By Sacha Shaw

Leaders of the AUKUS nations, all once pronouncing ambition on addressing the climate crisis and lording the mantle of global leadership, are now each in turn forgoing their international commitments, carving out excuses and worse.

AUKUS, the recent defence agreement between Australia, the UK and the USA, is demonstrating a surprising quirk: joint-failure to lead on carbon emissions reductions and climate change adaptation despite the magnitude of risks to national security.

As the northern hemisphere assesses the devastation from record breaking heat and catastrophic storms; the southern hemisphere is bracing for a tough summer season ahead. And already South America is suffering from heatwave in the middle of winter, leading some in Australia to speculate on the looming bushfire season.

This comes amid growing calls for the Albanese Government to release a report from the Office of National Intelligence on the national security implications of the climate crisis.

The Government refuses to publicly comment on the report despite it being on the desk of cabinet members since late 2022, all adding to frustration from the Greens and organisations like Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG) about the lack of action on the climate crisis and the doubling down on fossil fuels.

Is the Government sitting on the report because it contradicts recent decisions to expand fossil fuel projects like Woodside’s Scarborough? Might the report issue stark and justified reasons to reorganise our priorities instead of committing to throwing obscene sums after nuclear powered submarines?

“What China does or does not do will not drown small island states, nor desertify the dry subtropics, nor drive a global decline in crop yields, kill the Barrier Reef, salinate Kakadu or force the displacement of tens of millions of people. But a hotter climate will, probably in significant measure even before a full fleet of nuclear submarines has been commissioned in the 2040s”, said ASLCG in a recent report.

“Australia is missing in action”, but we are not the only ones.

SUNAK: from the tears of Alok Sharma to anti-green populism

The premiere international meeting on climate change, the Conference of Parties (COP), and indeed the whole United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is struggling with legitimacy problems.

The next meeting, COP28, will be held later this year in the United Arab Emirates, leading many to recoil at the dissonance between a climate crisis conference being hosted by a petro-state and led by fossil fuel executive, Sultan Al Jaber.

But not long ago, it was Glasgow’s turn to play host; and COP26 was met with much less hostility in part due to the UK’s apparent commitment to leading on climate action. Many remember the moment when, in the conclusion of last-minute negotiations, then President Alok Sharma fighting back tears apologised for failing to a pass a strongly worded communique on the phasing out of coal instead capitulating to phasing downcoal. UK’s leadership in that moment seemed genuine, and even Boris Johnson was broadly recognised for leading the UK at the peak of its climate ambition. A lot has changed since then.

Rishi Sunak, facing down a tough election, is breaking with the decade-long bipartisan commitment in order to wedge Labour on green policies; adding anti-green diatribes to his list of culture war talking points against anything perceived as ‘Left’.

Associate Director at the Institute of Public Policy Research, Luke Murphy said “I don’t think many people would actually now consider the UK to be a global leader (on the climate).”

“What the government seems to be doing is using the climate to divide the public”.

Under Sunak, the UK is committing itself to fossil fuel, announcing “hundreds” of new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea. The decision to abdicate from global climate leadership has not gone down smoothly in the Conservative Party, drawing censure and even resignations for party and cabinet members.

BIDEN: Leading by example?

Consistently and safely couched in a ‘well, he is better than the alternative’, Joe Biden has a mixed record of “leading by the power of our example”.

Of the leaders discussed here, Biden has taken the most ambitious action by far. The Build Back Better Act included important tax credits for electric vehicles and incentives for solar panels. But some argue it does not go far enough – falling well short of a Green New Deal and failing to include the Clean Energy Performance Program.

Continuing the thread of approving oil and gas expansion, the Biden Administration green lit the contentious Willow Project, going against his election commitment to ban new oil and gas permits on public lands and waters. Estimated to produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day, the Willow Project will be the biggest development in the region for decades. In addition to the Willow Project, the Biden Administration has also more recently approved fossil fuel licenses in the Gulf of Mexico.

Committed to a fossil fuel complex:

Appeals to national security abound in the political landscape of AUKUS. Nations are circulating, among other arguments, the need to ‘shore-up domestic capacity’, to ‘boost the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic slump or recession’, and even apparently enlightened pursuits to supply the world with ‘clean’ gas, coal and oil; and moralised attempts to decouple from and starve authoritarian states – but in reality, all that is going on is a continued commitment and recommitment to a fossil fuel industrial complex.

https://johnmenadue.com/joint-retreat-aukus-nations-back-peddling-on-climate/

Now that Kyiv’s counteroffensive is foundering, goal posts in the timing for talks and a ceasefire are quietly being moved.

BY Branko Marcetic

A forever war seems to be brewing in Ukraine.

Last week, I argued that given the failure of Kyiv’s summer offensive to reclaim significant territory from Russia and given the maximalist rhetoric that the U.S. government and NATO allies had been using since last year to sell the public on open-ended military support, the war in Ukraine was in danger of being prolonged again, well past the date that the Biden administration had appeared to set last year.

This increasingly looks to be the case. On Saturday, the Financial Timesreported that “U.S. officials are privately girding for what increasingly looks like a war of attrition that will last well into next year,” echoing an earlier Wall Street Journal report that “military strategists and policymakers across the West are already starting to think about next year’s spring offensive” and about “how to prepare for a protracted conflict.” 

It may well become “a protracted struggle that lasts several more years,” the Journal warned on Sunday, noting that Ukraine’s goal of retaking all the territory it lost now “appears a distant prospect.”

Writing in POLITICO, former Democratic congressman and Obama administration State Department official Tom Malinowski — now a senior fellow at the McCain Institute — argues that “for the war in Ukraine to end on terms consistent with American interests and ideals, Ukraine must be seen to have won, and Russia’s invasion must go down in history as a decisive failure.” 

In particular, Malinowski points to President Joe Biden’s declaration in February this year that “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia — never.” 

On Aug. 10, an unnamed senior official told CNN that “we don’t know how much longer this war is going to go on,” but that the White House “won’t be bashful about going back to Congress beyond the first quarter of next year if we feel like we need to do that.” 

In other words, the United States and NATO are moving the goalposts again in a war that has already been characterized by steady mission creep. At least some of their Russian counterparts appear to feel the same, with former Russian President and Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev recently saying that “should it take years or even decades, then so be it.” 

Yet this begs the question of when it will ever be considered a good time to wind down the war. The Ukrainian government and its supportersmaintain that it’s a lack of advanced military weapons that have hobbled its offensive, even as military experts insist no weapon would be a “magic bullet” against the dug-in Russian defenses and that the reasons for Kyiv’s military failures run deeper. This is not an unreasonable take given the significant amount of Western-supplied heavy weaponry destroyed in the offensive’s opening weeks alone.

If the next offensive similarly fails, will a ceasefire be pushed back again? How many years might this go on for? 

Even if Kyiv does stage a successful operation against Russian forces in the future, it’s not clear it will lead to an end of the war. For one, Moscow may decide to launch its own counter-offensive to erase whatever gains Ukrainian forces have made, starting perhaps an endless cycle of military toing-and-froing. Or we could have a repeat of last fall, when Kyiv and its NATO backers, emboldened by the major gains made in Ukraine’s September counter-offensive, rejected the idea of talks to insead pursue “total victory,” at ultimately disastrous cost.

Even now, Ukrainian leaders and many of its Western supporters still maintain the maximalist goals of restoring the country’s pre-2014 borders, which includes retaking Crimea. 

Ironically, a prolonged war is exactly what at least some NATO officials had hoped for from the start in order to trap Russia in its own Afghanistan-like blunder, with the New York Times reporting in March 2022 that the administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire.”

But a prolonged war will not be good for Ukraine, which has already suffered breathtakingly vast human and economic costs from a protracted war, and which falls further and further into debt with every month. And it will not be good for the rest of the world either, feeding into worldwide cost-of-living shocks while carrying the already twice-averted possibility of a catastrophic NATO-Russia war that could turn nuclear. 

Meanwhile, should the war drag on into next year, it may become a sore political issue in the 2024 election. President Biden came into office promising an end to “forever wars” and to launch a new era of “relentless diplomacy,” while his likely opponent, Donald Trump, has staked out a pro-diplomacy position on the war, making a protracted war in Ukraine a potential political liability. 

Meanwhile, as the U.S. public and Republican lawmakers increasingly sour on more military aid to Ukraine, the president risks having U.S. involvement in the war end not on his terms, but with Congress cutting off further funding. All the while, there is the unpredictability of war policy during the campaign season, potentially raising pressure on the administration to escalate Washington’s involvement, lest a perceived defeat threaten Biden’s chances for re-election. 

Even U.S. officials are now quietly admitting that Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley “had a point” when he called for Kyiv to make the most of its gains by suing for peace late last year, and that “we may have missed a window to push for earlier talks.” Now may not be too late to do so. 

But if the administration continues to drag its feet, it risks trapping not just Russia but the United States and Europe into yet another endless conflict, guaranteeing ongoing horror for the Ukrainian people and keeping the specter of nuclear catastrophe looming above the rest of the globe.

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

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