Let's start with a couple of chilling facts. The war in Gaza has nothing to do with democracy or human rights. It also has nothing to do with Israel's right to defend itself. Until yesterday, that's what I thought.
I was wrong. We're all getting played.
It's about oil and gas.
We should know by now that when both political parties in the U.S. show bipartisan support, something truly sinister is going on. We should also know that when a superpower starts using human rights as a justification for their actions, there's always an ulterior motive. So: Four years ago, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published a report on "the unrealized potential of Palestinian oil and gas reserves."
The report estimates these reserves could generate "hundreds of billions of dollars" for whoever develops them. It also criticizes Israel for preventing Palestinians from developing those resources as a way to alleviate their massive poverty. It just so happens that the U.S. is now proposing an international coalition of western governments to preside over Gaza once Israel pushes its 2 million inhabitants into Egypt. There's similar plans underway for the West Bank. Since the war started, Israel has already awarded a dozen gas exploration licenses to six different oil companies, including BP. They're going to explore exactly where those Palestinian oil reserves are located, off the coast.
Let's face it, this plan comes straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook, and it hits right in the middle of a global energy crisis exacerbated by war. When it comes to geopolitics, there's no such thing as a coincidence.
It's not just about oil and gas, either.
As Richard Medhurst explains, there's a wide range of economic and logistical incentives for the U.S. and Israel to depopulate Gaza, including the construction of a canal alternative to the Suez, allowing them to dominate maritime trade and giving them key military advantages. The preferred canal route runs right through the middle of Gaza. They've been planning this project for decades, and now they have a great moral cover story. All of this looks like a repeat of the Iraq invasion, with western countries antagonizing a rogue actor until they do something that seems to warrant an extreme response.
Likewise, the war in Ukraine has nothing to do with democracy, human rights, or even Russian aggression.
It's about natural gas.
The U.S. and Russia have been fighting for dominance of Ukraine for at least ten years. Ukraine sits on Europe's second-largest natural gas reserve. Russia has also exported natural gas to the EU through pipelines across Ukraine. Months after Russia's invasion, a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Germany. Now Germany is signing 20-year deals to import liquefied natural gas from the U.S. On a side note, liquefied natural gas is "way worse than coal."
Before all of this, Joe Biden's son just happened to find a way onto the board at one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies.
Now do you get it?
I do.
Once you see the facts, you can't deny it. Sure, you want to deny the facts. But then you look at world history. You look at U.S. history in particular. You come to understand that every single war we've ever fought was about resources or influence, or both. Even when there's a human motive, it's always the presence of resources and fossil fuels that tip superpowers over into violence. Why else would our leaders spend hundreds of billions of dollars on these wars, and literally no other human rights need, like hunger?
Freedom and democracy are always a cover story.
They're excuses.
Let's pivot to what's happening to the planet while superpowers fight over fossil fuels. You might remember the pacific northwest heatwave that sent temperatures above 120F (48.9C) degrees. It was the first time some of us started to understand what the future had in store for us. Now science confirms our suspicions. That wasn't supposed to happen until about 2060.
We live in a different world now.
A dangerous one.
Imagine what the studies are going to say about this year, one of shattered records across the world. A tropical storm grew into a category five hurricane overnight and destroyed an entire city. Another city was destroyed by wildfires supercharged by a volatile weather system hundreds of miles away. Every single country on the planet faced climate disasters that weren't supposed to happen for another three decades.
Over the last two years alone, we've seen megafloods kill tens of thousands while destroying large swaths of farmland. Entire countries shut down because it was too hot for anyone to function. More than five percent of Canada's forests burned in a single summer, choking the coast in toxic smoke and ash. In Arizona, people were going to the ER with third-degree burns from... the pavement.
Is there a plan?
No.
Democrats and their climate optimist buddies continue to insist that we sit back and wait for solar panels and wind turbines to save us, when we're already living through disasters that break our existing weather models. Forecasters can't predict what's going to happen anymore.
Every storm could turn into something much worse now.
Let's get real for a minute.
This is all we should be talking about. This is all we should be thinking about. This is all we should be doing. This is the only problem worth solving. It's the only thing worth spending trillions of dollars on. Every single day, we should wake up thinking about how we can reduce our consumption and make our lives more sustainable. There's a hundred things we could be doing.
It's not about preventing climate change anymore. It's not even about preventing the worst-case scenarios, because we're already there.
Those worst is already happening.
Instead, what are we doing?
World leaders are funding war and genocide at unprecedented levels. It doesn't make any sense until you cut through all the noise about justice and human rights, and look at the facts.
These are all climate wars we were warned about.
The superpowers and the corporations behind them know something that the public seems to dismiss. We're approaching peak oil and peak diesel, if we haven't passed these milestones already. Our leaders also know that without fossil fuels, they can't continue to manufacture the solar panels and wind turbines we'll need as fossil fuels become increasingly expensive and dangerous to extract from the planet. They're panicking.
Finally, they also know that severe droughts and floods are battering the world's food supply. We don't just rely on natural gas for electricity. We use it to produce fertilizer. And without fertilizer, global food production drops significantly, leading to famine. Of course, our leaders don't care about people starving.
They care about social unrest.
And elections.
The war in Ukraine is a climate war. The war in Gaza is also a climate war. In fact, it's more like a climate genocide.
Western countries are funding the massacre and forced removal of an entire population so that they can access oil and natural gas reserves on behalf of corporations. It's hard to stomach.
There's implications here.
It seems pretty clear to me. This is what our leaders have chosen to do with the rest of this crucial decade. They're going to deny or downplay the impacts of climate change. They're going to fight over resources. They're going to come up with excuses, like human rights. Increasingly heated and ideologically charged wars distract the public from genuine threats.
For the elite, it's a bonus.
They're not going to embrace regrowth or steady-state economies, or even sustainability. They're going to war over what's left of the planet. They're doing it to keep this bankrupt economic model and its endless hunger for energy going a little bit longer, until they die. It's no accident that most of them are in their 70s or 80s, either. They won't be around to see the devastating consequences that come from squandering our last chance to make the future at least somewhat bearable for our children. They don't care.
The last oasis of Biden's supporters continue to lecture us about choosing the lesser evil. Well, I don't think they get it.
There's no lesser evil.
At this point, the so-called lesser evil is killing us with just as much relentless speed as the greater evil. The greater evil wants coal. The lesser evil wants to build solar panels and wind turbines with natural gas, which is even worse. By the time we're done building our green infrastructure with what remains of our fossil fuels, there won't be anyone left to use it.
We'll be gone.
The lesser evil routinely works against our interests, and they're equally complicit in making the world uninhabitable. At the current moment, the lesser evil is teaming up with the greater evil to fund genocide. Even worse, they're doing it in order to gain access to fossil fuels.
It's reprehensible.
Yes, there's still time to change things. There's going to be time all the way up until the last drop of oil gets burned up.
Of course, our carbon budget is gone. Every day we stay on this path, we only hammer more nails in the coffin. Pretty soon, it's going to be all nails and no coffin. Meanwhile, even the public seems more interested in yelling and tearing down each other's posters than coming together.
This is our last chance.
We're blowing it.
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