Tom Engelhardt 254

September 17, 2017 Tomgram: Michael Klare, The New Face of "War" at Home [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Remember the special offers still available on historian Alfred McCoy’s just-published Dispatch Book,In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. Of it, Ann Jones said, “As the empire’s political, economic, and military strategies unravel under cover of secrecy, America’s neglected citizens would do well to read this book." For a donation of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the U.S.A.), you can get a signed, personalized copy from the author. (For further details, go to our donation page.) In addition, Haymarket Books, which produces and distributes our expanding line of volumes, will give any TD reader an exclusive 40% discount on the purchase of McCoy’s book. Simply click here to take advantage of this special offer and, while you're at it, offer a little always appreciated support for TD. Tom] The United States just experienced its largest rainfall event in memory. For the first time in recorded weather history, two category 4 hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, hit in a single season (not yet over). And San Francisco, famed for its chilliness, experienced an unheard of 106 degree day as September began, while a record West Coast heat wave, essentially an unending Irma or Harvey of wildfires, left parts of the region, from Los Angeles to British Columbia, enwreathed in a pall of smoke and ash (without even an El Niño year to blame for it). And did I mention that both states hit by those recent hurricanes have climate-change denying governors? Or that the man now in charge in Washington also denies the reality of climate change (a Chinese hoax!) and has stocked his administration with a remarkable cast of fervent deniers (the latest such appointment being the head of NASA), who have essentially wiped all references to the phenomenon off every imaginable federal website, fired climate-change scientists, and -- as a crew regularly backed in their careers by big energy -- seem intent on recreating the fossil-fueled America of The Donald’s 1950s childhood. Fortunately, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare tells us today, the cavalry is riding to the rescue -- more or less literally. In a government shutting down anything faintly connected to global warming, only one institution isn’t now run by deniers and that’s the U.S. military. As Klare points out, its high command is still planning for a radically climate-changed planet. Unfortunately, we’re talking about the same institution whose generals have been in a “generational struggle” to win even one of the endless wars they’ve launched or wandered into since 9/11. They belong to an institution, the Pentagon, that has gobbled up almost unimaginable sums of taxpayer dollars, without in those same years even being capable of successfully auditing itself. In other words, our potential saviors, at a moment when the very environment that has for millennia welcomed humanity is up for grabs, might be thought of as the Keystone Cops of the twenty-first century. Tom Beyond Harvey and Irma Militarizing Homeland Security in the Climate-Change Era  By Michael T. Klare Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had sent members of the state National Guard to devastated Houston, anxiously recalled them while putting in place emergency measures for his own state. A small flotilla of naval vessels, originally sent to waters off Texas, was similarly redirected to the Caribbean, while specialized combat units drawn from as far afield as Colorado, Illinois, and Rhode Island were rushed to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, members of the California National Guard were being mobilized to fight wildfires raging across that state (as across much of the West) during its hottest summer on record. Think of this as the new face of homeland security: containing the damage to America’s seacoasts, forests, and other vulnerable areas caused by extreme weather events made all the more frequent and destructivethanks to climate change. This is a “war” that won’t have a name -- not yet, not in the Trump era, but it will be no less real for that. “The firepower of the federal government” was being trained on Harvey, as William Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), put it in a blunt expression of this warlike approach. But don’t expect any of the military officials involved in such efforts to identify climate change as the source of their new strategic orientation, not while Commander in Chief Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office refusing to acknowledge the reality of global warming or its role in heightening the intensity of major storms; not while he continues to stock his administration, top to bottom, with climate-change deniers. Click here to read more of this dispatch.