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 destroyed. Families 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