Beirut’s Destruction was a Crime of Evil Negligence, the same Crime being Committed Against our Climate

Some 300,000 people in Beirut have been left homeless by the enormous explosion at the city’s port on Tuesday, which left it without a means of importing by sea. Half of the city has been damaged. 80% of Lebanon’s grain is imported, and the grain silos were destroyed. Thousands of buildings are unsound and uninhabitable. Thousands were injured, and forced to go to hospital where they feared contracting the coronavirus, if they could find a hospital that had room, since some hospitals had been destroyedFamilies are combing rubble in hopes of rescuing loved ones trapped beneath, and desperately putting their pictures online. 

Even before this catastrophe, nearly 1 million out of the country’s 6.8 million residents were unable to meet their monthly expenses and had begun skipping some meals, because of the collapse of the country’s banks and currency, and because of the Covid-19 recession in tourism and other industries. Now, famine is knocking at Lebanon’s door. This explosion was a crime, a crime of negligence. CNN reports that Badri Daher, the Director of Beirut Customs, has repeatedly asked for the 2,700 metric tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the port to be removed since it was offloaded from a sinking ship in 2013. Efforts were made to have the Lebanese army take it over. Nothing happened. Prime Ministers Najib Mikati, Tammam Salam, Saad Hariri, and Hassan Diab, all left the hazardous material there. Maybe Daher’s letters never went up that far. But the buck stops with the prime minister and the cabinet.

As I contemplate a bombed-out Beirut once again, my heart hurts. I lived there during the beginnings of the Civil War in the 1970s, when buildings began looking like Swiss Cheese, though that took years of bombardment and fighting. This happened overnight. I think I have a little bit of PTSD from those days. I still don’t watch war movies for fun. And the scenes now coming out are depressing in the extreme. I cry easily. The thing that frightens me most about what is essentially an industrial accident is that it resembles the climate emergency so much. The energy in the carbon dioxide we are pouring into the atmosphere by burning coal and gasoline is much greater than what was in Beirut’s ammonium nitrate stores….
https://www.juancole.com/2020/08/destruction-negligence-committed.html



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