 |
|---|
 |
| April 21, 2013 Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Coming Global Explosion
In his pathbreaking 2001 book Resource Wars, Michael Klare wrote: “Natural resources are the building blocks of civilization and an essential requirement of daily existence. The inhabitants of planet Earth have been blessed with a vast supply of most basic materials. But we are placing increased pressure on those supplies, and in some cases we face, in our lifetimes, or those of our children, the prospect of severe resource depletion.” More than ever, as he points out today, this remains a planetary reality with which we have still not truly come to grips. Since the beginning of this new century, however, climate change has joined resource scarcity in a way that will make for a far more combustible and explosive reality in the coming decades.
As John Vidal reported recently in the British Observer, leading scientists now believe that, by 2050, the pressures of climate change -- of record floods, intensifying extreme heat, and droughts -- could change the face of farming on this planet and lead to a doubling of prices for food staples, the very basics of life, as populations continue to rise. This, in turn, will undoubtedly mean destitution or worse for millions of the poor, particularly in Africa and Asia. On a planet rapidly changing in ways that have not been part of our repertoire in the rest of human history, TomDispatch has been, and will be, asking some of its regulars to peer into the murkiness of the human future and offer us a sense of what we may face. From thenext stages of weaponry in the American high-tech arsenal and thefuture aridification of the American Southwest to Washington’s limited view of a world roaring toward 2030, our writers have already begun doing so. Today, Michael Klare, author most recently of The Race for What’s Left, and a man always ahead of the curve, offers his views on a world too potentially explosive not to be attended to. Tom Entering a Resource-Shock World |
