Episode 1 – Earth’s Greatest Enemy with Abby Martin

Shilpi Chhotray [00:00:00] This is A People’s Climate, powered by Wildseeds Fund, from Counterstream Media and The Nation. I’m your host, Shilpi Chhotray. 

CLIP [00:00:01] The price of gas has risen almost 50% since the beginning of the war. In fact, the biggest winners of this entire thing, the whole enterprise, appear to be the oil companies who keep reaping profits.

CLIP [00:00:16] In March, the top 100 oil and gas companies in the world made about $30 million an hour. $30 million an hour. The war put up the price, and therefore they benefited.

CLIP [00:00:29] The military being the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet, how can they be given a free pass? Eight hundred faces around the globe, the toxic waste dumps, the superfund sites.

CLIP [00:00:43] Together, they create a fantastic cocktail of deathly contamination. And people must know that the United States military is unchecked. They have no transparency, and they have no one watching over them.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:01:04] Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. So when we talk about the climate crisis, we often focus on industries like oil and gas and rightfully so. But there’s one institution that’s almost never talked about, the military. The US military is not only the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world, but its footprint goes way beyond emissions, leaving behind a staggering trail of environmental destruction, toxic pollution, and contamination. Today’s guest has spent years documenting exactly that. Abby Martin is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her latest film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, investigates the consequences of the US military machine and asks a very specific question. What does it mean when the world’s largest polluter is also its least scrutinized? In this episode, we talk about why any serious conversation about the climate must confront militarism head on. Abby, it’s so good to have you here back in your Oakland roots. I’m really grateful to be spending this time with you and having this conversation in person.

Abby Martin [00:02:17] I’m so honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:02:20] Well, we’re talking at a moment where violence is escalating across the Middle East, and what often gets left out is that this isn’t just a humanitarian crisis. It’s ecological collapse in real time. And yet, the US military is almost never part of the climate conversation. So I want to start with your film. Why do you call the US Military Earth’s Greatest Enemy?

Abby Martin [00:02:44] There’s so many facets of why this is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, but the film really kind of covers the totality of not just emissions, but the maintenance of the military arsenal coupled with legacy contamination and the further militarization and expansion of the military and what that actually does to our drinking water, to our air. And I think, you know, seeing the ecocidal destruction in Iran and Gaza, it becomes really clear what’s going on.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:03:11] And we’re gonna go really deep into that. One thing that you’ve said recently is that you have to look at the military as actually the institution that’s keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence. So speak to that a little bit more.

Abby Martin [00:03:26] Yeah, I mean, look, the climate community has rightfully looked at the infrastructure of fossil fuel, right? But those companies have a military that works on their behalf. The US military is basically the enforcement arm of global capitalism. And this is the way it’s kind of always been in the history of the United States. The military has always been a force for extractive industries to maintain its own force around the world. And so all of these bases are necessary, not only to maintain some sort of world order based on human rights and these liberal notions, right, that we’re indoctrinated with, but also to maintain our ‘national security,’ quote unquote. National security has always explicitly been about fossil fuels and securing and maintaining the access to those fossil fuels. And so when you look at all of the bases around the world, where are they? They’re where the main arteries of capital flow.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:04:26] Where the resources are.

Abby Martin [00:04:27] Exactly, where the resources flow, that’s the basis. That’s what this is about. It’s controlling the supply chain and the arteries of capitol. So just the nature of the expanse necessitates the continuous growth and pillaging and plundering of all the resources on Earth, just to maintain itself, right? So when you look at the early extraterritorial bases, it was always to accumulate coal and have these coaling stations. And then of course it switched to oil. And so you see now Venezuela, largest oil reserves in the world. Iran, third largest oil reserves in the world. Trump is explicitly stating it, right? There’s no pretense at all. And it’s to fuel this monster, this dragon, just to fuel it at any cost.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:05:20] I want to actually focus a little bit here that most of this film was made under the Biden administration. And at the same time, so much of how people have come to know your work, including myself, is through your reporting on Gaza, on genocide, where we’re seeing not just mass violence, but the destruction of water systems, farmland, entire ecosystems now buried in toxic rubble. So when you put all these pieces together, it feels like continuity, you know, across administrations, across decades. Across these 800 military bases around the world that you speak of quite a bit in the film. What is that system that keeps this level of violence in place no matter who’s in power?

Abby Martin [00:06:01] The film is so important because it’s a time capsule of the Biden administration. This film kind of exemplifies what the status quo is and what has been deemed normal by the ruling class, by the global elites. So that’s really important and instructive because it has gotten so bad. Trump has taken it to such a new level, but we have to go back and realize Trump is not an anomaly. Trump is an extension of the system that incubated this. He’s a natural consequence of what has been normalized and allowed. When we don’t hold criminals to account, when we let this impunity reign, coupled with the wanton environmental destruction, this is what we get.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:06:41] This is the result.

Abby Martin [00:06:41] This is the result.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:06:43] Before we get into some of the core parts of the environmental impacts of the military, I think it’s really important to name something quite special is that you worked on this film with your husband, Mike Preisner, and he’s the co-director of Earth’s Greatest Enemy and also an Iraq war veteran. I really wanted to name this because I think it shapes the story in such a profound way. And supporting veterans is really important to both of you. What do you wish people understood about the cost of war, not just for the people on the receiving end, but for the people that are sent to carry it out?

Abby Martin [00:07:14] I see it firsthand, I see that everyone in the military is a victim of this machine. They’re a victim a propaganda too. And so to reach people with humility and empathy and say, we are all being harmed by this. But what it’s doing to service members, it’s killing them too. Every base is a story of contamination. Every base has been used to you know, impede Indigenous sovereignty, destroy their land, all of the testing and war games that are done on these bases. It’s not just happening there, it’s happening here too. So for example, at the bases here, just the volatile organic compounds that are used to clean the engines, that’s just dumping 20 million pounds of toxic waste into the environment every single year. That’s killing soldiers. You look at something like Camp Lejeune. Camp Lejeune, North Carolina was the biggest groundwater contamination event in American history. This was a decades long toxic dumping into water wells at this Marine Corps base. And for years, for years top brass knew that they were dumping toxic waste, did not tell the soldiers. They let them continue to drink contaminated water and there was hundreds of babies that died and there was no accountability, there was no accountability. When the military is found to be toxifying and contaminating their own service members, they lie. They cover it up, they lie and then they deny claims and they refuse accountability. And this is a story as old as time.

CLIP [00:09:01] Marines were drinking it while they were out in the field and everybody on base was drinking it. They were bathing children in that water, making their formula out of that water. Mothers were drinking that water that was going right into the baby’s system.

Abby Martin [00:09:19] A few miles away from the Marine Corps base is a cemetery. It’s the resting place of so many infants who died from the water contamination that it’s known to locals as baby heaven. To this day, the military has not conducted a formal study to account for all the children who died.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:09:45] There are so many important elements of this film and you really get into the belly of the beast. I would love to dive into some of the major ways the military pollutes. We know carbon emissions drive the climate crisis fundamentally. What’s striking is how much war accelerates that. A recent analysis found the war in the Middle East right now is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined with about five million tons of CO₂ emitted in just the first two weeks. So talk to me about the scale. How much does the US military actually contribute to the global emissions?

Abby Martin [00:10:22] I’m sure your audience already is aware that they are exempt from international climate treaties. These emissions were being counted excluding military emissions. So how are we counting emissions if we’re not actually counting the totality of our emissions? We went into this project with that statistic kind of in the periphery. That’s kind of known in academia that the US military is the largest polluter on an institutional level bigger than 150 countries combined. So that alone is like, it’s really hard to wrap your mind around because you’re like wait a minute. How can you even compare the military to countries? You know, they’re emitting a lot of carbon to sustain a population. There’s agriculture, there’s infrastructure projects. But then once you unpack what that statistic means, it’s just the oil purchases on paper every day, 270,000 barrels. So then you’re like, whoa, wait, that of course doesn’t give you the full picture. For the longest time, it was completely hidden. None of this was exposed because they said it was a threat to the national security of the United States. But let’s go into the life cycle.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:11:27] Yeah.

Abby Martin [00:11:28] The life cycle is something that no one really thinks about because the arms industry is considered separate from the calculation of when you’re looking at even the national totals of these things. So of course, when you look at how are these weapons constructed, the extraction of the rare minerals in places like the DRC. I mean… And then shipping it worldwide. And then you look at the application of the weaponry. War, blowing up field depots, intentional targeting of oil infrastructure that we’re seeing all across the Gulf States and Iran. You know, hospitals using their energy to care for the wounded, these things aren’t counted. The pulverization of one of the most carbon-intensive materials, which is concrete, we just watched for three years straight. One of the most densely populated places on earth be pulverized into dust, toxic dust laden with asbestos, laden with toxic materials. None of this is contained. All of this is going to have generational impacts globally. And of course, that’s just the US military. The US controls a much larger web of militarism. So you cannot just look at the US in isolation. You have to look at all of the countries that are under its banner of control.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:12:47] Talk about NATO and how much impact it actually has.

Abby Martin [00:12:53] You see now that NATO has a built-in, non-binding dictate to basically say, countries that are part of NATO have to buy into US weaponry. Just in the last couple of years, they were demanding that all NATO members spend 2% of their GDP on weaponry, and then Trump, of course, demanded a 5% NATO expenditure. So not only is it pivoting countries away from actually investing in their own sustainable alternatives to this fossil fuel madness, but now they’re even more subservient to US dominance and the military industrial complex. And what’s so crazy to me is none of this is binding. None of this binding, but you see them willingly doing this because they’re so terrified of retaliation and repercussions from the US.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:13:41] Let’s talk a little bit about the military’s unofficial use it or lose it policy and what this means for the environment. This was extremely chilling for me.

Abby Martin [00:13:51] So there’s so many munitions being made. And every year, the military budget continues to go up.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:14:00] From our tax dollars.

Abby Martin [00:14:01] From our tax dollars. And so what’s amazing is Trump saying we want a trillion dollar military budget. It’s already been well over a trillion dollars for years and years and years because they don’t include veterans benefits in that total. But how is it possible that the military budget continues to go up if we withdraw from places? How is that possible? How is that rationalized? Well, when you look at the military as a for-profit corporation that has to justify the expenditures, they have to use every cent to rationalize asking for more money the next year. And so when you translate that logic into, let’s say, getting weaponry or munitions, you have to us it all in order to justify getting more. And so they leave their equipment behind. It’s like they don’t even really need it. And they call it the million dollar minute. And this happens many, many times out in the field. Before they go back to the forward operating bases, they’ll blow up everything on site. Everything, everything. Bags of C4 explosives. They film themselves blowing all this stuff up in the field, and they don’t even think for a second about the environmental consequences of blowing all this up because they need to rationalize getting the money back.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:15:19] It’s just a crazy amount of waste on so many levels.

Abby Martin [00:15:22] Thing is bullets don’t have an expiration life after a year. Then a lot of planes defuel as well for the same logic. They dump all the oil before they refuel. Yeah.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:15:37] It’s staggering. One of the stats that really caught my attention was that for every person killed in the US Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 250,000 bullets were fired, leaving behind massive quantities of exposed metal and toxic residues. What are some of the actual materials we’re talking about?

Abby Martin [00:15:59] This is really important because we tend to think of just human cost in terms of direct deaths and killing. We don’t really think about the legacy contamination. How long this lasts. World War I still has dead zones from small armaments that were used from those weapons a hundred years ago. So the weapons that we have today. They are dipping bullets in depleted uranium so they can pierce metal easier. And this leaves behind a legacy of toxic contamination that will be around for millennia. It’s so unnecessary. So every bullet that’s discharged, it explodes with residue of depleted uranium, tritium, all of these chemicals that go into the groundwater, the air. And the thing is, yes, of course, there’s horrific birth defects. We know that at the height of the occupation, Iraqi leaders were even saying, don’t have kids because it’s so rampant and widespread, the birth defects, but now 20 years later, when you look at what we have done to Iraq, that people are still being born today with congenital heart failure, the cancer rates are off the charts. I mean, the cancer clusters, there’s no one untouched in that country. And this is 20 years after after the height of what was going on. That’s how long this lasts. Every place that bombs are dropped and bullets are fired, that contamination will have residual effects for generations.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:17:50] Abby, I’d like to go back and ask a question about fossil fuels here. So if military dominance relies on fossil fuels and climate policies don’t include military emissions and reporting, what does this actually mean for the possibility of a real energy transition?

Abby Martin [00:18:07] Well, we can’t have an energy transition with a global military empire. It’s not going to be allowed. And you see people in the film telling me that point blank because they’ll have the face of environmental stewardship. People like Elizabeth Warren have proposed greening our global military empire, slapping solar panels on bases and hybridizing some of these vehicles like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which really is a drop in the bucket.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:18:32] Yes.

Abby Martin [00:18:32] But the problem with that is you can’t green a global military empire that essentially runs on oil. We’re talking about an air force that is bigger than the next five air powers combined. That is oil, oil, oil, and you even heard major generals tell me it’s a pipe dream. We need oil.

CLIP [00:18:52] But let’s don’t walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it. And so until that you become up with something that replaces oil, making all these systems work, I think we need to keep the alternatives in check.

Abby Martin [00:19:12] And it’s like, well, thank you for saying it plainly because you guys have been parading around all of this propaganda that somehow this is possible to have both, right? That’s what we’ve been told by neoliberalism for the last 50 years. It’s been hoodwinked about environmentalism is compatible with imperialism. And we know that that is not true.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:19:33] I would love to talk a little bit more about imperialism and colonization. It’s really at the crux of so much of your work. But if we can talk a bit about Hawaii in particular, it’s a central hub of US military power. And for me, it’s one of the clearest examples of ongoing imperialism in our very own country. Talk to me about what happened at the Red Hill Naval Base in Oahu.

Abby Martin [00:20:01] Every American loves Hawaii. It’s an ideal vacation spot and it’s seen as a beautiful paradise, right? Not many people know that the US military has wrought complete destruction and devastation all across the islands. Most notably what you’re talking about, Red Hill. In 2021, the Navy leaked 19,000 gallons of jet fuel from decayed storage tanks. It seeped into the drinking water wells used by military families.

CLIP [00:20:37] Unknowingly drinking cooking and bathing with toxic water.

CLIP [00:20:41] A single underground tank as high as the aloha tower and four times as wide holds 12 million gallons of fuel. 20 of these sit under Red Hill and over time 19 have leaked.

Abby Martin [00:20:52] These antiquated, rotting storage tanks that sat right above Oahu’s main aquifer. For people who don’t understand, this is a natural water well embedded in the mountains, and the military decided to build storage tanks of oil right on top of it. Right on top of them. Why? Like why?

Shilpi Chhotray [00:21:17] Why would you even do that? Yeah.

Abby Martin [00:21:21] Like, I could have told you to not do that, but here we are. So over time, basically all Indigenous Hawaiians were like, please shut down these tanks. They are going to leak. And they had. And it seeped into the drinking water wells of military families as well, of course. And the military was lying to them. Drink the water. It’s safe.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:21:43] Camp Lejeune, they’re trying to cover it up.

Abby Martin [00:21:46] They try to cover it up. This is the modus operandi for the military. Cover it up, lie, deny until it’s too late, and then do everything in your power to defuse the situation by denying claims and responsibility and just hoping it all goes away. And the Red Hill disaster, I mean, this is one, one part of what the military has done to Hawaii. The amount of destruction that they have brought on those islands. I mean, you look at Hawaii in general, let’s just look at what it is. A lot of Americans have no idea that Hawaii was a sovereign country.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:22:25] That’s right.

Abby Martin [00:22:26] That had its own government up until the late 1800s.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:22:28] Its own queen.

Abby Martin [00:22:28] Its own Queen. And what happened was in the late 1800s, the US military went there and they said, we need this for a base. We want to use Hawaii to project our power across the Pacific. And so they overthrew the sovereign nation of Hawaii.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:22:47] To create a military base.

Abby Martin [00:22:47] To create a military base. And through that they excavated what we know as Pearl Harbor. Why is it called Pearl Harbor? Because it used to be the breadbasket of Indigenous Hawaiians. They cultivated, they fed the entire community because it was a pearl. That’s how fruitful and voluminous like the nature of all the fish were in that area. Now it’s a superfund site. You can’t fish there, you can’t eat any of the fish there. There’s just signs everywhere saying, do not eat. Deadly. And this is what we do. This is what the military does.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:23:20] Well, this is also where RIMPAC is, the Rim of the Pacific exercise.

CLIP [00:23:24] They have assembled here from the four corners of the Earth. Fifty-five warships, among them the newest and most sophisticated ever produced. The United States is here. Japan, Canada, France, Australia, Germany, 26 nations all together. Each will introduce the latest naval technology in their arsenals. We are T.O.! The operation is called Rim of the Pacific, the world’s largest and most complex naval exercise. It will be as close to actual warfare as is peacefully possible.

CLIP [00:24:15] RIMPAC is really, it’s all about invading other countries. These are all invasion scenarios that they’re doing.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:24:28] It takes place in Hawaii around Pearl Harbor, and you got access to attend. I have questions about that, by the way. So what did you witness there, paint a scene for our listeners? How did the military treat you? And what does that reveal about their priorities and awareness around the environmental catastrophe that they’re causing?

Abby Martin [00:24:47] It’s the largest war games in the world. Under the banner, of course of the US, varying countries take place every couple years when they hold these exercises. They’re massive. The scale and scope of these exercises are massive.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:25:02] It was also eerie, the exercise was super eerie.

Abby Martin [00:25:05] Bizarre, right?

Shilpi Chhotray [00:25:06] Yeah, bizzare.

Abby Martin [00:25:06] They sink a ship. Like they love doing that. They literally like will destroy a ship and just let it like sink to the bottom of the ocean. And it’s like leaching all these chemicals. And they do this as like the big grand finale, I guess, at the end of the exercises. First of all, they go and use Hawaii as not only a dumping ground, but as a playground for themselves. They go and they have a good time. They just treat the island as expendable. They’re just blowing stuff up, patting themselves in the back, pumping fists. They’re literally just like shooting machine guns in the water, just for fun. Blowing up the most outrageous looking bombs like on the shores where sea turtles hatch. It’s insane. And of course, when you look at marine mammals, it’s so intrinsically tied to the health of not only the entirety of the ocean, but the-

Shilpi Chhotray [00:26:00] on the land. It’s like. That’s how we breathe.

Abby Martin [00:26:02] Yeah. And so, and so RIMPAC, it’s devastating for so many reasons. It’s like not only the destruction of Hawaii, the destruction of the ocean, the full frontal assault 24-7 warfare being practiced against all of the creatures in the ocean. Sonar being used that pings hundreds of miles away. And actually creates bubbles in marine mammals’ brains that creates mass beachings. But because it’s so far away, the military can just be like, we have no idea how this happened, but it happens every single RIMPAC.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:26:34] It impacts actually 70% of the oceans, the military sonar.

Abby Martin [00:26:37] 70%, they’re using it in 70% of the world’s oceans. And this is…

Shilpi Chhotray [00:26:42] That’s staggering, Abby.

Abby Martin [00:26:43] It’s staggering. It’s staggering. Well, let me explain the scope and scale of this. I mean, the fact that they authorize themselves to quote, unquote, ‘take’ marine mammals.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:26:53] Yep. So I take as a permit that literally authorizes them to kill.

Abby Martin [00:26:57] To harm or kill.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:26:59] Harm or kill. Okay.

Abby Martin [00:27:01] These mammals depend on sound. That’s how they do everything. The very same institution that actually has deemed a lot of these mammals endangered also authorizes the Navy to quote unquote ‘take’ them every year. So this actually amounts to millions of marine mammals.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:27:17] 26 million.

Abby Martin [00:27:18] 26 million over the course of a five year war games in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, 26 million. But you look at like the dolphins alone, there’s more than even the amount of dolphins on the planet.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:27:32] This is so barbaric.

Abby Martin [00:27:32] And you think how do you even wrap your mind around that because they’re actually estimating that they are going to harm pods of dolphins multiple times. Multiple times.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:27:44] I do want to ask why people don’t know about this, because I am in the environmental field. I actually studied marine science and your film was the first time I learned about this. And it made me angry.

Abby Martin [00:28:01] I mean, I can ask the same question of why don’t people even know that we live in an empire? We never even question the overarching system and the consequences of that system, because if you did start talking about takes, then of course the military would be in the crosshairs, number one. But that’s why we don’t know. We don’t even know that we live in an empire. We didn’t even what our military is doing around the world. We’re so deeply propagandized and that includes academics, that includes people who are in this climate field. It’s it’s no —.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:28:34] We need everyone to get on board.

Abby Martin [00:28:34] We need people to understand that you have to have an anti-imperialist framework if we’re going to tackle these issues seriously.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:28:43] I do want to go back to one thing, and it’s just a really practical question. How the hell are you getting into these places? How the are you are getting into RIMPAC and all of these industry military events? I mean, a quick Google search about you would make it very known that you’re Abby Martin, the anti-imperialist. And I’m just like, as a journalist who interviews people, I just mind boggled.

Abby Martin [00:29:08] You do your research.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:29:09] Yeah. How do you get into these spaces? But I would love to know.

Abby Martin [00:29:15] And what’s amazing about this is there is this kind of contradictory narrative, right, throughout the film. On one hand, the military is this very secretive institution. They don’t grant you any access. But on the other hand, they’re dumb. They don’t Google you.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:29:31] That is insane!

Abby Martin [00:29:31] They don’t do their research. So I’m applying to get in these spaces and I’m like, I’m Abigail Martin. They’re like, ‘come on in, sis.’ I mean, what’s crazy is I thought that I was gonna be beating down other journalists at RIMPAC because it’s such a huge event.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:29:45] You have, like, a private showing!

Abby Martin [00:29:47] I was with, literally the only other reporters that were there were extensions of the military industrial complex, Air Force One, Defense One, Navy News. These people exist to revel in the machinery of the Military Industrial Complex and to bolster weapons systems. So they were there to actually help the Military industrial complex. They were like, why are you, who are you? Why are you here? And it really showed me, oh my God. This is how complicit journalists are, in general. I mean, if you work for corporate media, this is an institution that is subsidized by the very power structures that journalists should be holding to account. I lived in DC for several years. I know how it works. It’s access, access, access. You don’t wanna step on the toes of not being able to get back into these spaces. So you play the game. And so I go into these spaces very intentionally knowing that I will never go back. And you have one shot. You have one shot to get it right. But what my question is, I’m not special. I do the bare minimum of what a journalist should do. My question is where’s everyone else?

Shilpi Chhotray [00:30:55] When people hear this, when they’re going to hear our conversation, they’re going to feel overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed. Like this is the most powerful military in the world. So let’s talk about where the pressure points actually work. What would a world look like if we actually address the military’s role in climate destruction? And what are some tangible things you want to see?

Abby Martin [00:31:16] Yes, I think there’s several things here, incremental steps that can be taken now, right? So there’s the big vision of what ultimately does need to happen to have a habitable planet that we can all survive on. And there’s things that need to happen right now that are completely feasible and that are actually being proposed. A moratorium on data centers, right? Cause data centers are now the new face of the war machine. They’re a labor issue and environmental issue. This is something that’s being proposed by Bernie Sanders and we can all get behind that now. 25 already have been shut down in 2025.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:31:48] Talk a little bit more about the connection with military.

Abby Martin [00:31:51] Yeah. So, you know, this has been something that’s become very apparent during the Gaza genocide is how much big tech and these kind of technocratic billionaires who are curating our reality also are profiting off the destruction and building the infrastructure for surveillance, for genocide, for these weapons systems, right? You know, the hundred points that were targeted in 10 minutes in Lebanon, for example, that’s AI and that’s Palantir. And that’s the people who are creating the infrastructure for this. When you look at the first Trump term, a lot of these people were virtue signaling against Trump. Mark Zuckerberg’s lawsuit against Trump with Facebook, you had the Google CEO protesting the Muslim ban at the San Francisco airport. Again, all of this is now, the pretense is gone.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:32:36] Okay.

Abby Martin [00:32:36] They all folded into Trump. They’re all having lunch with him, they were all standing behind him in the inauguration. And it’s like all, like the mask, it’s Mehdi Hassan said, he’s like, masks off, hoods on. Like these people just straight up, it’s like these people are the new face of the war machine. And it’s really scary because of how much this is accelerating and how little kind of morality is behind these systems. It was already problematic to have drone warfare. Now you don’t even have a person pulling the trigger. It’s a robot. And where’s the accountability there? When Claude or Lavender demolishes 20 apartment blocks to find one person who’s responsible for these war crimes. So the data centers are huge. And then of course, there’s Barbara Lee’s proposal to just shrink the budget of the military. The fact that the military budget continues to grow and grow and grow, it needs to be completely cut in half right now.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:33:34] People can’t buy eggs and milk.

Abby Martin [00:33:36] It is absolutely absurd. That needs to happen. And then of course you look at divestment campaigns. This is something that has been successful across state universities, but there’s been so much movement with the encampments and all of the transparency now in accountability, demand for accountability of what weapons systems and contractors are invested in universities. You know, the military gives $100 million dollars to at least 12 universities.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:34:07] Are they most like Ivy Leagues?

Abby Martin [00:34:09] No, I mean, Austin Tech, it’s really crazy. Yeah, just across the board, the military is extremely invested and it’s not just obvious tie-ins. It’s like engineering departments, science departments, it’s like they are plucking up the best and brightest from all of these institutions, but there has been a lot of successes. I mean you look at the data centers being canceled with hyper community, hyper localized resistance. Banding together, building big tents and broad coalitions and stopping these things in their tracks. That’s possible. The divestment campaigns have been successful as well. There’s one that happened in Chicago in 2022, where a youth-led activist movement stopped a subsidy of $2 million that was recurring through the city of Chicago to Boeing. And so they stopped that. There was a successful divestment from Boeing. So there’s so much that we can do, but I think we have to decommission this global military empire and we have to force accountability mechanisms to make the remediation happen. We have to force the military to clean up their mess.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:35:16] I keep thinking about the 60s and 70s and the rise of anti-imperialism at the height of the Vietnam War. What is it going to take to see our society rise up in that way?

Abby Martin [00:35:27] We’re in the infancy stages of organizing and mass education. I feel like we’re getting back to kind of that foundational understanding that capitalism is driving a lot of this. And that’s why Gaza has been such a fundamental moment of awakening for so many people, understanding the mechanism and the structure of why these things are happening, giving us an answer finally. And that what’s so incredible, reorienting people’s movements and taking them out of the silos and putting them into one mode where it’s we have to be anti-imperialists, we have to be internationalists, and we have to have solidarity with all oppressed people in the global south and understand how their oppression is our oppression. It’s all intrinsically tied together. As an advocacy journalist, I create media to agitate. I try to use propaganda in a way that’s slapping you across the face with the truth, but not to paralyze you, to empower you. And so this is the solution. Education, action, community, building organizations that have the understanding of what we’re talking about because we can’t make a dent in the environmental space if we don’t address the elephant in the room. And it’s gonna take a lot. It’s gonna a lot to help get the mass movement that we know that we need to force power to bow to our demands. We need them to be scared of us, just like they were in the 60s and 70s.

CLIP [00:36:55] The United States is waging an unjustifiable war in Vietnam. And what we have to decide is that we’re going to keep coming back until this war ends. And we tell these men that if they don’t end the war, then we will alter the basic structure of this country, and we will not be silent until they do do this, and until our children can look at this country with hope, with hope for what it will be, and not despair for what it is.

Abby Martin [00:37:34] We have to create that fear again, and we have the bodies. And the thing is, we’re not gonna fight them militarily. We can’t fight this. We have speak in the language that they speak, capital flow, withholding our labor, strikes, understanding how labor is essential. During Occupy Wall Street, that shut down the ports. It was the most beautiful day of my life because I saw the power of all of these people coming together and I understood how it could be stopped.

CLIP [00:38:01] Thousands of demonstrators shut down evening operations at the Port of Oakland. The nearly 5-hour long protest at the port was part of a day-long general strike in the city.

CLIP [00:38:11] So this is basically saying, look, the people are in charge here. You have to change course, and you have to start doing stuff that actually takes care of people.

CLIP [00:38:20] Police say about 3,000 gathered at the port at the height of the demonstration.

CLIP [00:38:24] It’s taking back what is ours in America, what we’ve earned, and what it deserves us. We have basically put into this country, and we deserve to get back what we put into it.

Abby Martin [00:38:37] I see it again happening now in a way that’s so powerful that I’ve never seen before. I’ve ever seen Americans care about people in other countries. And that’s really powerful. That’s really powerful. So there’s something happening. There’s a mass awakening happening here. And I don’t think we’re seeing it translate in the streets because people have fatigue and we can’t ever accept that. We can’t ever let this system prevent us from imagining something different, from preventing us from realizing that we have the power and the agency to do something else. And that’s, you know, this movie is just one tool in the arsenal to give us a fighting chance.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:39:11] Abby, your words are so palpable and a reminder of what journalism can be when it’s actually in service to the public. I have so much respect for you and your work, and I can’t thank you enough for being in this conversation today.

Abby Martin [00:39:22] I have immense respect for you. This whole project is absolutely fundamental and I just encourage every listener to really understand how important and crucial this reporting is and to support it.

Shilpi Chhotray [00:39:38] One of the most important threads I took from my conversation with Abby is that the climate crisis doesn’t exist in isolation from these systems of war, extraction, and political power. These are deeply entrenched realities, even if our media and most institutions look the other way. People on the front lines bear the immediate violence, of course, and the devastation of war. But the harm does not stop there. It extends outward through toxic contamination, through the military’s contribution to global emissions. Ultimately intensifying the climate crisis for all of us. You can find links to Abby’s documentary in our show notes. Until next time.

Thank you to Wildseeds Fund for making this podcast possible. This episode of A People’s Climate is executive produced by Mindy Ramaker, with engineering and sound design by Ameeta Ganatra, theme music by Khafre Jay, additional research by Asia Simms, recorded at Studio 132 and Skyline Studios in Oakland, California. From Counterstream Media and The Nation, I’m your host, Shilpi Chhotray. Until next time.