Peace is Necessary to Give the Climate a Chance
Military spending exacerbates the climate crisis, but military operations are often exempt from our carbon budgets and climate analyses.
BY SABINE VON MERING FEBRUARY 6, 2024 2:48 PM
When my son was a teenager... he used to roll his eyes when he saw the books I was reading: “Why do you like reading about all this depressing stuff, Mom? World War II, the Holocaust, climate change?”
Why indeed. As a professor of German and European studies, the answer is complicated. Last semester, I taught two courses—one on European Perspectives on Climate Change, and another on antisemitism on social media. After the attacks on October 7, I realized that, in comparison to the conflict in Israel-Palestine, the climate crisis seems utterly solvable. And that these crises are, of course, connected.
... The emissions from Israel’s military actions in the first two months of the war in Gaza alone were equal to burning more than 150,000 tons of coal… As my colleague Harrison Watson has shown, the Middle East is already a climate victim suffering tremendously from extreme weather, a situation that is expected to get a lot worse in the near future.”
This connection between war and climate and our unwillingness to change course has a long history. I remember vividly how relieved I was to see the Kyoto Protocol adopted in 1997… but then came the September 11 terrorist attacks, which led to the invasion of Afghanistan a month later and, in March 2003, Iraq. During that time, emissions rose more dramatically than ever before, exacerbating the climate crisis.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.
