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Alfred McCoy, How to Go from a Win-Win to a Lose-Lose World
Governor Ron DeSantis — you know, the guy who sent those plane loads of immigrants flying from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, with Florida tax dollars — caught something of the spirit of our moment in the wake of the recent catastrophic landfall of Hurricane Ian. He called it “basically a 500-year flood event.” And it’s true enough, if you’re talking about the last 500 years. If, however, you’re talking about the future, the next decade or two, consider one thing guaranteed: Ian and potentially far worse — imagine the American equivalent of what recently happened in Pakistan where one-third of the country was flooded by record monsoon rains and glacial melt — is undoubtedly in the cards. You won’t have to wait another half a millennium for the next Ian to hit our shores.
It’s obvious that all too few Americans want to face this reality: that we’re truly in a new world in the worst sense imaginable when it comes to climate change. To me at least, the most striking thing about the days-on-end coverage of Ian and its path of destruction was how little the overheating of this planet was focused on. Yes, you could indeed now find individual stories in the mainstream media that dealt with the climate-change-intensified nature of such a storm. But for those of you who watched the TV news as I did, there was little sense that we are functionally in a new world.
Worse yet, if things go badly here this November — as they just did in Latin America’s biggest country, Brazil, where the climate-change-denying party of President Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Trump, won the largest bloc of seats in both chambers of that country’s Congress — and again in November 2024, you might as well kiss this planet goodbye. Or put another way, in the context of the latest piece by TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, while the United States may be in a new Cold War in Eurasia, we, like the rest of humanity, are also in an increasingly hot war right here at home — and if you doubt that, just check out the megadrought-ridden American West. Tom
The New Cold War Heats Up Asia: China and the U.S. Face an Unprecedented Crisis
