 Hello, hello. Hi everybody, welcome. Thank you so much for coming today. Thank you for joining us at the People's Forum. My name is Mia, and I'm a staff member here at the People's Forum on the research team. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. So we're really honored to be here with CodePink, a fantastic organization working in collaboration with them on a really, really important event. So today we are here because we all know that we're facing a crisis of our own survival. One in three people around the world face food insecurity. They're projected to be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050 and extreme ecological and weather disasters are happening more and more frequently. This past June, a Senate committee approved an increase to Biden's defense budget, making the total almost $850 billion. This is more than the next nine countries combined. The United States has over 800 military bases across the world. This is three times as many as all other military bases in the world. We must see these numbers as inherently linked to the destruction of our climate. We don't have to go very far to see the effects of US militarism on the environment. Just yesterday, a study was published that the water of the Hawaiian people in Red Hill Oahu still contains jet fuel from over 100 million gallons that the US is storing on its naval base there. There will be no clean water as long as that military base remains on that island. All of our fates are tied to this crisis of our climate, of our planet, but we are not all responsible for it. Who hold the most responsibility for decades of environmental degradation, extraction, and destruction? Not Russia, not China, not the global south, but the US and the West. And why is that? For this preservation of a decaying system known as capitalism. Are we going to let the US keep funneling money into its military? The protectors of US imperial interests and capital interests across the world? The number one climate destroyer in the world? No, no we are not. We refuse to pay their climate debt with our bodies and our land. And you know why? Because we as the masses have the power to protect our people and protect the planet. We just need to be able to harness it. So all of us in the US in whatever struggle you're in must realize that we have a common enemy. And that is the US war machine and imperialism. And we must build the unity necessary to win this fight in defense of our lives and the planet. So thank you so much. And I believe I'm going to pass it off to Sophie from Code Pink. Can everyone hear me? Okay, not used to microphone. Thank you so much for that introduction. Welcome everyone and thank you for coming. My name is Sophie and I'm the summer intern for Code Pink's Wars Not Green campaign. I'm so thrilled to be here with you all today, both online and in person to learn and take action against the war machine destroying our planet. As you all probably know, today is Hiroshima day, marking the 77th anniversary of the nuclear bombings that left a devastating impact to people and planet that can still be felt today. On days like today, we must reflect on the violent systems that lead to tragedies like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Capitalism and imperialism have led us to poison our planet and live in a society of extreme inequality. We must confront the power structures that hold these systems in place. The US military is the largest industrial producer of greenhouse gases, yet uses climate change as an excuse to increase militarization globally. We cannot solve the climate crisis unless we confront the US military and the power structures it holds in place. Today we're gonna hear from incredible experts and activists who know how militarism is destroying people and planet. Between our series of speakers, representatives from local organizations will offer ways for us to take action now and build a better world for future generations. Thank you again for coming, and now I'm going to pass things over to Nancy, a long time war is not green campaigner. Hi everyone, my name is Nancy Mancias and as many of us are descendants of settlers, immigrants or descendants of those forcefully brought to this continent, we must recognize and should never forget that we are on unseated Lenape lands. We also recognize US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month and the environmental effects the bombings caused with the emission of large amounts of radiation, the survivors who have had to deal with the physical and psychological effects. The US continues to be the largest producer of nuclear weapons. Our war is not green campaign, looks at how war impacts the environment and how war is accelerating the climate crisis. Now I'd like to bring up my colleague, Sam to the microphone. Hi everyone, thank you for coming. Yeah, as we've noted, 77 years ago today, a really horrible atrocity took place, the US bombing of Hiroshima. And so after this bombing and after about 70,000 lives were wiped out in a matter of seconds, the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet wrote a poem in the voice of a seven year old girl who died in this terrible act. The poem was later translated to Japanese by Nobuyuki Nakamoto as Shinda Onanoko, dead girl. And it is frequently, sorry, it is frequently sung at commemorations of the atrocity. Given the harshness of war and the escalation of conflict that we are seeing right now, it is worthwhile to reflect once more on Hikmet's beautiful haunting lyrics. I come and stand at every door, but no one hears my silent tread. I knock and yet remain unseen, for I am dead, for I am dead. I'm only seven, although I died in Hiroshima long ago. I'm seven now as I was then. When children die, they do not grow. My hair was scorched by swirling flame, my eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind. Death came and turned my bones to dust and that was scattered by the wind. I need no fruit, I need no rice, I need no sweets nor even bread. I ask for nothing for myself, for I am dead, for I am dead. All that I ask is that for peace. You fight today, you fight today so that the children of the world may live and grow and laugh and play. Now that was as we noted in atrocity that U.S. militarism inflicted abroad. It has a long history of doing that. It also inflicts U.S. militarism and also inflicts violence domestically in many ways. And one of these ways is the increasing militarization of the borders. I'm really proud to introduce someone who has been studying this militarization and the violence it inflicts for 15 years, more than 15 years. I'm speaking of one of our speakers today, Todd Miller, who writes for a weekly post for the Border Chronicle and is the author of several books, including Storming the Wall, Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security, Empire of Borders, the expansion of the U.S. border around the world and build bridges, not walls, a journey to a world without borders. And so with that, please enjoy Todd Miller. Thank you sir, sorry I'm coming in from greetings from Tutana, Arizona. That's where I'm talking to you from. And it's such an honor to be here today with you, with Cook Tank, an organization that's long admired and have participated in Cook Picket events in the past. And it's really an honor to be here with you. So I'm gonna talk a little bit of connecting climate and displacement and borders. And I wanna start with, in 2015, I was in a town called Tenozike, Tenozike in Tavasco in Mexico by 20 miles from the Guatemala border. And when I was there, I went to the train yard. And the train yard is where people would gather to get on the train to head north. Sometimes other parts of Mexico, sometimes to the United States. And when I was there or not, I wasn't really necessarily looking at climate at that time. I was really looking at the expansion of the US border abroad. So I was in Mexico just looking at its southern border and following the ways that the US was fortifying its border. And so like when I went to the train yard, I couldn't help to notice, but there was an army vehicle and it was patrolling along a road right alongside the train yard. I remember seeing a soldier standing up in the back of the truck and with an automatic weapon in his hands. And it looked like they were patrolling, looking for people. And at the same time, I looked over to my left and there were three, what turned out to be small farmers, who were crouched behind the train. And I ended up talking to these farmers after the vehicle had passed, of course. And they were from Honduras. And they told me that they were on the move because there was no rain in their community. No rain, there was no rain, so no harvest, no harvest, no food, no food, a crisis, a catastrophe. And later, looking into the area they are from and people who might be familiar with how climate is impacting Central America will be familiar with the term the dry corridor. They're from the part of the Honduras or in it. It's a dry corridor that extends through the Central American countries where the seasons are not reliable anymore. And this particular incident, it affected 400,000 families. And these droughts, like this is 2015, but they were happening before then and they've been reoccurring since then. And one stat I wanted to bring out was that in 2020, not only were these droughts happening during the harvesting season again, but there were two hurricanes that hit the coast of Honduras and Nicaragua at the end of that year and COVID all at the same time. So the World Food Program shows hunger levels in the dry corridor areas of Central America going from 2.4 million to 8 million. It's an astronomical jump from in 2021 just to show how much people are being impacted and by many very much impacted by climate events and COVID, of course. And so when I ended up talking to these three farmers, they told me that they had been in this train yard for about six days. They had tried to get on their train the night before, but the train had been going fast, too fast. And that was part of the Mexican border policy at the time. The federal government was instructing train conductors to go too fast, so people couldn't even jump on it. But even if they had gotten on the train, and I was staying in the shelter nearby. So I heard the stories from some of the other people that actually got on that train. There was an immigration checkpoint a mile down the road or a mile down the tracks, I should say. And so people had to leave the train anyhow. And so they were in the middle of this massive immigration enforcement, border enforcement apparatus. That's very much like from the United States. And in fact, U.S. officials have said the U.S. Southern border is now the border with Guatemala and Chiapas. And that was said in 2012. I would argue that it goes even way beyond that. So let's back up just a second to 2003 just to show, just to look at a little bit of U.S. policy and how this is involved in this. So 2003, there was a report that looked at a worst case scenario involving climate change. And it was a report by the Pentagon, commissioned by the Pentagon. And I found the words. I'm going to read a couple sentences verbatim from the report. And it really kind of shows the U.S. official thinking when it comes to climate change. And it goes like this. The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency. And then borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands. And they put in parentheses, an especially severe problem. Mexico and South America. And I do believe they meant Central America as well. They just didn't put it in there. And so those sorts of assessments are pretty commonplace when you start digging into U.S. officialdom. But I wanted to make a point first to say that that report came out in 2003. And you know what happened in 2003. That was the implementation of the Department of Homeland Security. And the Department of Homeland Security, of course, made the agencies Customs and Border Protection, CBP, made the agency ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And if you take the total budgets of those agencies from then to now, it's we're looking at dramatic historic growth of border fortification, unlike we've ever seen before. There's been $350 billion put into these, just those two agencies. And you could go further when you think of the border apparatus. And a lot of that has been going into these massive hiring surges of quadrupling or quintupling, if I don't know if I'm pronouncing that word right, quintupling the border patrol from four to 4,000 to 20,000 armed agents to building up walls and barriers. Well, before Trump and during Trump and now after Trump, building up all kinds of surveillance infrastructure. Now the U.S. Borderlands is the most surveilled area, the part of the entire country. If you go south of where I live in Tucson, you're getting, you have cameras staring at you almost everywhere you go that you can actually see, let alone the stuff you can't see like the drones flying overhead with their cameras or the underground motion sensors and that sort of thing. So lots and lots of this money has been put into this ever enlarging apparatus that as I just, as I mentioned at the beginning is expanding beyond our borders into other countries like the southern border of Mexico. But now I would say it goes even further into South America and the Caribbean and really across the world. But we could talk about that at another time. But how does climate change, climate change fit into this? So you have that report, but obviously at the time DHS was talking about counterterrorism, the war on terror. And you're, and also there was economic issues going on that they didn't mention as much like the North American Free Trade Agreement and eventually Central American Free Trade Agreement. But then you see climate coming into the official discourse in 2007, there was this report called the climate climatic cataclysm. And I just want to read a short little thing from that report by Leon Firth. And Leon Firth was the former security advisor for Al Gore. And he wrote on looking at a scenario of 2.6 degrees centigrade rise in global warming by 2040. He wrote that quote unquote border problems will overwhelm US capabilities beyond the possibility of control except by drastic methods and perhaps not even then. And this is all a direct quote. Efforts to choke off illegal immigration will have increasingly divisive repercussions on the domestic, social and political structure of the United States. So that, you have that same sort of thinking that's going in right as these budgets are just going rising and rising for border militarization. And then following that, you have more things that happened in 2010. The Obama administration connects climate with as a national security arrest. And one of the things that they do, you see this start to appear in departmental man security literature, climate change is treated as a threat multiplier. That's the term that they use. So it's not necessarily the hurricane, right? It's what happens to people after the hurricane. That's the threat climate is a threat multiplier and multiplies the threat. And that's the way that the department of implement security has been looking at this. And one of the quote unquote threats is displacement of people and people being on the move. And you can look at in 2013, DHS came out with a climate action plan. So for anyone who thinks that DHS isn't knowing of climate change, wrong. They're very much thinking about it. They're very much looking into the future. They're very much, in fact, they're preparing for the future 25 years in the future, 30 years in the future, thinking of future displacements. If you look at their climate action plan, they will talk about the very droughts that a couple of years later would displace those three farmers I met in, I met in 10-O-C-K and they end hurricanes and all the different things that affect Central America. They know that it's going to happen. And this, you go up to 2000, comes up to 2021, you look at the national or the annual threat assessment that's done by the, I think it's the national intelligence community. You look at 2021 rendition that happened that they put out last year. And I counted and they mentioned migration 18 times. And many times associating that migration, mind you, with the 2020 hurricanes and the hunger stat that I gave you on Central America earlier, associating it with Central American people coming north from Guatemala, from Honduras, from El Salvador, mainly, but from other countries as well. So there's the kind of knowing ahead of time that this is happening, but the response being further militarization, further fortification of the border, further building up and expanding the border to places like Southern Mexico, where it's becoming more and more difficult for people to move. And I just wanted to say one last thing, and then I'll end. I helped work on a report late last year, right before the, jeez, where was the, where is the big climate summit last year? Was it Copenhagen? No, it was on Copenhagen. Glasgow, the Glasgow climate summit. We looked at the top emitters, the highest emitters, the top 10 emitters of greenhouse gas emissions. And of course, as everyone knows, who is number one, and we're looking at historic emissions from the Industrial Revolution on United States, of course. And then we compared the money spent from on border and immigration enforcement with climate action, climate action like money that's given to countries that might help in drought situations or something like that. And lo and behold, the United States was nearly a ratio of 12 to one in money that was going to border enforcement and immigration enforcement, I would say border militarization over climate action. And that's an undercount because there's so many funnels. There's money that goes for the border expansion in the Pentagon that you can't, it's very difficult to track. So it's clear that the climate adaptation plan of the United States is to build up to fortify to, that is the primary response to the more and more displacement of people. And I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you so much, Todd, for joining us and talking about that. Now I'm really pleased to welcome Greta Zaro, the organizing director of World Beyond War. Thank you. My screen and share the presentation that I prepared for you all today. Hi, my name is Greta Zaro and I'm the organizing director with World Beyond War. For today's event, we are focusing on the interconnections of war and the environment. And I've been tasked with speaking about alternatives to militarism, how we can advocate for a green and peaceful future, which I think involves a two-pronged approach of resistance and regeneration. But first a little about World Beyond War and the impact of war on the environment. World Beyond War was founded in 2014 and we look holistically at the institution of war itself and aim to abolish all war. We oppose all forms of war, weapons and violence. And we look at all of these multifaceted impacts of war, the social, environmental, economic, et cetera. And we take a decentralized approach in our work that is driven by our chapters and affiliates on the ground in their communities, working on campaigns that resonate with them. People in 193 countries worldwide have signed our declaration of peace, pledging to work non-violently to end all war. Our three main campaigns are peace education, weapons divestment and closing military bases. The first peace education involves debunking what we call the myths of war and laying out the proven non-violent strategies to get us to a world beyond war. That work is based in our blueprint book, our foundational book, a global security system and alternative to war, which really lays out the strategies needed to get us to a world beyond war. And from there we've developed online courses, fact sheets, webinars and many more materials that lay out both the myths of war and the ways to get us beyond war. Then our two main action campaigns are weapons divestment and closing military bases, which both of which we see as crucial steps towards dismantling the institution of war. The first to literally withdraw the money from war, to withdraw investments from weapons manufacturers, military contractors and war profiteers. And we do this so many levels from the individual level, institutional level, municipal funds, state funds, et cetera. And the second closing military bases. Military bases are these literal centers of imperialism, pre-positioning troops and weapons in preparation for war. And we especially acknowledge the US military as the biggest culprit with 95% of all foreign military bases. So we see closing bases as another critical step to get us to a world beyond war. Now intersectionality is at the heart of our work. We are focused on building bridges with all types of groups, showing that war is at the nexus of social, ecological and economic issues. And so that's really relevant to today's conversation. How can we build these bridges and coalition build with groups to show that if we want to make progress on climate change, we need to tackle the elephant in the room, the war machine. Now, given today's focus, let's dive a little bit more into the specific interconnections of war and the environment for some context. And here are some startling facts. The US military is the largest institutional consumer of oil on the planet. Foreign intervention in a civil war is 100 times more likely when the country at war has large reserves of oil. Now the military is often seen as our protector, right? What I'm quoting the Department of Defense, but we're actually fouling our own nest. The US military is among the top three largest polluters of US waterways. And the majority of Superfund sites, which are sites designated as hazardous by the EPA that often require millions of taxpayer dollars of cleanup. The majority of these sites are military sites. On top of all this, despite being one of the largest polluters on earth, the military is often exempted from climate agreements such as the Kyoto protocol, the Paris agreement and the UN framework on climate change. World Beyond War joined with our allies in Scotland last year to protest the UN COP 26 climate conference and to urge for the inclusion of military emissions in climate agreements. Now for more information about war and the environment, we have tons of resources, articles, videos, fact sheets, et cetera. You can visit worldbeyondwar.org slash environment. So we know what the problem is but what can we do about it? World Beyond War's recent No War 2022 conference last month explored this very question of how can we enact change-making that both challenges the structural causes of militarism, corrupt capitalism and climate catastrophe while at the same time concretely creating an alternative system based on a just and sustainable peace. We highlighted Italian activists in Vicenza who have curbed the expansion of a military base and converted part of the site into a peace park. Organizers who have demilitarized the police in their cities and are exploring alternative community-centered policing models. Journalists who are challenging mainstream media bias and promoting a new narrative through peace journalism. Educators in the UK who are demilitarizing education and promoting peace education curricula. Cities and universities across North America that are digesting from fossil fuels and weapons and pushing forward a reinvestment strategy that prioritizes community needs. And many more examples. You can visit worldbeyondwar.org slash No War 2022 for all of the recordings of this inspiring event which brought together people from 22 different countries. I also published this Common Dreams op-ed on this very topic. Many of us are burned out by years of protesting a flawed system. How can we use organizing strategies that combine resistance and regeneration to keep us feeling nourished and start enacting tangible change? This is based on what's called pre-figurative politics which is described by Adrian Kreuz political theorist as the following. This approach aims to bring about this other world by means of planting the seeds of the society of the future in the soil of today's. Social structures enacted in the here and now in the small confines of our organizations, institutions and rituals that mirror the wider social structures we can expect to see in the post-revolutionary future. Now another way of framing this is called resilience-based organizing which is about taking the means to survive and thrive into our own hands. Movement generation is doing a lot of work in this arena and describes resilience-based organizing as the following. Rather than asking a corporation or government official to act, we use our own labor to do whatever we need to do to survive and thrive as a people and a planet. Knowing that our actions conflict with legal and political structures set up to serve the interests of the powerful. Resilience-based organizing puts agency directly into our hands to meet our own collective needs. A tangible example of this might be guerrilla gardening on a former military-based site. Inspiring examples abound of this creative blending of resistance and regeneration combined in a way that both challenges existing structures while forging new systems based on non-violence and ecological consciousness. For example, indigenous land defenders in Canada, the tiny house warriors are constructing off-grid solar powered tiny homes in the path of a pipeline. The project addresses an immediate need for housing for indigenous families while working to block corporate and government extractive policies. Another example, the Japan Campaign to Band Landmines is building composting toilets for landmine survivors many of whom as amputees struggle to use traditional Cambodian-style toilets. The campaign duly raises awareness about the victims of war and the importance of enforcing international disarmament treaties to band landmines while serving a basic concrete need and as a bonus creating compost used by local farmers. Food sovereignty projects organized by war child in the war-torn Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo offered the social and therapeutic benefits of farming for victims of violent conflict while teaching communities vital skills to grow their own food and create sustainable livelihoods. And on a personal note, I too am striving to live out this two-pronged approach as both organizing director of World Beyond War and co-founder of the Unedilla Community Farm in off-grid organic farm and nonprofit permaculture education center in upstate New York. At the farm, we create a space for the teaching and practice of sustainable skills such as organic farming, plant-based cooking, natural building and off-grid solar energy production alongside community organizing. While rooting our work in practical skill building for aspiring young farmers, we also recognize systemic barriers like land access and student debt and engage in national coalition building to lobby for legislative changes to alleviate these burdens. I see my farming and anti-war activism as intimately interconnected to expose the impact of militarism on the environment and advocate for policies like divestment and disarmament, while at the same time, teaching concrete sustainable skills to reduce our carbon footprint and minimize our dependence on multinational corporations and the military industrial complex itself. I hope these examples inspire you to think about how you can blend resistance and regeneration to nourish ourselves and our communities while we rage against the war machine. How can we start enacting changes on the individual and communal level that advance social, economic and environmental renewal? Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Greta. For those examples of communities who are struggling to create transformation, you definitely bring hope to us and give examples of living outside of the war machine. Our next speaker is Ellie Kinney, who's a campaigner with Conflict and Environment Observatory in the UK. Ellie, thank you for joining us and welcome to the People's Forum in New York. Thank you so much. It was lovely to be here, even though I'm virtually... Can I just check that everyone can hear me? I can hear things. That's good. Fab, let me just go ahead and share my screen just one second. Okay, I think for some reason it's saying that I can't do, but that's okay, we can power through. So... Oh, let's try again one second. Can everyone see that? Yeah, perfect. Amazing. So hang on, now I can't see anything else, but that's okay. So thank you so much for inviting me. It's been such a really, really interesting start. So my name's Ellie Kinney. I'm joining you from Manchester in the north of England. I've been involved with campaigning around militarism for maybe the past kind of seven or eight years, mostly focusing on nuclear weapons at first and then more recently looking at how militarism intersects with the final crisis through my work at the conflict environment observatory. So the conflict environment observatory is also based in the north of England. And it's a charity that works to increase the protection of people and ecosystems from the impact of armed conflicts and military activities. More recently, this has involved monitoring in real time the environmental consequences of the war in Ukraine. And you can read more about this on our website if that's something you're interested in, including the first of a series of briefs on this matter, which we published last month. So I joined the conflict environment observatory this year to explore the intersection between militarism and the climate crisis by looking at the carbon footprint of militaries and how we can hold militaries accountable for their contributions to the climate crisis through our project, the military missions gap. So what is the military missions gap? So the gap has three components. The first is what governments are obliged to report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. She's been a mouthful, otherwise known as the UNFCCC, which is also still a bit of a mouthful. So there's currently no obligation to report any military missions to the UNFCCC. Different countries have different reporting obligations overall, but not a single one of those includes missions for military activity. The second is how they report the military missions. So overall, we find reporting to the UNFCCC either incomplete or unclear, or overall just highly inconsistent between different countries. And we find that the countries that do report voluntarily don't do it well. Many don't fully report their military missions and they lump them together with civilian missions. And the third is what they don't report. Emissions data, which is voluntarily reported is often simply energy spaces or fuel use equipment, but military missions are so much more than that. Militaries need to be held accountable for the indirect emissions caused by wars, such as having to rebuild aerobaticus. So why does this matter? So in 2020, 40 industrialized countries, which you'll be able to hopefully if the screen's working, see on in dark gray. So these 40 industrialized countries spent $1,270 billion on their militaries. And only five of these countries reported even some of those emissions that resulted from that spend. And in the same year, 15 countries, which are highlighted in white, they spent $510 billion on their militaries. And we have no data whatsoever on what the climate impact of this was. So at this stage in the climate crisis, no industry can be exempt from cuts, especially not when one of the world's largest militaries, the US, has a carbon footprint bigger than 140 countries. The US Army, the UK Rural Air Force and NATO have all set net zero targets and they've reached the praise of being leaders in climate friendly defense. But if militaries want legitimacy on climate security, they have to be carbonized. Militaries have large and complex supply chains which are currently unaccounted for. But I've taken this diagram from our recent report, a framework on military emissions reporting, which highlights how much is unaccounted for military reporting guidelines. So in comparable industries, supply chain emissions are estimated to be between four to seven times higher than an organization's own emissions to begin with, which is a truly shocking level of underreporting. Without measuring this, neither militaries, policy makers, nor civil society know how large military emissions are. And what we can't see, they won't cut. And so the huge blind spot in our global plans to tackle the climate crisis. So how are we trying to fix this? So we, alongside Lancaster University and Durham University here in the UK, set up militaryemissions.org. This is a website where we lay out clearly military emissions data that gets reported to the UNFCCC where each country submits their own data. And we then rate the quality of that data and importantly what we think is missing. We believe that transparency is the first step to reducing emissions. And through this website, researchers, campaigners and policy makers can start to see this issue clearly. We've also published our own methodology for counting emissions as a benchmark for militaries to ensure that every element of conflict and training is considered. This is hugely important as militaries are starting to produce their own methodologies and we need to ensure that they hold up to our standards. NATO's failure to release their own methodology for public scrutiny goes to show that we can't allow militaries to set their own ambitions here. And that's why we're campaigning to get military missions on the agenda at COP 27. Now the UNFCCC process isn't perfect, but through the UN, we want to be able to make military missions reporting essential as a first step towards reductions. And I know that reductions might seem like quite a tame place to start and I'm sure that a lot of you are in movements with far more radical ask, which is like obviously amazing and usually needed, but we believe that transparent emissions reporting is simply the first step to being able to hold militaries accountable for their impact on our climate and our environment. So this is how we plan to change them. So we want military missions on the table at COP 27 and we want to look to COP 28 to keep up this pressure. We're asking that states commit to improving the standard scope, frequency and transparency of their reporting. And with effective reporting, we can understand the scale of the problem and insist that militaries pledge meaningful, credible and verifiable cuts to their emissions now. So how can you help us? We can visit militaryemissions.org and you can see how much different countries do report. And coming weeks we'll be updating this data with more recent information as well and we'll be analyzing what trends are going on. So you'll be able to keep an eye out for that as well. You can follow us on Twitter to keep it to date with what we're up to. You can also sign up for our mailing list either through the type in the link in here or by visiting our website. We've got a campaign launching shortly about NATO's net zero promise and it would be wonderful to have all of your support behind it. So thank you so much for taking time to listen to me today. Thanks to Cove Bank for the invite. So my email address is on this slide and I welcome anyone to get in touch if you'd like to learn more about military missions or if there's anything you'd like to work together on and collaborate on. We're always really interested to hear what other campaigners are up to in this area. So yeah, thanks again and have a really enjoyable and productive day. All right, thank you so much to Ellie. Our next speaker, I'm really excited to introduce our first in-person speaker, Seth Sheldon. Seth is the United Nations Liaison for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, otherwise known as ICANN and he's a founding member of the New York Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. So I'd like everyone to give a round of applause for Seth. Thank you very much and thank you for having me with you today on this very meaningful and important 77th anniversary of the US bombings of Hiroshima. It's an honor to be with you and I guess my role is to focus on the role of nuclear weapons and the climate crisis. And as with all military operations, the nuclear industrial complex has a massive carbon footprint and presentations like the one we just heard from Ellie Kenney I think help illustrate that in general. But I think I'll take this opportunity to focus on another aspect of the relationship between these weapons and the climate. And that is that nuclear weapons pose the most acute risk to the climate that we know. Acute in that climate change in general is on a longer and all too quick timescale but still a longer timescale versus nuclear weapons which threaten to exacerbate humanity's climate crisis exponentially and instantaneously. That's because an exchange of nuclear weapons is likely to cause something that you've probably heard referred to in general or specifically depending on what generation you are but people talk a lot about, you've heard the phrase nuclear winter, right? And what do people mean by that? Well, just to take one example that has been modeled and is frequently referred to by scientists, a potential conflict between India and Pakistan that examines in exchange of a hundred Hiroshima size nuclear warheads targeted at cities. By the way, that's a deliberate in these models a deliberate underestimation of what a potential conflict would look like because, well, first of all, the combined arsenals of India and Pakistan represent some 270 to 290 nuclear weapons and most of those are much more powerful than the Hiroshima sized weapons. Many don't even realize this but when we think about a potential nuclear conflict right now we're looking at weapons that make the Hiroshima bomb look like colonial muskets by comparison to what's in arsenals today. So this represents like less than one half of the percent of the world's arsenals but under this limited so-called limited scenario the direct effects of a detonation just in the region alone would be absolutely catastrophic some 20 to 40 million people would die in the first week from the direct effects from the explosion, the blast, the fires, the radiation, the fallout. The fires would continue to burn though because nuclear weapons are extremely efficient at igniting fires simultaneously over large areas and they rapidly combine together. It would destroy people, lands, crops and thus we start thinking about these what you might think of as like less direct effects and this can happen, we see that these would have consequences even outside the region of use. The fires that result from the detonation would loft under this modeling of this India-Pakistan conflict loft six and a half million tons of soot and debris into the upper atmosphere meaning that it goes beyond the cloud line where precipitation would bring it down and so it just stays up there and the sun is blocked out, the ozone layer is depleted and scientists believe that it would cause global cooling in the range of 1.2 to 1.5 degrees Celsius for well over 10 years, that's nuclear winter. And it's the notion that we'd have a prolonged drop in global temperatures that disrupts the climate. Now if we start examining these models and extrapolating as some have done to like the larger arsenals, US and Russia where we have weapons on higher trigger alert meaning ready to be launched within minutes, we start looking at ice age conditions that get brought about by a nuclear conflict and this is not with outside the realm of possibility and we're obviously all aware, all too aware that even right now we are seeing the many people discuss as people used to do more frequently and say during the height of the Cold War a potential conflict right now with using nuclear weapons. Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and the White House and has responded with statements like all options remain on the table. These conflicts are really, really possible. We believe or I often say that these climate crisis and nuclear weapons are sort of this mutual cycle of doom, basically meaning that like the climate crisis leads to many social problems, of course, food and resource and security which leads to humanitarian disasters, refugee crises and these risk increase the risk of armed conflict and armed conflict increases at the risk of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons exacerbation. Nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons exacerbates the climate crisis back in that loop so start anywhere on the loop but we are often trying to say that nuclear weapons and climate chaos are very interconnected and to quote Jonathan Schell who has said that causes this connection the fruit of swollen human power and that anyone concerned by one should be concerned by the other. That's the relationship as we see it and as many scientists see it. But we do have a plan and I see that the title is, the subtitle is what you can do about it, right? So let me just say a little bit about what's going well I think and what we can all invest in. And by we I mean well all of us but I'm speaking again for ICANN and we are a global coalition of, I think we are right now 617 non-governmental organizations in 107 countries and on this important day as we commemorate this 77th anniversary of the U.S. dropping the atomic bomb as I come from actually I had the privilege to come here from an event honoring one of our movement's most important representatives, Hibaksha or survivor, Setsuko Thurlow and we're also in the middle of the review conference for the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons at the UN which is happening all month and that's the beleaguered treaty that is unlikely to advance nuclear disarmament and at any foreseeable time but that's one of the main structures for how governments work with this issue. But I have the privilege to tell you about something that gives us hope right now and that is the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. I have some copies for people here in case you don't know about it, want it? Yes, applaud the treaty. It was adopted in 2017 by 122 countries. Today 66 states have fully joined it and have gone through the whole ratification process and there are more on the way and just a couple months ago in June we held our first meeting of states parties in Vienna where we adopted or they adopted civil society, doesn't get the vote on this, but the states adopted a 50 point action plan that sets forth a really workable and promising plan path toward a world free of nuclear weapons. It's very exciting. This treaty, it bans everything to do with nuclear weapons, developing, testing, production, manufacturing, transferring receipt of nuclear weapons stockpiling using threatening to use nuclear weapons, very relevant in this moment, assisting or encouraging anyone to do any of the prohibited activities, including financing. I know CodePink and many of us work on divestment so there's a huge hook for divestment in this treaty, but relevant to this discussion, it does more than just work to prevent future harm. The TPNW also aims to address past harms as well. We call them the positive obligations under article six and seven under the treaty that provide for victim assistance and environmental remediation, just to turn to article six which says section two. Each state party with respect to areas under its jurisdiction or control contaminated as a result of activities relating to the use or testing of nuclear weapons shall take necessary and appropriate measures towards the environmental remediation of areas so contaminated. And so an obligation to remediate affected environments. Now, of course we know, many of us here, that's essentially impossible to fully remediate the environment that's been affected by nuclear weapons, but especially in communities that, many with long forgotten names at this point, that because they've been destroyed by the nuclear weapons industry. Morroa, Eker, Semipolitinsk, and this is a way forward, a way to try to address the harms. Many people seem to talk about nuclear weapons like they've been used just twice, especially on day like today. We think about that catastrophic and awful event, I shouldn't call it an event like it was passive, but this attack by the US. But in fact, nuclear weapons have been used more than 2,000 times. There have been more than 2,000 tests of nuclear weapons, and the harm from this has been unspeakable. ICANN has just launched a new map resource. It's the website is nuclearimpacts.org that you can sort of go around and see where all the tests were and all the communities that were affected. It's like, it's pretty cool actually. I mean, not the event, not what we're depicting, but the map itself. The resource itself is really kind of, I think, really useful, and for me it's been really affecting. But as I'm speaking to you from New York, I also wanna say that some of that harm is in New York. Nuclear weapons began in New York. They called it the Manhattan Project for a reason. And hundreds of tons of uranium that were dedicated to the Manhattan Project were passed through New York, you know. And that legacy resonates today. There's various locations that are being remediated. In gratuitous presentations, she was talking about the Superfund sites that are working on cleanup of affected areas. The ones in New York are nuclear weapons sites. The waste and the uranium that was processed through those sites are here. One is like just a few blocks away actually. There's about 150 tons of uranium materials restored at the Baker and Williams Warehouse on 20th Street, West 20th Street, which is now basically the High Line. It's right next to the High Line. And that building had been used for various purposes until in 1989, the Department of Energy did an assessment and said, oh yeah, there's a lot of radiation here. There's radiation throughout New York actually, but they identified it there and then they removed around approximately, I think it was like 50 tons of uranium or materials that I should say, materials that were affected by the uranium that was stored there and certified it for unrestricted use in 1995. And so we don't talk about it anymore. We think it's fine. I mean, but if you go there with a Geiger counter, it's not nothing. And so back to what we can do about it. Excuse me, it's under the good stuff. I also wanna mention, well, as I was introduced as one of the members of the New York campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, which has the support. We work with several of you in this room. I know we have peace action here in Granny's for Peace and a lot of people here know and have been working with us on this. Well, one thing we've just produced, actually I have a few of these, but these are a little more precious and hard to print. But we just made this like cool map. Again, I say cool, not for what it depicts, but what I think, how it's illustrated. That's like, it looks like a tourist map. But when you open it up, it depicts all of the sites in New York City that have been affected by the nuclear weapons industry and then gives us a lot of descriptions about how you could go visit them. Like you're a tourist. It's really cool. Yes, applaud the map. We're very proud of it. And you could also see it on our website, although I just checked the website and we're having a little issue. But, well, our website is nycan.nyc, like nycan.nyc. The map website is, oh man, what is it again? Nuclear, and I think it's nuclearnyc.com. But through Nycan, the work we've done over the last few years that was like local has been to advance this very comprehensive package of legislation, local legislation. And it was adopted in December of 2021. So we have all worked really hard to get it through in the last session of the city council. But it does a few things. And just real quick, there's a resolution 976 that does a few things and that calls on the city controller to divest the New York City pension funds from companies involved in the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons. Our research indicates that New York City has around $475 million of public pension money invested in companies that manufacture and maintain nuclear weapons. It's a really small percentage, by the way. It's like a $266 billion combined pension fund. So we're talking about like less than half a percent or something like this, or 0.2% really small. But now we have this resolution calling on the controller to do this and the controller is already saying he's going to do it. So this will be a massive win once that happens. It also, this resolution reaffirms New York City as a nuclear weapons free zone, which supports earlier city council resolutions that prohibited nuclear weapons in New York. Few people recall that New York City, in addition to what I was talking about as Manhattan Project Origins, also in later years, was a host to nuclear weapons. We had the city was surrounded by nuclear weapons bases and also ships that entered New York City's harbor with nuclear weapons on them. And that hasn't been the case since the 1980s when we first issued, made New York City a nuclear weapons free zone through New York City Council resolutions. So it reaffirms that, and then we have a law as part of this package of legislation that sets up an advisory committee to educate the public and recommend policy on issues relating to nuclear disarmament. And we're working, actually, this is one way you can help us and look at our website, nikeand.nyc, and see what we're doing with this because right now we're trying to implement this committee and we're trying to convince the mayor to implement it the way we want him to. And it's basically gonna be set up by the mayor and the city council speaker and we need New Yorkers to tell them to work with nikeand and work with us to get this through. I don't know how many of you saw that very unfortunate public service announcement a little bit ago from New York where the New York City Office of Emergency Management issued a video illustrating for New Yorkers, like a public service announcement. It looks ridiculous, I mean, like farcical, but telling us how we can survive a nuclear attack. Yeah, I mean, I can't do it justice in the time I have remaining to talk about it, but I mean, it's basically directing, if you haven't seen it, check it out. Hopefully they'll take it down soon, but it's still up now. It's really hard to do descriptive justice to how outrageous it is. I just, you know, to hone in on what I think is the most outrageous reason that it's so bad. I mean, for two categories of critique, one is that it's so horribly unrealistic and device isn't actually good. I mean, it's not that I think that you shouldn't tell people how to live if they can live, but the way they go about it is so unrealistic and ridiculous. I mean, it looks like it could be like a Saturday Night Live episode thing, the way they present it, that's like none of that is realistic. They're telling people to like get in their homes and stay in their homes and listen to advice from, you know, on the radio and stuff. And of course, we all realize that like, what do you mean stay in your, what homes? Oh, take a shower, they say. You know, it's like, it's so absurd. It's really hard for me to even know where to start sometimes and listen to the radio as if there wouldn't be an electromagnetic pulse that didn't destroy all communications infrastructure. Anyway, so one category of why it's bad is because of the bad advice, but the second category is that it, you know, much like the duck and cover drills of decades ago, I think that it perpetuates this public sensibility about why nuclear weapons are here to stay and that we should all just treat it as if it's normal. And it's presented like it's like telling us that the two, three trains are out of service and you should, you know, go check out the four or five train or something. It just makes it so mundane and ordinary in a way that perhaps not intentionally, but the effect of it is to desensitize us to the outrage of nuclear weapons. So that's the second way. But the last thing I'll say, I mean, the, well, the committee that I was talking about is designed to help avoid embarrassments like that. And that's why we really hope that the city will implement that committee as soon as possible and we could work on never doing things like that. The last thing that this legislation does, by the way, is join New York City to the ICANN Cities Appeal, which through which New York City has called on the federal government to join the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. And that's an initiative that we have at ICANN, we have hundreds and hundreds of cities that have joined so far, but, you know, many capital cities from Paris to, no, Sydney's not the capital, but from Paris to Washington, DC has joined. But, you know, we have hundreds in the US. New York is the one I'm most proud of, of course. So we're very excited about that. But yeah, that's what we do. And that's the connection we see to the environment. I get a little tangential there, but thank you for all you're doing. Thank you, Co-Ping, for your inspiring work. And I wish you a meaningful and reflective Hiroshima day. Hello. Our next speaker is joining us online. Abby Martin is an American journalist, TV presenter, documentary director, and activist. She founded Citizen Journal's website, Media Roots, and in 2015, she launched the independent documentary and interview series, The Empire Files. We look to Abby to get deep inside the belly of the beast and expose their violence, but now she's here to talk to us about her new project, Earth's Greatest Enemy. Welcome, Abby. Thank you so much, Jody. Thank you so much, all of you, for being a part of this incredibly important forum. By nature of just, of course, of what this forum is, everyone here is already aware of the fact that the United States military is one of the biggest dangers to the environment that we face. By the fact that you are here right now, you understand the concept that war and the military is not and cannot be green. You know the statistic that the United States is the world's largest industrial polluter, the largest consumer of fossil fuels, itself releasing more CO2 than most countries. And you're probably aware that this extends far beyond that. It's the destruction of ecosystems, human health through construction and maintenance of military bases all over the US and around the world. So I've always been generally aware of these things as well, but it wasn't until I spent the last year on the ground going to investigate all of them a little deeper for our documentary, Earth's Greatest Enemy. And the deeper picture behind this reveals a very disturbing picture. And I wanted to share just a couple of the facts that I've learned with you today telling some of these stories. On the issue of habitat destruction and leaving areas uninhabitable to human beings, it seems so far off to many people living here. But, you know, 900 of the 1300 superfund sites across the US are due to the US military and hundreds more are not counted, that should be. The military is able to get away with this because they do their worst to places that are just out of sight, out of mind. Indigenous lands in the US as well as colonies and neo-colonies of the empire around the world. When we traveled to Alaska mainly because it's the Canary in the coal mine for climate change, I spoke with the Yupik people and Arctic indigenous culture who had resided for centuries on St. Lawrence Island off the coast of Alaska. And I wanted to bring up the story specifically because US military pollution isn't just damaging or an inconvenience, it's actually continuing the genocidal process of settler colonialism. Because the way of life in St. Lawrence Island is completely destroyed. These ancient practices of hunting, fishing, living with the land made it so you could expect to live to be up to 100 years old for so long. And that is now completely gone. Now, they told me that people are expected to die half that, 50 to 60 years old. So 40 years have been shaved off their lifetime because of a direct result of toxins dumping, using St. Lawrence Island as a dumping ground by the US military. Those who used to just have this old way of life now die young of rare cancers. And many have had to relocate to towns just across rural Alaska where they can only keep their songs and stories alive for how life was for generations up until a couple of decades ago. Now in Hawaii, of course, the opposite climate, it's another model of how the indigenous culture there worked with the land. It was a reciprocal relationship with indigenous people and the environment. And these fisheries that were ancient were able to sustain huge swaths of those islands, even Pearl Harbor, I mean, virtue of the name itself. It was just overrun by mussels and oysters and clams that you can just go and just have this bountiful, plentiful place that could feed everyone. Military comes in, dredges all of this up, basically conquered the place. And it's still legally is essentially conquering and occupying Hawaii to this day. The US military now uses Pearl Harbor, Oahu, the big island and other locations there as a dumping ground, as a gas station and a training range to basically practice destroying other nations. I met with so many native Hawaiians describing the catastrophic environmental impact that this has and the great pain that it continues to cause for the people. Just there covering RIMPAC a couple of weeks ago, these amphibious land assaults that they go and dredge up all of this terrain where they practice invading residential neighborhoods on the islands during COVID when RIMPAC was held out in the middle of the Pacific and didn't do the amphibious land assaults, giant ancient sea turtles came back for the first time in 50 years to nest. And I really think that says it all about what happens in the absence, even just a short brief moment of time that you can see nature reclaiming its territory. We're not talking about past incidents of pollution that haven't just been remediated in a timely manner. This is ongoing. In a few weeks, we're traveling to Guam which is another US colony because there's actually an active lawsuit being held against the Air Force. What are they doing? You might ask. Well, they're disposing of you munitions by just blowing them up on the beach continuously in violation of the law for basically no reason at all. They have plenty of empty storage facilities. They see how the habitats in human health can be destroyed by this, but those people are expendable to the US military. And this is just one of the many aspects of how US military pollution and occupation there has destroyed the way of life for the indigenous culture and is continuing to wreck the environment. If most of all the superfund sites at the US are current or former military installations, just imagine the impact of the pollution in the countries where it hosts a hundred, I'm sorry, a thousand, I wish it was a hundred, a thousand US military bases and military equipment. And this is aside from the most obvious decimation of the environment, which is the direct impact of warfare. There's so much more to say about this, but of course, I wanted to pivot to the biggest environmental crisis facing humanity today, which is carbon emissions. The US military, of course, is a massive contributor to this. And as explained by Barry Sanders, Professor Barry Sanders in his book, Green Zone, emissions from the US military alone could push the climate toward the tipping point past the tipping point. That's how big they are. It's because the US military is so huge and expansive, it's always growing, no matter what. And the apparatus of weapons production, supply lines, funding, arming, regimes, totalitarian regimes around the world, it's unquantifiable. And one of the reasons it's hard to quantify is because the US government hides the data and makes itself exempt from reporting, even in these international climate agreements that we're told are gonna save the planet. But without getting into all of this now, here's the most important thing I've learned since. Since starting this film, I've had the opportunity to talk to all the top environmental democratic governors that are seen to be on the forefront of the climate change issue, questioning the leading environmentalist members of Congress, including Speaker Pelosi herself. And just a couple of weeks ago, I spoke to the top commanders of the US military at RIMPAC, including the Secretary of the Navy. And I asked them all about this elephant in the room, about the massive impact of growing military emissions. And their answers were unanimous, that even if it's true, we cannot scale back the military because the military is the solution to climate change. They've all accepted climate catastrophe as an inevitability and they want the military to manage the instability they've already seated that it will cause. This is not a vision to save the future, this is a vision to plummet it even more into inevitable catastrophe. We have on one hand a military machine that's accelerating the crisis and on the other the system of imperialism that's behind it, preventing the necessary action that's needed to avert a total calamity. Because we know the power and influence of this machine goes far beyond its military machines, its arbitration courts that hold these countries hostage, prevent them from seeking justice, it's debilitating economic sanctions that force the hand prevent the growth of these independent nations from forming and charting their own path. There's so much more to say on this topic, but it's clear that together we must fight to make the case that US militarism and the system of imperialism must be the primary target of our efforts to turn things around. And my goal with this film is to make this an interjection in the environmentalist movement, a powerful tool to aid that effort. If you wanna learn more about it, please go to earthsgratestenemy.com and please become a sustainer of important organizations like CodePink. Thank you so much. So grateful to Abby for joining us. We're gonna switch things up a little bit and also just wanted to note that we're running a bit behind schedule. So I apologize to all of our speakers who are waiting on deck and reminder to everyone to keep things brief and concise as much as possible. But yeah, we're gonna switch things up now by hearing from representatives of local and national organizations who are working to confront the intersection of militarism and climate change. These organizations are CodePink, Brooklyn for Peace, Peace Action, New York State, Extinction Rebellion Peace and CFR Watch. First, we're gonna hear from Tim and Jodi of CodePink. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Tim Biondo. I work on the Cut the Pentagon campaign for CodePink in Washington, DC. CodePink, for those of you who don't know by now, is a feminist organization that has been fighting to end US-backed wars, occupations, and militarization for nearly 20 years now. As we work to demilitarize and divest from war from Oahu to Ukraine, we know that many of the most significant harms that war does is on our land, our air, our water, and our climate. That's why a key part of our work has always been our war is not green campaign, which many people like here, like Nancy Mencius and Sophie Shepherd, have been key leaders on, is so important. This November, as in years past, Nancy will travel to COP 27, the UN Climate Conference in Cairo, Egypt, to demand that world leaders confront military emissions and military pollution and military impacts on climate change as they seek to confront climate globally. You can get involved in the war is not green campaign and sign our petition to demand President Biden declares a climate emergency now and begins to treat military operations as such at codepink.org slash WING. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. So I'm Judy Evans, I'm one of the co-founders of codepink. And for almost a decade, there has been a pivot to Asia. The US, those in power with the hands on the lever of power in Washington have pivoted and many costs have already been felt with this war in China. We got to witness it this last week with Pelosi's irresponsible visit there. And but also Asians in America have felt the increase in Asian hate from the propaganda of hate that the Pentagon is putting out around China. But the other thing is that the United States military has been building military and missile bases and Abby referred to Guam in the Asia Pacific violating pristine ecosystems and the human rights of the indigenous peoples in these islands. So one of the campaigns we're working on at codepink right now is with the indigenous leaders, one of which you'll hear from later, Julian Erguan, to say to Congress, you have to understand what is happening and you have to stop it. So this war is happening. People are already feeling the consequences of it. And so that's one of our war is not green campaigns. And the other is that to follow up on Pelosi's frightening irresponsible act, where what we need right now is cooperation with China. China is not our enemy. This is a crisis, what's happening to the planet. And we need cooperation and she literally rip the threads of connection that we need so desperately. We know we need diplomacy with Ukraine and you can't stop a war once it starts. And that's a devastation to the planet. So you can both act to tell your member of Congress to stand for peace, not war. And with Guam at codepink.org. Thank you. Make sure everything. Hi, my name is Mikayla Zerkes. I'm the executive director of Brooklyn for Peace. Thank you everyone for being here. It's great to be in community with you all. As a peace organization, we are committed to eliminating war and the social injustices that are its causes. And we do that through active education and advocacy to promote U.S. policies based on peace, justice and human rights. And we see climate action as an integral part of our mission and our movement for peace. And believe that the climate crisis, as many speakers have said, can only be dealt with if we confront the U.S. military's role in driving global warming. And we wanna work with everyone here to make that happen. One of our main actions has been a petition urging our senators and congressional representatives to do four key things. First is urging President Biden to declare a climate emergency, redirecting Pentagon funds and troops to mitigate global warming and make America more resilient, make the U.S. more resilient. Join the defense spending reduction caucus, is point two. Third is reduce the carbon polluting activities of the military by decreasing its scope and shrinking the Pentagon budget. Fourth is to support a Green New Deal agenda as well as the Thrive Act to exponentially increase spending for research and the implementation of energy efficiency, renewable energy, clean transportation and other technologies and ensure a just and equitable transition off fossil fuels and the creation of millions of green, family sustaining and unionized jobs. You know, that was kind of a mouthful but the link to the petition is on a little sign on the table and it should be in the chat for folks on Zoom. So we encourage folks to sign that. And if you're interested in getting more involved with Brooklyn for Peace, we have several activities coming up. So on Saturdays from 10.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, we've been doing vigils and outreach for ending the war in Ukraine. And we very much welcome folks to join us. That'll be continuing through August. We're also hoping to have a booth at the Atlantic Antique Street Fair in on October 2nd and would love folks to join us there as well. Maybe get some more signatures on that climate action petition. And we're also coordinating a Zoom event focused on the effect of the war in Ukraine on climate change or the climate crisis and food security. So once we have pieces for that in place, we love organizations to co-sponsor and folks to help promote. So if you're interested in getting involved with any of those activities or if you have any additional ideas, please feel free to get in touch for folks in person. You can chat with me. And for folks on Zoom, the easiest way to sign up would be to go to brooklynpeace.org slash volunteer. So thanks again, everyone, for being here and looking forward to working on this together. My name is Margaret Engel and I'm standing here representing Peace Action New York State, which is an affiliate of the largest grassroots peace network in the US. So I wanted to thank Sophie and the folks that could ping for putting this together. And I'm really glad that earlier, Seth brought up the MPT conference because that's what Peace Action has been involved with for the past couple of weeks. And negotiations have really been underway at the headquarters and they're gonna continue through the month of August and it's really been a great opportunity for civil society to come together and call on our governing bodies to put an end to the continuing nuclear arms race. But beyond that, it's also been an opportunity to connect with fellow young activists and advocates across the world working on the same issues in their communities. Something that I personally have noticed is that in all the webinars and discussions and rallies and demonstrations, there's really been something missing from a lot of the dialogue and that's how militarism impacts climate change. It's just not talked about enough at the MPT conference and it really should be. Meanwhile, I've been speaking with colleagues. One was from the IPPNW and she was saying to me that a lot of the older generation in the peace movement has been complaining that they're losing the young people to the climate movement, which is just so ridiculous because they're failing to see the intersection between the two. And instead of trying to exile these young people from the peace movement or from the climate movement or from another movement, we should be looking to the climate movement to see what organizing tools are bringing those young people in instead and finding a way to work together. So, that's something we're trying to do at Peace Action. And yeah, I'd say one of our strongest assets at Peace Action, which is something that I personally take care of and help oversee is the Student Organizer Program. We have 14 active chapters in New York across the state and at those chapters, we encourage students to post webinars, get out in the community, connect with their community chapters as well. And really, we let them focus on the topics that they're interested in, whether that's like something to do with their major, something with their career path and it really helps foster that lifelong dedication to peace and social justice. So, that's one of our main things. It's really great. For example, in terms of climate change, last year we had a student from Niagara University host a webinar on the Love Canal Disaster, which was just a short drive from campus. And I'm actually wearing the Niagara University shirt right now, so. Also, the students from Clarkson University upstate were able to host a discussion on the history of the aquasasini and the Mohawk culture and influence in the region. And a lot of that discussion had to do with climate change and climate impact. So, those are just some of the examples of the things that they do and it's really great and I'm just really proud of them. But beyond the Student Organizer Program, this September a vote is expected to happen on a bill to end US involvement in the ongoing war in Yemen. And we need people standing with us in the fight against the US war machine that continues to stoke violence and terror across the globe without paying any heed to its environmental impact. So, thank you. We urge you to contact your senators and ask them to support SJ Resolution 56 and consider attending the Yemen School Bus bombing vigil that's gonna be on August 8th. It's a virtual commemoration with Action Corps, Hands Off Yemen, the DSA and Code Pink. And lastly, I, again, as other speakers have been doing, wanna bring attention to the fact that it is the 77th anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima. And events like that should really encourage us to remember the real humanitarian impact of all of these horrible effects of militarism. We can stand here and talk about policy and organizing tools, but we really need to remember that there is a cost and it's human lives. And so, we should listen to the stories of the Habakasha and help them in their fight against further destruction. So, thank you very much. Hi, my name is Noboko Hori and I am representing Extinction Rebellion's Peace Affinity Group. Thank you. For those of you who aren't familiar, Extinction Rebellion is a global decentralized movement that uses nonviolent direct action to demand action on climate. Our Peace Affinity Group is in rebellion, I'm just gonna read our mandate. It's in rebellion against US Empire and US military and its destruction of climate. Why? I think you all know that you know why, but US global hegemony poisons people and planet, prioritizes military spending over a just transition, bolsters global systems of neoliberal extraction and creates sacrifice zones and sacrifice populations. And I feel like I have to mention US hegemony is a system of white supremacy too. We have to remember that we are trying to build we're trying to build coalitions and connections across movements. Of course, the climate anti-war and also US hegemony is a racial justice issue. Thank you. Our weekly meetings are Thursday at 5 p.m. I have, we have flyers that are over at the table with a QR code if you'd like to get involved. Thank you. I'm gonna move this down because I'm not tall enough. Can you all hear me if I just talk? Okay, cool. I have to use the mic. Oh, for the people on Zoom, I forgot, okay. Hi, my name is Bella and I am a member of CFR Watch and CFR stands for the Council on Foreign Relations. Boo, I know, right. The Council on Foreign Relations has been described by a former member as America's single most important non-governmental organization whose primary role is to define the accepted, legitimate and orthodox parameters of discussion on foreign policy. The Council on Foreign Relations publishes foreign affairs, if any of you have heard of foreign affairs, and they define and dictate a lot of what people in America are allowed to do when it comes to foreign policy. Their members include government officials, corporate leaders, America's wealthiest and other professionals as well. And so our organization is seeking to bring attention to the power of the CFR. We're looking to do a campaign of political education on what exactly the CFR is and then also to disrupt their power when it comes to American foreign policy and return it back to the people because these decisions impact people. They don't only impact those at the top. And so if you want more information, we have this piece of paper over there and it has this nice little QR code where you can sign up for updates about our campaign. And you can also follow us on Instagram and Twitter at CFR underscore watch. And that's what I have for you guys. Thank you so much. Sorry. So next I'm gonna bring somebody from across the globe, Julian Arguan. I spoke about earlier from Guam. He's an indigenous, tomorrow human rights lawyer and author. He's also an amazing storyteller. He's the founder of Blue Ocean Law, a progressive law firm that works at the intersection of indigenous rights and environmental justice. His last book, and please get it if you haven't read it, The Properties of Perpetual Light, Open Readers' Minds to Guam. He's also been a finalist to the Pulitzer Prize this year. Welcome, Julian. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jodi. Thank you all for having me. It's an honor to be here with you. I can't think of a more important webinar to be a part of, like on the whole planet right now, because Guam, as some of you know, we are bracing ourselves as I speak for a cataclysmic round of militarization. Guam is, it is no exaggeration to say that my 30 mile long island is fast becoming one of the most militarized places on the planet. I'll just give you a little bit of backstory so that you understand how we got here. In 2005, the United States made a bilateral agreement with the government of Japan to move some 9,000 US Marines and more than 10,000 dependents to the island of Guam from Okinawa, which we know as well has showered an unfair and wildly massive US military presence on this little land mass as well, because Japan, you know, the empire really likes to go to war, but, you know, export the suffering. So Okinawa and Guam are both sort of, really sort of quintessential case studies of what happens when decisions are made by people we cannot vote for and we don't elect. Guam remains a colony under American rule. Under US domestic law, we are considered an unincorporated territory where the constitution applies or doesn't apply based on the whims of Congress, but under international law, and I'm an international human rights lawyer, and we've been working on our decolonization movement for a number of years, but under international law, Guam is a non-self-governing territory. This means that the UN recognizes it formally as a place that is colonized and that is entitled to the remedy of decolonization. So we remain on this list, a list of 17 non-self-governing territories or colonies awaiting some formal exercise of self-determination, of decolonization. Of course, precious little has happened on that list. We just sit there and sort of, we're sitting there in the scorching sun, it seems. And meanwhile, we are bracing ourselves for this sort of the largest military buildup in recent history. So what we have on Guam really is, I don't know a better way to explain it, but we have nearly 500 years of uninterrupted colonization that is now being exacerbated by a very aggressive wave of US military expansion. So it is sort of all of that together, cumulatively, is what we are fighting. So I, as Jodi said, I founded Blue Chihuahua. We are a very progressive sort of firm of activist lawyers who have been litigating this shit app, who have been litigating everything since the beginning. We have been suing the US military just more or less on every front for the last decade. We've won some cases, we've lost some cases. We recently just won a case, trying to protect, to designate critical habitat for 23 endangered endemic species, some of which are directly imperiled right now, as I speak, due to a massive multipurpose machine gun range. That's 59 acres. The US military claims that it needs this firing range and the place that it chose to build this firing range on is an unspeakably beautiful place with a pristine limestone forest that took thousands of years to grow. And that is home to several such species, including the Mariana's fruit bat, the Mariana's eight-spot butterfly. The two plants, for example, the two plants that the Mariana eight-spot butterfly lays her eggs on are both located in this area. And sort of adding to that is the Hodgson Logwitry, the Cereanthus Nelsoni tree. It's the last, the sole remaining mothering adult Hodgson Logwitry in the world. And this firing range is 100 feet away. So this is just like, to be in Guam right now is to be sort of assaulted, like every sense is, like, and I mean, I mean that in a really personal bodily way as well. I live here in, yeah, I live in a southern village on Guam, I live along the coast. This is a really important area traditionally for my people. And when I look out at the landscape now for the past two years, I see warships, military transport ships. I mean, this is, they are interrupting the landscape. At the same time, homeland security, various departments, basically the most important of which is DOD, Department of Defense, they are doing training exercises, some of which are announced, some of which there is no announcement. And we are in our homes trying to have dinner and we hear and the helicopters are too loud and like they are flying far too low and far too close to our homes. And we are eating dinner and we don't even know that it's coming. It is like, it is like, it is like a war zone. Even if it's technically we're not in war yet, we absolutely are. When you're in a community that is a frontline community where empire exports the suffering, you know that it's already afoot. The wargames are already afoot. Just recently we had the Valley and Shield which involved like over 20,000 military personnel from several countries. And while this is happening, the US military is also in Hawaii, native Hawaiian waters in Hawaii doing RIMPAC. These are just like actual wargames where they're blowing up ships in the water. All of this is happening. And this is happening now in such a way that I almost feel I'm losing my ability to respond. Like part of it is, you know, when you're going through this, it's like you actually like you're bearing witness to your own heart and it is hardening and you feel it and you know it. Like when the helicopters are here and they're here constantly, like honestly it changes the rhythm of my own heartbeat. Like I have more anxiety. Like there's so many sort of daily manifestations of colonial imperial violence and you can feel them all. The wide range, you know, you can feel them in Guam right now. So this is not a hypothetical thing. When Pelosi came through and Pelosi also stopped by Guam on the way to Asia, to Taiwan. I couldn't even breathe because I know what's coming. You know, it's like seeing this massive like train wreck, you know, and you're like not moving, you're not getting out of the way and you're watching it happen. And that's what it sort of feels like. That's what I wanted to use my little six minutes to try to explain is what it feels like when you are living in a militarized colony, because you see it coming and you can't actually get out of the way because all of the decisions are being made by people you do not vote for. That is the definition of colonial violence and that is what we experience in Guam every single day. I mean, when I say we are effectively lurching from one crisis, humanitarian and environmental in nature to another, I wanna be even more specific. Last week, we found out just more information about PFAS. I don't know if you all know about PFAS, these are the forever chemicals that are used to make firefighting foam and oil repellents, et cetera. They're used often in military bases. Recently, a national study came out really clarifying the link between PFAS exposure and a wide range of negative health outcomes. Everything from a decreased fetus birth weight to a range of cancers, most prominently kidney cancer. Like all of this is the information we found that last week, specifically is that every single well tested on the US military bases in Guam are above EPA's new health advisory limit. You know, so like every single well in the military base. And Guam is 30 miles long. We have a military base in the North, Anderson Air Force, a military base in the South, the US Naval base and everything, all these other installations in between. And now, we as of just last year because of this military buildup, we now have a US Marine Corps base. So it's like, you know, all colors of the DOD rainbow, they're all here. And so we are trying our best as activists, as lawyers, as activists lawyers. We have been fighting this so hard for like basically the entirety of my legal career. And so what we were asking from like a group like this and working with Jody and Code Pink and all of these campaigns, China is not our enemy, the cost of war project. We are part of this project, even if we barely sort of enter, we're like a blip on the national conversation, but we're absolutely part of this process because we sort of, we are the place where, you know, where these chickens are coming home to roost. It is here and it is happening and it is now and it is real and it's affecting people's daily life. And we would like some support, you know, and while we would like, you know, Congress, the specific campaign that we're working on now is trying to get members of Congress to investigate the allegations set forth by not one, but three UN special rapporteurs. So the UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples on human rights in the environment and on toxics, all three signed a historic joint allegation letter against the US military, actually detailing sort of the wide range of alleged harms from human rights violations, such as the violation of the right to self-determination, indigenous rights violations, such as the violation of the right to free prior and informed consent. And now, of course, the sort of new found, like right to a clean, safe and healthy environment, all of these rights are directly imperiled by the US government because of its appetite for war. It is time to end these endless wars and Guam is a perfect place to start. Thank you, Julian, and for telling about the trauma and the continued colonization that is happening in Guam. We stand in solidarity with you and your resistance. Our next speaker, Ramon Mahia, is someone I had the pleasure to meet last year at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. He is an activist, a person who brings his whole heart to his work. Ramon is with the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. Thank you, Ramon, for joining us. We are delighted to hear from you and what you have to say about the effects of militarization on the planet. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you, everyone, and thank you for the invitation. I'm honored to be able to share space with an amazing lineup of speakers and with all of you, the change makers and attendants organizing your communities to confront this many-legged monster of militarism. It's vitally important for all of us to understand the role of militarism and what it has at the intersection of the extractive economy and climate change if we are to build the alternative. As I was introduced, my name is Ramon Mahia, and I'm the anti-militarism national organizer at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, where we hope to continue to contribute an analysis of the relationship between militarism and the extractive economy and to deepen the consciousness and messaging of our membership. We're an alliance made up of over 60 member organizations across Turtle Island and, as far as Guam, who are committed to critically struggling against U.S. militarism in its various forms. As a Marine, I participated in the U.S. invasion of Iraq and I witnessed the havoc U.S. bullets and bombs waged on people and the land. Effects felt to this day as corporations profited from death, investors capitalized on the conflict. I saw the destruction the U.S. war had on Iraqi infrastructure on schools, agriculture, power, water, sewage treatment and health facilities were decimated. Today, Iraq is the world's fifth most vulnerable country in terms of availability of water and food and exposure to extreme temperatures. Two U.S. wars in Iraq have left behind hundreds of tons of depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs, shells, casings and other toxic metal waste which continue to degrade the environment contributing to water and soil pollution of arable lands and the contamination of produce. The people of Iraq have, quote, the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied, end quote. Two U.S. wars on Iraq did not help. They only further exacerbated the grueling conditions Iraqis are forced to face today. Each day I wake up and I recommit myself to our communities, to the women, children and families devastated by U.S. war and imperialism. An institution that willingly engages in human and ecological destruction to achieve this mission will never be ready to confront climate change. Addressing climate change requires ending the military industrial complex. Last year at COP26, also known as the Conference of the Parties in Glasgow, Scotland, we saw an opportunity to raise the issue of the exclusion of military missions and make a narrative intervention. GGJ together with Indigenous Environmental Network, Climate Justice Alliance, Just Transition Alliance, Jobs with Justice, comprising the, it takes roots delegation of over 60 frontline leaders sought to make that clear in a collective voice that U.S. militarism is the number one polluter, killer, colonizer. Because it's not only about emissions that we have to confront, but the violence perpetrated day in and day out by this government and this military. The work movement did in the lead up to COP in the streets of Glasgow, during COP, within the COP space, during the people's summits and the conversations that movements had on TV and radio interviews, op-eds and not to forget, Empire Files, Abby Martin who questioned Nancy Pelosi and U.S. elected officials, the U.S. Climate Envoy. All of this together made it possible for this past COP to be seen as the first climate talks where militarization was finally made part of the conversation. This convergence of the demilitarization, abolition and environmental justice movements has proven to show extremely powerful and critical in this moment. Our members left Scotland returned to their communities invigorated to continue to make clear that no serious response to climate crisis is compatible with a growing military and excluding pointed critique of U.S. military from climate conversations as a threat to our continued collective existence. So what else can we do? If we are to dismantle these systems of violence, this monster of militarism, then we must situate ourselves in the work with an internationalist perspective so that we can examine its vulnerabilities and campaign against this collectively. These systems of violence are international and thus their solidarity and campaigns must be international as well. To fight this beast from within its belly is no easy task. It's hard, but it's one that must be waged. Our communities, our comrades in the global South, those most impacted by climate change and the least responsible who have contributed to it are depending on us. In addition to, you know, we must view the struggle as one. This war being waged on us is not an either or is not being waged at home and is not being waged abroad. To view this as such is a false binary that delays our ability to unite and make advancements. The military industrial complex is hardwired for domination and control. If it's not exploiting conflict and war to protect current and future weapons investments and fossil fuel extraction is utilizing the climate crisis to justify greenwashing of police and military budgets, which is disastrous to our communities and the issues that we face today. You know, what's happening now at Red Hill is just the latest in a grotesque history of environmental and ecological disasters wrought by the US military, which is threatening their drinking water. And Guam, as we heard it, endangers the island's main source of drinking water there. And in Albuquerque, a decades old jet fuel spill of over 24 million gallons larger than the Exxon Valdez migrates through the aquifer, which provides drinking water to the largest urban center in the state. We need to tell our officials that our lands, our communities, our communities are not sacrificed zones. As the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, the military is an important client of oil and gas. So it's no coincidence that these industries back warmongering politicians and funding tanks to push greater military interventions. You know, we must break this link between politicians tasked with passing legislation that impacts every single one of us and the corporations that benefit from warmongering. That's the fossil fuel industry. That's weapons manufacturers. As long as Congress continues to go unopposed, they'll continue to pave the way for an ever-increasing war budget to exceed over $800 billion next year. You know, we believe at GDJ in just transition, a vision-led, unifying, and in place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative one. You know, to advance this, we've helped to develop the 15 plank of the people's orientation of the regenerative economy, which offers community groups and policy advocates and policymakers a path to solutions that work for frontline communities and workers. You know, our solutions must protect, prepare, invest, and transform relationships and structures that are rooted in respect, equality, and justice. You know, I really don't know how much time I have left. I know that we're running up on time. But you know, GDJ's slogan is a no war, no warming. Build the feminist economy for the people on the planet. Because we even know that ending fossil-fueled military escalation across borders all over the world is vital that we are to continue to inhabit this planet. Few activities on Earth are as ecologically destructive as war and militarism. And we must continue to say over and over again that any plans to confront climate change must address militarization. So join us in principle solidarity with people impacted by US military expansion and the policies that contribute to ecosystem destruction, war profiteering, and cellular colonial violence, demand that elected officials support the call for no war and the warming, and commit to divesting from war-fueling policies, accelerating climate destruction, and invest in a life-affirming, regenerative way of living. Thank you, everybody, for the time. Thanks so much, Ramon, for joining us. We are coming up on 5 o'clock. So if you have to go, completely understand. But I hope you can stick with us just a bit longer. We have two speakers left, Jim Rine, and then Vijay Prashad, who's joining us in person. I'm very excited to say. And then we're going to close the song from the New York Metro Raging Granny, which I'm very excited about. So now I'm super happy to introduce Jim Rine, who's one of the leaders of the Climate Crisis and Militarism Project at Veterans for Peace. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for allowing me to join this very distinguished panel. And if I could share the screen, I would like to be able to show some illustrations. So I'm all right. OK. Can you see the presentation? I can get a share. Let me try that again. All right, share. And we'll start again from the beginning. So what I'm going to be presenting, and hopefully you can see this now, is a presentation that has been put together by a committee within Veterans for Peace. All of us have different backgrounds. My background is in geology, so I'm really worried about climate change. Veterans for Peace is an organization that started in the mid-80s, mostly from Vietnam era vets or Vietnam vets, actually, that were really ticked off about what the United States was doing in South and Central America. Now I'm going to be talking a little bit about what's going on now. It was kind of a coincidence, two bad things at once, at the time when Russian-vated Ukraine was about when the IPCC released their Code Red for Humanity Report and on how bad the situation is with climate change. And the question is, can we have a new arms race, spawned by this conflict in Ukraine, and involving NATO, and still expect to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius in the future? Of course, on this Hiroshima Day, anniversary of Hiroshima Day, we need to look at the other potential conflict or event or result of this conflict between the United States, albeit by a proxy in Ukraine and Russia, of the two largest nuclear powers. I'm not an expert on this, but I found it very interesting. A paper by Akkuk and others, 2019, looked at the results of modeling results of the conflict between Russia and the United States, where they went full bore on their nuclear retaliation on each other. So what the chart that's showing here is just the effects starting in hypothetical at a May 11 of the ongoing for about 15 days, looking at all the carbon, the carbon soot that is emitted into the atmosphere based on the multiple atomic explosions and fires of the cities and so forth. Essentially, 150 billion kilograms would be emitted into the atmosphere. The darker the colors, the higher intensity. And essentially, you can see these plumes in the stratosphere and the atmosphere are going into the northern hemisphere. What does this cause? What this causes, and there's two diagrams here from the same paper, the upper one shows average growing seasons. So the red is, let's say, over 300 days per year as a growing season. The dark blues would be less than 50. Purple would be less than 25. The diagram on the bottom is the result of this plume of black soot in the atmosphere. And let's just make a long story short. The area that we're in, like Northeast, where I'm in in Detroit, Michigan, growing days would go down to, let's say, 25 days per year for a period of at least one or two years. So if the bombs didn't kill you, if the radiation didn't kill you, then you'd starve and freeze to death. One thing about here is sort of an ironical. The global south looks like it might be saved at least by this nuclear winter. Again, going back to that IPCC report, this is code read for humanities. The diagram here is from that report. The blue is industrial emissions. It's going from 1990 to 2019. It keeps going up. It stopped at 2019. That's when the report period ended. It is still going up, especially went down a little bit for COVID, but now it's going back up again. Again, industrial CO2 is blue. Agricultural forest is in yellow. Methane is in red and the black is nitrous oxide and fluorocarbons. And in this report, they say by 2025, we have to peak our emissions. And we're not anywhere close to doing that. What is a major source? A lot of the other speakers have mentioned US military, largest institutional consumer. And one example of that is a B-52. A B-52 flying for one hour is the equivalent of seven cars running for a year. And then if you add the industrial complex, so largest institutional consumer of oil and gas, but the war industry essentially triples these emissions of our military. OK, one B-52, but we have the largest air fleet in the world. Three times that of Russia, four times that of China. So we are the big, big dog on the block and the big emitter. Why are these emissions so high? Why do we keep throwing money at the military? The chart on the left shows essentially the differences between, and this is from 2021, US expenditures almost three times more than China, 11 times more than Russia. No wonder Vladimir Putin is paranoid. And of course, since 9-11, we have spent $16 trillion on war. And essentially, we could have done completely made renewable energy 100% in the United States three times over with the amount of money that we've wasted. Now, a lot of that money, half of it, has gone to contractors, not to the troops. The defense industry, yes. The average person makes about $90,000 in the defense industry. Big five CEOs make $22 million on the average. One important thing, why does this money keep going to them? They spent over $1 billion in lobbying since 9-11. So since the war on terror began. Another chart from that IPCC report, essentially going from 2010 historical to now and going in projections out to 2050. The blue line is where we need to be to stay below 1.5. The red line is where the active policies are. We're nowhere close. And meanwhile, Biden has submitted a budget to increase the Pentagon spending by 4%. And as other speakers have said, Congress has added more $30 to $40 billion on top of that. And then projected out to 2024, again, over $800 billion. This is why our emissions are going up, destroying money at the military. Of course, if the Republicans were to take over, it would be much larger increase. And again, humanity can't afford a prolonged war. Statements by John Kerry, very obvious to anyone. What can we do? Go to our website. There's a lot of information there on our resources page. Lots of the reports of this talk is based on. You can support House Resolution 767, which calls on the US military to report their emissions and to come up with a plan and actually follow the plan. And we're going to need support because even though laws have said they need to report their emissions and come up with a plan, it's not really enforceable. We need to order major cuts in the Pentagon to really get these emissions lower. At the site, we'll source you to a letter and you can pull out the letter and send it off. And finally, in the next few weeks, I'm going to be reaching out to other organizations to see if anybody, any folks are doing things during the COP 27 in New York. And if so, please respond to my emails or contact me to say what you're going to be doing because we'd like to be involved in things going on. And I'll end there. Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you, Jim. So next, a special treat to finish us off before we sing together. Vijay Prashad is a Marxist historian, global educator, journalist, and revolutionary. He is the executive director of Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research and the chief editor of LeftWords Books. But more important, Vijay is what inspires us. Here we come together to learn, but at Code Pink, we say, educate, inspire, and activate. And Vijay manages to put few words together that light fire in our hearts and nourishes our soul. So Vijay, can you finish us off today? Thank you. Nice to see you. Thanks a lot. Such an important subject. And I don't want to go over the details of what you've already heard. Obviously, the United States spends a trillion dollars, maybe more, because half of the things we don't even know what's going on, CIA budgets and national security budgets. And you just take the US budget at face value. You never learn anything. There's so much stuff that's hidden behind the walls of the national security state. I often think that countries shouldn't be judged by their constitutions, but by their budgets. Because after all, constitutions are written by previous generations. But when you look at a country's values, you can only understand it annually. And annually, the United States seems to favor war, policing, and so on ahead of human needs. And so you want to really judge the United States. Don't listen to what the president says or the house speaker says. And boy, not only what she says, but where she decides to say things. I mean, maybe she should spend a little more time in Washington and try to get some bills passed that would help people's lives rather than gallivant around the world and open the doors to hell even wider, as if you need more confrontation in the world. But basically, you've got to judge a country based on how it spends the people's wealth every year. And how much does this major wealthy society spend on the least of them, as they say in the Christian world, in other words, of the poor? And how much does it really spend to mitigate the climate crisis? Nothing. I mean, it's literally nothing. And the data is out there. We know all that. Everything we hear, we keep hearing. And I want to actually talk a little bit about that. Because the real question isn't, what's the problem? And the real question isn't a lack of analysis. The real question is, who is the we? And why is the we so small? Why is it that the anti-war movement in the United States is so weak? Why is the we so small? Why do we always feel that we just don't have the power to move an agenda? I mean, here's a major government official provoking a conflict. And there was nobody. And I say nobody. Because we were there on the streets. But we are not enough to be somebody. And I would like to say it in that way, so that maybe it's provocative to say it like that. But it's also true. We can't move an agenda. Where is the anti-war movement in the United States? For all the talk about democracy and human rights, one of the principle human rights is a right to live in security, not to live with bombs falling on your head. That should be a principle enshrined, right? You want to lecture the world about democracy and human rights? You can't lecture them with bombs. You can't teach people about democracy when you bomb them. For me, the principle question is the we. Why is this movement so weak? Not how do we understand this or that aspect of militarism and war? Of course, it's important to have that analysis, to have that discussion. But the question is, how do we enlarge these movements? Not only in the United States, but in Canada. That wretched country that always pretends to be at least better than the United States. Why do they get a free pass in all of this? Lieutenants of US imperialism, the Canadians, where are they? Where is the movement? I don't have an answer for it, obviously. And maybe neither do we have an answer. But that's got to be our obligation. You know, it's one thing to say we've got to fight against climate change. It's one thing to say that in so many millions of people are inspired. I looked at a map of Europe. The whole of Europe looked like it was in a forest fire. Maybe that's like payback for colonialism. I'm not sure. Maybe there is a hidden hand up there firing bolts of lightning. That's a cruel way to see the world. Millions of people are worried, deeply worried. And yet the same millions have faith in the system. The same millions have faith in the politicians. Remember Glasgow? Again, COP26, that means they're 25 before Glasgow. This year in Egypt will be 27. That means they were 26 before this year in Egypt. And the politicians come, and they make the same quote unquote speeches and do the same nonsense, which is commit themselves to Jodi's favorite company to go after BlackRock. And they commit themselves to the Pentagon. And they commit themselves to actually protecting the Pentagon from having to reveal statistics of its climate green gas footprint. Millions of people are worried about this. Why haven't we brought them into the anti-war movement? This campaign is super important because it's taking the anti-war movement to those millions of people who are worried about the planet. I very much hope that everybody who's participated in this is going to go out to all the climate movements that are there in your communities, the groups of people in WhatsApp and so on, who are worried about the climate issue and make it very clear to them, we can't save the planet just by worrying about sea level rise. Now, that may sound like a silly thing to say. But remember, I didn't say don't worry about sea level rise. We have to be worried about climate change. But we have to understand the role of war, carbon-fueled war, talk to the Iraqis, talk to the Vietnamese who have experienced their climate being destroyed by war. I hope very much you will all go into those spaces where people are already motivated to do something about the climate and bring the question of the war to them so that they can take the serious problem of war and climate to the political class, that political class which will do nothing about it. But whose feet have to be held to at least that fire so that we can build an even bigger movement to supplant these politicians. I very much hope at some point in our lives the budget of a country like the United States will actually reflect the values of its people. I very much hope that. I very much doubt that today's budget actually represents the values of the people of this country. It definitely represents the values of the corporations. I very much hope if not in our lifetime, that in the lifetime of young people you will have a budget come before the US Congress which puts a lot more of the social resources of the country towards helping everyday needs of people, towards mitigating the serious challenges in the world, towards eliminating nuclear weapons, towards eliminating the climate crisis, towards making the planet a decent place to live in. I often say the point of being alive is to make the world a better place. Why can't government's purpose be to help make the world a better place? Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Vijay. That was very inspiring. Let's give Linda a round of applause for all of our speakers and organizations. Thank you so much for joining us online and in person today. I'd also love to offer deep gratitude to the People's Forum for hosting us today and helping us organize and promote this event. So let's give them a round of applause too. Thank you. I personally feel a lot of love and rage when learning about these issues. Rage because of the systemic violence happening every day but also love because of the community of activists who are eager to work together. Whether you have been a part of the movement for decades or this is your first day, I hope our event has inspired and motivated you to connect with other activists and take action today and every day. We win this fight together. Thank you. So I also want everyone to know that Sophie and Nancy put this together and can we all give them a round of applause? Thank you. Thank you, Jodi. That's very sweet of you. Amazing job of educating us and inspiring us. Thank you both of you. Thank you. All right, to close out, the New York Metro Raging Grannies are here. I'm looking for them, not sure who's still here, but they're going to, we have some song sheets and we're just gonna close things out with a song about militarism and the climate crisis. So thank you all so much for being here. And then afterwards, feel free to check in with organization reps to learn how you can get involved and feel free to ask any questions. Thank you. To one, because given the military pollutants. New York Metro Raging Grannies are really honored to be at this phenomenal conference and I think everyone has done such a great job. Very much so anyway. Okay, so this is our way of the station that we've been talking about all day is by singing. So that's what we're going to do. And everyone can join in because I think you know this song. This song, okay, now it works. Okay, are you gonna put it on me? No, then we can't. Yeah, let's see how you do it. Are you gonna move around? Okay, good, okay. So this is a song that we put together called The Military Pollutes and it's dedicated to this conference. And if anyone needs extra song sheets, they're over here and everyone can sing along. First song on your sheet. First song on the sheet. Let me see if I can think of it. I'm playing the wrong chords. Hurrah US military. You're our world's greatest carbon emitter. Your burn fossil fuels. With a total amount of torture made and killed. You toss in a bonus for free. We get climate catastrophe. Climate conferences we've had a few but they never address what you do. Jet fuel depleted uranium. Global bases contamination. These stories you skillfully hide. They're all secret. They're all classified to global security. Let's meet from war and then the planet lovingly. Yeah, let's say one more. So Alas, we'll be Save the Earth by Vicki Ryder. Well, and it goes to Billy Boy. If anyone remembers Billy Boy, I think you will. Well, the climate is a changing and the earth is getting hot. We've got drought and wildfires and even more. We've got climate refugees and the rising of the seas. But the worst threat of all is we've got war. The military's planted landmines where the flowers used to go. They sprayed nine-pomped agent orange and boiled gases. And their greatest contribution to the Earth's toxic pollution is the radioactive fallout from these wars. They spent trillions on the weapons that destroy our mother earth. While those war profiteers keep on making war, they keep using fossil fuels and they take us all for fools. Know that the worst threat comes from war. The ones who know it best are the ones who've been to war. So we're rising with one voice to say, We're all to see that there is no planet B. To save the Earth, we have got to end all. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all you do for peace, for justice, for the planet. Thanks for being with us. There's still some sweets left. And Sophie and Nancy, thank you so much for producing this, David. Thank you for managing the Zoom and keeping everyone's face on the screen. And please continue to come for the People's Forum for many nights and days of education. The more we are educated, the more we can be inspired and activated. Thank you.