Jane Fonda and her Fire Drill Fridays are linking social movements across issues, eyeing the connections between the myriad problems we see causing climate chaos, many of them rooted in capitalist consumer culture. (Photo: Twitter/CodePink)
Avoiding the Climate Catastrophe Starts With Divesting From the War Machine
The time has come to divest from the war machine and withdraw our public dollars from weapons corporations.
Here we are, a full three decades after NASA scientist James Hansen raised the specter of a looming climate crisis with Congress, looking at the first generation of severely impacted youth and telling them they're right: We have completely squandered their future. For too long, our dominant culture has practiced unsustainable growth and consumption, ushering in the end of a habitable planet and with it civilization as we know it. Those most impacted are the communities who have contributed the least to climate change, a direct extension of the settler colonization project that has unfolded across the globe over hundreds of years.
We are encouraged by intersectional organizing, and thrilled that Jane is connecting the dots that link militarism, weapons corporations, migration, and the climate crisis.
Jane Fonda and her Fire Drill Fridays are linking social movements across issues, eyeing the connections between the myriad problems we see causing climate chaos, many of them rooted in capitalist consumer culture. From the need to tease apart incarceration from profit to outrage at our treatment of asylum-seekers at our southern border, we've witnessed rapid wins in the movement to divest public dollars from the private prison industry after years of hard work behind the scenes. The same asylum-seekers who are fleeing nations ravaged by wars and conflicts--many driven directly by U.S. policy--and the impacts of climate crisis are being held in appalling conditions in concentration camps and prisons, many of them run by the private prison industry. We are encouraged by intersectional organizing, and thrilled that Jane is connecting the dots that link militarism, weapons corporations, migration, and the climate crisis. We are clear on the impact: the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet, but the nationwide call for a Green New Deal has not yet given attention to our military spending as either a massive driver of the climate crisis that cannot be ignored, nor as a source of much-needed funding for a project as massive as the Green New Deal.
Movements to divest from the military and movements to divest from fossil fuels often face the same bad actors. Recent actions targeting the massive asset manager BlackRock are drawing attention to their investments in companies behind Amazon deforestation. Investing in these companies undermines our ability to maintain a livable planet, namely by destroying the forests that are the lungs of the earth in the Amazon basin. Here at CODEPINK, we have also given considerable attention to BlackRock because they are the world's top investor in weapons manufacturers, but even this more explicitly anti-war action connects to the climate crisis. The same weapons that are used in wars and conflicts all over the world are a crucial component of the war machine that makes up a significant portion of the Pentagon's fossil fuel use--the U.S. military has released 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases since the start of the global war on terror in 2001. Moreover, those same weapons are a major factor in conflicts that lead to migration by asylum-seekers--weapons that are in turn produced by corporations that are propped up by our public dollars, to the detriment of our communities. When our public institutions invest public money in weapons corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, they are underpinning the war machine that draws public dollars away from projects benefiting our communities and puts them into an already bloated defense budget. There is a clear thread running from the Pentagon budget to weapons corporations to our impoverished communities to migrants fleeing wars and drought to greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis. Imagine a snake consuming its own body: that is the war machine's connection to climate breakdown. We must begin rapidly removing our public dollars from the war machine if we are to save humanity and the planet--which, like the climate crisis and the war machine, cannot be separated.
The time has arrived to build the next big divestment movement made up of people coming together across the planet to divest from the war machine--by withdrawing our public dollars from weapons corporations and putting them into local needs, including local green new deals, housing, health care, and education. The path to divestment has been laid by successful movements before ours; it is paved with the South African Apartheid regime, with coal and gas extraction companies, with gun manufacturers and tobacco companies, and with the private prison industry. The opportunities for divestment from the war machine abound. Cities, public pension funds, and university endowments invest public dollars in private corporations that often include weapons corporations, and elected public servants often accept campaign contributions from weapons-makers. Together we can demand that they divest because it is morally unacceptable to build our communities on top of global conflicts. At the same time, we must demand that we instead invest our public resources in projects that positively impact our communities, starting first with a rapid response to the climate crisis that is exacerbated by endless wars.
Join Jane Fonda Thursday night, November 7, for her teach-in on the connections between war and climate chaos. On Friday, I will bring this message to the Fire Drill Friday rally on the east lawn of the U.S. Capitol to call on all of us to engage to Divest from War. We will then march to the White House to call out the current resident who just took steps to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Join in person or on the Fire Drill Friday livestream.
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Urgent. It's never been this bad.
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission from the outset was simple. To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It’s never been this bad out there. And it’s never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed and doing some of its best and most important work, the threats we face are intensifying. Right now, with just four days to go in our Spring Campaign, we are not even halfway to our goal. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Can you make a gift right now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? There is no backup plan or rainy day fund. There is only you. —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
Here we are, a full three decades after NASA scientist James Hansen raised the specter of a looming climate crisis with Congress, looking at the first generation of severely impacted youth and telling them they're right: We have completely squandered their future. For too long, our dominant culture has practiced unsustainable growth and consumption, ushering in the end of a habitable planet and with it civilization as we know it. Those most impacted are the communities who have contributed the least to climate change, a direct extension of the settler colonization project that has unfolded across the globe over hundreds of years.
We are encouraged by intersectional organizing, and thrilled that Jane is connecting the dots that link militarism, weapons corporations, migration, and the climate crisis.
Jane Fonda and her Fire Drill Fridays are linking social movements across issues, eyeing the connections between the myriad problems we see causing climate chaos, many of them rooted in capitalist consumer culture. From the need to tease apart incarceration from profit to outrage at our treatment of asylum-seekers at our southern border, we've witnessed rapid wins in the movement to divest public dollars from the private prison industry after years of hard work behind the scenes. The same asylum-seekers who are fleeing nations ravaged by wars and conflicts--many driven directly by U.S. policy--and the impacts of climate crisis are being held in appalling conditions in concentration camps and prisons, many of them run by the private prison industry. We are encouraged by intersectional organizing, and thrilled that Jane is connecting the dots that link militarism, weapons corporations, migration, and the climate crisis. We are clear on the impact: the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet, but the nationwide call for a Green New Deal has not yet given attention to our military spending as either a massive driver of the climate crisis that cannot be ignored, nor as a source of much-needed funding for a project as massive as the Green New Deal.
Movements to divest from the military and movements to divest from fossil fuels often face the same bad actors. Recent actions targeting the massive asset manager BlackRock are drawing attention to their investments in companies behind Amazon deforestation. Investing in these companies undermines our ability to maintain a livable planet, namely by destroying the forests that are the lungs of the earth in the Amazon basin. Here at CODEPINK, we have also given considerable attention to BlackRock because they are the world's top investor in weapons manufacturers, but even this more explicitly anti-war action connects to the climate crisis. The same weapons that are used in wars and conflicts all over the world are a crucial component of the war machine that makes up a significant portion of the Pentagon's fossil fuel use--the U.S. military has released 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases since the start of the global war on terror in 2001. Moreover, those same weapons are a major factor in conflicts that lead to migration by asylum-seekers--weapons that are in turn produced by corporations that are propped up by our public dollars, to the detriment of our communities. When our public institutions invest public money in weapons corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, they are underpinning the war machine that draws public dollars away from projects benefiting our communities and puts them into an already bloated defense budget. There is a clear thread running from the Pentagon budget to weapons corporations to our impoverished communities to migrants fleeing wars and drought to greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis. Imagine a snake consuming its own body: that is the war machine's connection to climate breakdown. We must begin rapidly removing our public dollars from the war machine if we are to save humanity and the planet--which, like the climate crisis and the war machine, cannot be separated.
The time has arrived to build the next big divestment movement made up of people coming together across the planet to divest from the war machine--by withdrawing our public dollars from weapons corporations and putting them into local needs, including local green new deals, housing, health care, and education. The path to divestment has been laid by successful movements before ours; it is paved with the South African Apartheid regime, with coal and gas extraction companies, with gun manufacturers and tobacco companies, and with the private prison industry. The opportunities for divestment from the war machine abound. Cities, public pension funds, and university endowments invest public dollars in private corporations that often include weapons corporations, and elected public servants often accept campaign contributions from weapons-makers. Together we can demand that they divest because it is morally unacceptable to build our communities on top of global conflicts. At the same time, we must demand that we instead invest our public resources in projects that positively impact our communities, starting first with a rapid response to the climate crisis that is exacerbated by endless wars.
Join Jane Fonda Thursday night, November 7, for her teach-in on the connections between war and climate chaos. On Friday, I will bring this message to the Fire Drill Friday rally on the east lawn of the U.S. Capitol to call on all of us to engage to Divest from War. We will then march to the White House to call out the current resident who just took steps to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Join in person or on the Fire Drill Friday livestream.
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Here we are, a full three decades after NASA scientist James Hansen raised the specter of a looming climate crisis with Congress, looking at the first generation of severely impacted youth and telling them they're right: We have completely squandered their future. For too long, our dominant culture has practiced unsustainable growth and consumption, ushering in the end of a habitable planet and with it civilization as we know it. Those most impacted are the communities who have contributed the least to climate change, a direct extension of the settler colonization project that has unfolded across the globe over hundreds of years.
We are encouraged by intersectional organizing, and thrilled that Jane is connecting the dots that link militarism, weapons corporations, migration, and the climate crisis.
Jane Fonda and her Fire Drill Fridays are linking social movements across issues, eyeing the connections between the myriad problems we see causing climate chaos, many of them rooted in capitalist consumer culture. From the need to tease apart incarceration from profit to outrage at our treatment of asylum-seekers at our southern border, we've witnessed rapid wins in the movement to divest public dollars from the private prison industry after years of hard work behind the scenes. The same asylum-seekers who are fleeing nations ravaged by wars and conflicts--many driven directly by U.S. policy--and the impacts of climate crisis are being held in appalling conditions in concentration camps and prisons, many of them run by the private prison industry. We are encouraged by intersectional organizing, and thrilled that Jane is connecting the dots that link militarism, weapons corporations, migration, and the climate crisis. We are clear on the impact: the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet, but the nationwide call for a Green New Deal has not yet given attention to our military spending as either a massive driver of the climate crisis that cannot be ignored, nor as a source of much-needed funding for a project as massive as the Green New Deal.
Movements to divest from the military and movements to divest from fossil fuels often face the same bad actors. Recent actions targeting the massive asset manager BlackRock are drawing attention to their investments in companies behind Amazon deforestation. Investing in these companies undermines our ability to maintain a livable planet, namely by destroying the forests that are the lungs of the earth in the Amazon basin. Here at CODEPINK, we have also given considerable attention to BlackRock because they are the world's top investor in weapons manufacturers, but even this more explicitly anti-war action connects to the climate crisis. The same weapons that are used in wars and conflicts all over the world are a crucial component of the war machine that makes up a significant portion of the Pentagon's fossil fuel use--the U.S. military has released 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases since the start of the global war on terror in 2001. Moreover, those same weapons are a major factor in conflicts that lead to migration by asylum-seekers--weapons that are in turn produced by corporations that are propped up by our public dollars, to the detriment of our communities. When our public institutions invest public money in weapons corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, they are underpinning the war machine that draws public dollars away from projects benefiting our communities and puts them into an already bloated defense budget. There is a clear thread running from the Pentagon budget to weapons corporations to our impoverished communities to migrants fleeing wars and drought to greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis. Imagine a snake consuming its own body: that is the war machine's connection to climate breakdown. We must begin rapidly removing our public dollars from the war machine if we are to save humanity and the planet--which, like the climate crisis and the war machine, cannot be separated.
The time has arrived to build the next big divestment movement made up of people coming together across the planet to divest from the war machine--by withdrawing our public dollars from weapons corporations and putting them into local needs, including local green new deals, housing, health care, and education. The path to divestment has been laid by successful movements before ours; it is paved with the South African Apartheid regime, with coal and gas extraction companies, with gun manufacturers and tobacco companies, and with the private prison industry. The opportunities for divestment from the war machine abound. Cities, public pension funds, and university endowments invest public dollars in private corporations that often include weapons corporations, and elected public servants often accept campaign contributions from weapons-makers. Together we can demand that they divest because it is morally unacceptable to build our communities on top of global conflicts. At the same time, we must demand that we instead invest our public resources in projects that positively impact our communities, starting first with a rapid response to the climate crisis that is exacerbated by endless wars.
Join Jane Fonda Thursday night, November 7, for her teach-in on the connections between war and climate chaos. On Friday, I will bring this message to the Fire Drill Friday rally on the east lawn of the U.S. Capitol to call on all of us to engage to Divest from War. We will then march to the White House to call out the current resident who just took steps to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Join in person or on the Fire Drill Friday livestream.
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.