I fear our benign weather allows us to overlook just how much New Zealand’s climate is influenced by its position in the chilly Southern Ocean. Meantime, the rest of the world is facing heat changes of terrifying proportions.
Most recently, my attention was caught by the unusually early drought being experienced in the Amazon region. Along with its tributaries, the Amazon is the largest river in the world by discharge volume of water, and the longest according to Wikipedia.
The Amazon region’s earlier-than-usual drought is marking one of the worst environmental crises in the past 44 years. At the height of last year’s drought, barging operations became unviable due to shallow waters, so traders had to redirect agriproducts through alternative ports down the coast.
Importantly, and as remarked by noted academic and writer, Alfred McCoy, in a recent article in the online Salon magazine, world climate change could ultimately impact the United States’ global hegemony. In McCoy’s view, the once ‘most indispensable’ nation, which won the Second World War and built a new world order, has become dispensable indeed. But, as he points out, the decline and fall of American global power would be nothing special in the sweep of history.
‘After all, in the 4,000 years since humanity’s first empire formed in the Fertile Crescent, at least 200 empires have risen, collided with other imperial powers, and in time collapsed.’
Even the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 didn’t disturb the then world order.
However, he adds, the real question is not about the fate of American global hegemony, but the future of the world order it began building at the peak of its power, not in 1991, but right after the Second World War.
McCoy remarks that, since then, Washington’s global dominion has rested on a ‘delicate duality.’ The raw realpolitik of US military bases, multinational corporations, CIA coups and foreign military interventions has been balanced by a surprisingly liberal world order.
Some observers, such as Princeton political scientist, G. John Ikenberry, have argued that Washington’s ability to shape world politics would diminish, but ‘the liberal international order will survive and thrive.’
McCoy writes that Ikenberry remains optimistic the world order will endure because international issues, such as climate change, make its: ‘protean vision of interdependence and cooperation… more important as the century unfolds.’
American deaths in the Second World War numbered 418,000, but those losses paled compared to the 24 million dead in Russia, the 20 million in China, and the 19 million in Europe. The US found itself with a vibrant economy on a war footing and half the world’s industrial capacity, while the swelling surpluses of American agriculture fed a famished humanity.
Despite this, there is mounting evidence that, as climate change accelerates, it is creating the basis for the sort of cataclysm that will be capable of shaking even such a deeply rooted world order, McCoy writes. The cascading effects of global warming will be ever more evident, not in the distant future of 2100, but within just 20 years, impacting the lives of most adults alive today.
¹. With acknowledgement to the song It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by American group R.E.M.
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