiowarnerd

Yeah, this is not my area of expertise but it seems clear that all possible solutions involve a lot of pain.

xxx

Was anyone able to see the Google maps location discussed in the show?

Robert Arndt

The Laki eruption also has a pretty significant hand in causing the French Revolution, too.

online Leftist Archive Project (LARP)

Not sure if you guys will see this since this video went up over a year ago - but if I want to read more about the Naxalite movement specifically, does anyone have any book recommendations?

Aditya V

Matthew, I would start with No. 1 and go on to the others. The final one references a bunch of books 1. https://www.efsas.org/publications/study-papers/an-introduction-to-naxalism-in-india/ 2. https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/india/telangana/story/20130729-maoist-leadership-hails-from-a-single-district-of-telangana-764751-1999-11-30 3. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/11/08/archives/the-naxalites-whose-extremism-knows-no-extremes-are-indian-indian.html 4. The People's War group (PWG), the forerunner of today's naxals was founded by Kondapalli Seetharamaiah (also featured in Magic Seeds). His wife wrote a biography when she was 94 years old. The English translation is available here - https://www.amazon.com/Sharp-Knife-Memory-Kondapalli-Koteswaramma/dp/9383074884 5. Naipaul - Magic Seeds 6. https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/sai/pol/news/course_outline_liebig_ss2019.pdf