In climate straits
Three weeks, over 4 million people displaced and more than 4000 dead into this horrific war and I’m not sure we all see the turning point it is.
By now, I’m sure most everyone reading this knows is fully aware of how oil and gas — and, specifically, the Persian Gulf — have become the flash point many long feared it could be. Just today, Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, called it “a major energy crisis,” as the agency prescribed emergency response measures to cut oil demand.
But I feel the multiple intersections of this war and the climate crisis cannot be stressed enough. In particular, that the world’s continued dependence on hydrocarbons is a major liability.
First, because it props up violent authoritarian regimes. The Islamic Republic was not the first to weaponise fossil fuels. Putin knew Europe’s reliance on oil and gas was its Achilles heel — and he didn’t hesitate to exploit it.
Ans second, because continuing to burn oil and gas guarantees deadly floods, massive wildfires and a host of other cataclysms that will increasingly affect each of us before we know it, if they haven’t already.
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Take Iran. Even before Israeli attacks on oil facilities turned Tehran’s skies toxic black, the Iranian regime entertained the idea of relocating the capital in the face of a long mega-drought that’s at least partly been aggravated by climate change.
And it’s ultimately civilians — in Iran, in Lebanon, in Palestine and in Israel — that pay the heaviest price. In the breakneck speed of today’s chaotic world, to many of us in the Global North, this war will probably feel like a distant memory within a couple of months. But its scars — physical, psychological, environmental or economic — will last far longer.
Even if you’re lucky enough not to have bombs raining on your town, high energy prices mean many will be, or are already, struggling to make ends meet. If your next electricity and heating bills are in any way affordable, it most likely owes to earlier investments in energy efficiency and renewables. Soaring energy prices also mean that fossil energy companies — like the arms industry — stand to rake in obscene profits. That is, beyond what they’ve already made over the past 21 days.
Whoever eventually declares victory, for a handful this war is already a bonanza: for U.S. firms that export LNG; for Putin’s war chest that gets a fresh cash injection; and for Norway, one of Europe’s main oil and gas suppliers, that’s currently lobbying the EU for more Arctic fossil fuels.
All of this happens because contemporary wars, climate change and the demise of democracy are intimately linked — they are systemic crises that feed each other and magnify one another.
And in the extremely complex and confusing reality, I think recognising these intersections is crucial for understanding the world, and for seeing this war for the watershed moment it is.
Now would be a good time to demand policymakers take decisive action to stop this war and to hold Israeli, American and Iranian war criminals to account for the atrocities they’ve already inflicted on millions — particularly kids. It’s also time governments introduce the kind of structural changes — not just temporary, band-aid solutions — that will both shield people from this energy emergency but also put societies on track to a future that is radically better, the world we, and our children, actually deserve.
This war is a historical juncture. The crucial question is whether societies, wounded and exhausted, can muster the critical mass needed to take a new path.
