Veterans Day 2030: 19 years from now, a world of endless war?
We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.
You are already strapped in. Now it’s just a question of how fast you’re heading for the cliff. You may want to hit the brakes, but the lead-footed deniers are in the driver’s seat for now…
It is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs and Pakistani mega-floods, of countless environmental refugees - hundreds of millions by the second half of this century - all clamoring to occupy the parts of the developed world that aren’t flooded or desertified.
In such a world, everyone will ultimately become a veteran, and Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day may fade into obscurity, as people forget about a time when wars were the exception, a time when soldiers were but a small minority of the population.
So when does this start to happen?
Thomas Fingar, “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst,” sees it happening by the mid-2020s:
By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.
For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,’ Fingar said, while the United States will face ‘Dust Bowl’ conditions in the parched Southwest”.
He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.
Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.
Climate change is a national security issue. Period, full stop. There’s much more information available at the original ClimateProgress article. Highly recommend reading the whole thing to appreciate just how dangerous the GOP’s aggressively destructive denial is.
