The “full agreement” between Giorgia Meloni and Joe Biden is not surprising: unconditional support for the war in Ukraine leaves no room for differences of any kind. In addition, Giorgia has also signed up for the war – for now only “commercial” – on China and in exchange she has admitted – against her convictions – that something must be “done” about climate change. On the other hand, the agreement between the United States and the fascists, fathers and grandfathers of the Brothers of Italy, is at least 70 years old and has always seen the former in the guise of instigators and the others as executors of (almost?) all the massacres that have infested our country since the post-war period.
The Italian government thus joins those who, in the name of “god, country and families” (their own) are moving the political axis of the European Union eastwards, but actually in the opposite direction, towards Washington; with the advantage for Washington that, unlike the Polish government, the Italian one does not tremble, at least for now, [at the thought of] bringing all of NATO into the war against Russia. Draghi does it on behalf of everyone. As for sovereignty, it can be forgotten: in the end, sovereignty has always been and will always be that of NATO. The schedule? Indefinitely prolonged war, war economy, militarization, warmongering and authoritarianism (let’s call it fascism) and – why not? – the destruction and reconstruction that war entails.
The arsonists who trigger the fires that are destroying the forests all over the world are hunted down, not to mention the drought that makes the fires uncontrollable. (There have always been arsonists: Erostratus, who set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, was one of them). [All this] is a manifestation of the climate crisis. On the other hand, we know, “in the summer it’s hot”… The destruction, pollution, CO2 emissions and deaths – not a few tens, but hundreds of thousands – that the war in Ukraine, like all other wars, is causing, are a hundred times greater than those of fires, but they are not taken into account: no one hunts down the arsonists who have ignited and brooded it for years. “Save the climate” in words, yes, but woe to whoever touches the war! Now that Washington has put the climate back on the agenda, even Mattarella remembers it, Pichetto Fratin weeps in public (dejà vu), and the newspapers praise his foresight. But is it possible that they don’t know that war eliminates all measures to deal with the climate crisis?
Unfortunately, even in the sacrosanct letter with which one hundred Italian scientists invite the media to “tell the truth” about the causes of the ongoing disasters (it’s not “bad weather”) and the measures to be taken to deal with them, the theme of “war” is overlooked. And, apart from a fleeting mention of “adaptation policies to protect people and territories from the irreparable effects of climate change”, that invitation to the media focuses exclusively on mitigation measures: “Rapid elimination of the use of coal, oil, and gas, and decarbonisation through renewable energy”. But is this all “the truth” to which the media should open pages and services? No, unfortunately, there is much more and it’s time to open the eyes to that too.
Whatever happens – but there will certainly not be a sudden change of course at a global level, especially now that COP 28 has been assigned to a petro-monarchy, under the direction of an oil tycoon – climate-changing emissions will continue and will exceed the budget available to [make them] stop at +1.5°C. But even if they stop tomorrow, the Earth will still continue to warm for years. Polar caps and glaciers will continue to melt, ocean levels will rise, submerging millions of square kilometers of land, rivers will no longer receive water and permafrost will emit methane into the atmosphere, triggering positive feedback. Extreme events – hurricanes, floods, hailstorms, heat waves, droughts and fires – are bound to multiply (even if all the arsonists are arrested). Before all the governments, businesses, cities, producers and consumers of the world are forced, by the violence of adverse events rather than by international, national and local agreements, to give up using the hydrocarbons buried in that safe they call Earth, this [Earth] will have had plenty of time to fall apart.
The currents of both the atmosphere and the oceans have already changed, and will continue to change, and with them the “time”: the local one, on the basis of which we are used to organizing our daily life. This too will change, willy-nilly. The communities, large or small, that will know how to equip themselves to adapt to increasingly difficult living conditions – a life more sober, but also richer in relationships and experiences – will lead the way to those who, for better or worse, will have to follow them or else to disappear.
According to Gaia Vince (in Il secolo nomade,-The nomad century -, [Publisher of the Italian edition] Bollati Boringhieri, 2023 [publisher of the English edition: Penguin, 2022 ]) by the end of the century the most populated half of the planet will be uninhabitable due to excessively high temperatures or because it is submerged by the sea. There will be hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of refugees and migrants who will seek refuge in the still livable half of the planet, especially the northern one, perhaps made more fertile by global warming. But it is necessary to deal with the anti-migrant phobias now stirred up in all countries of immigration, from Sweden to Tunisia, from Myanmar to Australia, from the United States to Japan.
But how many of us do those calculations? As early as 2004, the Pentagon had written that “developed” countries should prepare for an all-out war against waves of refugees who would try to break through their borders. Those who didn’t do so were doomed to perish. This is where the “Fortress Europe” comes from: from the belief that there is no longer room for everyone in this world. What is actually proposed by the racists of “Fortress Europe” and many other fortresses – without saying it and hiding, on the contrary, behind professions of climate denialism – is the extermination, by abandonment or by wide gaps [of living conditions], of more than half of the world’s population. Today’s campaigns and measures against “clandestine” refugees and migrants serve to get us used to these massacres, to cultivate our indifference.
“We cannot welcome into our country, nor into Europe, all of Africa, which by 2050 will have two billion inhabitants!” This is what is repeated to us even by the best intentioned, without ever taking into account what this statement entails if we stop there. But is there an alternative? We have to look for it. No one has ever faced a similar dilemma before, but you certainly don’t face it by ignoring it. All that remains is to try to slow down, and then stop and reverse, the consequences of global warming even on that half of the planet that is most affected by it. Those parched and devastated lands can still be reclaimed, reforested, irrigated, cultivated, with many large and small projects such as the half-abandoned one of the great green belt of the Sahel, reinforcing or reconstituting local communities as a safeguard for the rehabilitation of their territory. But who can be the protagonist of such a turning point if not the flow – for now, and for a few more years, so limited – of migrants who reach Europe? If they were welcomed, included, trained and enriched by the relationships within the communities that host them, these migrants can be the protagonists. They will thus be put in a position where they will both be able to voluntarily return to their lands of origin – which most of them want – but also to return when they want to the country in which they took refuge. And who can better plan the future of their country and fight more against those who are reducing it to a desert and a political hell than the community of expatriates who have fled?
Certainly war, the militarization of the world and the sale of arms to dictators, as well as the unlimited exploitation of their countries, do not help, but these are problems that concern us above all.