Cause of war

“Never let a good crisis go to waste”, is a quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill. It could also be the motto of the fossil fuel industry. The day before Russian tanks entered Ukraine, the American Petroleum Institute released a set of demands of President Biden, urging him to make it easier than ever to dig up and burn fossil fuels. Republican Members of Congress immediately took to social media and Fox News to echo the call.

The mainstream media appears to be reading from the same script. The Washington Post and Bloomberg both published an article with the title ‘Fracking is a Powerful Weapon Against Russia’. The New York Times Editorial Board called for European nations to “rapidly expand facilities for handling liquefied natural gas”.

These cries stem from the fact that Russia’s oil and gas exports are what fund its war machine and afford it leverage over much of the world – 9 percent of Europe’s total energy comes from Russian oil and gas imports; Germany depends on Russia for around two-thirds of its gas.

Unfortunately, it can’t be ignored that the calls for expanded fossil fuel production are happening at the same time as the arrival of two major new climate studies.

One, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the most comprehensive review of climate science ever published. Its headline findings include the fact that one in three people are now exposed to deadly heat stress on a regular basis and that the mass die-off of species, from trees to corals to insects, is already underway. “Delay is death,” said the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, discussing the report and the urgent need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

The other study of note comes from the International Energy Agency, one of the world’s most respected energy research bodies. It turns out that the gas industry has been undercounting its methane emissions by some seventy percent. Given that over a twenty-year period, methane has eighty times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide that is no small detail – and it means that the LNG that the New York Times is now championing is even worse for the climate than we thought.

The IEA and IPCC studies make one thing crystal clear: heralding increased fossil fuel production as a solution to the war in Ukraine is myopic.

For one thing, climate change – caused by the burning of fossil fuels – makes future wars more likely. Research has shown that extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was likely due to climate change. That drought caused crop failures that pushed an estimated 1.5 million people from rural areas into urban ones. This helped create the social stresses that led to the uprisings against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011.

Excerpted: ‘Fossil Fuels Are Not the Answer to War. They Are Its Cause’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org