Can we ever truly combat climate change in a world at war?

According to The Guardian, which has not given up on its war counter since February 24, 2022, we are now over 572 days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Every day, this media outlet and many like it try to keep the world aware of the fact that, even if our terminology differs, we in the West are at war. We have embargoes in place. Economic and military sabotage afoot, along with political espionage. Funding packages that openly deliver military equipment and tactical training to Ukraine. An International Criminal Court arrest warrant out for the leader of a country that sits on the UN Security Council.

But as with every children’s game or sporting event where semantics are king, it doesn’t really count if a ref doesn’t call it, or if a child doesn’t say the right word at the right moment in the playground ritual.

Unless we officially declare war, we can just issue sternly worded warnings, and otherwise pretend we’re in a “lukewarm war”, at best.

This is a necessary fiction, mind you: the rules of engagement require no less. Compulsory acts of escalation would be triggered the moment more of the West goes to war, and… besides, there are nuclear weapons on the line.

The fiction has to hold, to sustain the possibility of de-escalation.

But we also cannot forget that it is a fiction, because the impacts of this war are felt daily: in our refugee systems, in our distribution networks, in our financial systems, and in our world’s diminished readiness to tackle climate change.

We do not have time for this added atrocity. But here we are, embroiled a global poly-crisis all the same. In the wake of COVID-19’s blow to human thriving, amid a European land war with far-reaching socioeconomic consequences, we also have to to pull back from our current environmental overreach (i.e., we’re nowhere near on track for the 1.5°C cap on global temperature increase over pre-industrial levels set in 2015), and mitigate the damage already set into motion.

…Will we?

Or is this grand experiment in human civilization doomed by its own proclivity toward constant in-fighting? How can we plan around an active war involving some of the world’s most influential petroleum producers and enablers, to bring about a better future for those who survive it?

That’s the question we’re asking this week for Humanist Book Club, as we reflect on Kim Stanley Robinson’s highly optimistic The Ministry for the Future (2020): a near-future speculative fiction that didn’t account for humans being quite as self-serving as this war, among others, illustrates that we are.

We’ve survived our blinkered thinking before. Can we do it again?

Robinson’s book did not anticipate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although it talks about a future of “economic war” and reflects on infrastructure reforms and political responses that emerged from twentieth-century conflicts, the novel’s main focus is on the “War for the Earth”, which Robinson imagines starting after a series of coordinated attacks we’ll talk about in our next piece.

Just as news of Russia’s invasion hit the West, I published “Oil imperialism and the struggle for human agency over our futures”, in which I reflected on the dangers of being bound to an international oil economy with so many imperialist players. There, I highlighted how Russia had been playing with oil markets before COVID-19 disruption, and how much our reliance on fossil fuels was limiting other countries in ways that compelled pushing for oil independence at any cost. It was a brutal situation, even before the war: with national fortunes tied up in oil revenue, whoever could mess with oil markets could also mess with a nation’s ability to free up cash for alternative investments: say, for green energy.

So talk about a Catch-22: to get out of this oil imperial nightmare, some countries felt that they had to grow their domestic oil and gas to shake international control over the value of their economy. This vicious system is a topic I recently broached on Global Humanist Shoptalk, in a meditative miniseries on “Petronationalism”: how our modern world has been shaped by state projects framed around petroleum interests. And it’s one I reviewed here recently, around oil companies rushing to use up the last reserves while this market still has profit potential.

READ: The oil god delusion: What ancient pantheists got right

But with respect to the war itself, we have even bigger problems for climate change.

Emissions from war, and energy offsets

Last November, the Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP27, for short) heard a grim report on the climate impact of Russia’s invasion. The first version of Climate Damage Caused by Russia’s War in Ukraine explored a number of factors contributing to an uptick in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions:

• flights and other transport for displaced people,
• the gas, diesel, and jet fuels used by military vehicles,
• GHG emissions from the direct use of munitions,
• leakage from the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines,
• operational movements by the armies themselves,
• the impact of fires caused in conflict regions, and
• the anticipated GHG cost of infrastructure rebuilds.

The study’s authors, Lennard de Klerk and a team of Dutch researchers, compared the overall emissions in this seven-month period, of 97.3 million tCO2e (tons of CO2 equivalent), to that of the Netherlands in the same time frame. The Netherlands are one of the highest emitters in Europe, emitting 34% more than the average European in 2019, and still off course for 2030 reduction goals as of 2021.

In June, de Klerk released further grim findings, which will be refined and presented at COP28 at year’s end. In this updated Climate Damage Caused by Russia’s War in Ukraine, Russia’s war in Ukraine sits between Poland (lower) and Belgium (higher) in a list of top European GHG emitters. 120 million tCO2e were attributed to the aforementioned factors stemming from the conflict.

Even then, these are conservative estimates. The second report benefited from more clarity from Ukraine about certain emissions factors, but others remain behind the fog of war. Fuel outputs, for instance, are not readily available for either side, leading study authors to rely on estimates from observed usage and proxy sources. (Nevertheless, current estimates already find Russian troops to be consuming three times as much fuel as Ukrainian troops.) Russian fortifications, relying heavily on concrete, have also contributed to higher GHG emissions, with the toll of fires and infrastructure rebuilds also mounting over the war’s first year.

Worse yet, even amid energy economy contractions throughout Europe from this conflict, researchers found offsets for any attendant reduction in emissions:

The ongoing war in Ukraine caused the country’s economy to contract by almost 30% in 2022, resulting in a corresponding reduction in emissions. However, it is expected that the reduction in emissions are less than the decline in GDP. Nonetheless, these reductions were significant, but this report contends that most of the emissions reduction has simply been displaced outside Ukraine. Millions of refugees have been forced to flee the war, taking their carbon footprint with them to Europe and other parts of the world. In addition, due to energy shortages, disrupted supply lines, and destruction of factories, the production of consumer goods has shifted from Ukraine to other parts of Europe, resulting in increased emissions in
those regions. Furthermore, in the highly globalized iron and steel market, competitors have taken over dwindling production, thereby increasing emissions in their respective regions. Thus, the reductions in emissions in Ukraine have largely been offset by increased emissions elsewhere, providing no meaningful relief to the climate.

Page 9, Climate Damage Caused by Russia’s War in Ukraine (24 February 2022 – 23 February 2023), Lennard de Klerk et al, June 2023

This report also included more nuance with respect to the disruption of optimal flight plans, and other secondary war impacts that keep emissions high.

Together, the details paint a troubling picture. Yes, the war has to some extent stepped up Western efforts to reduce reliance on international oil and gas networks. What could not be managed effectively during peacetime, when Russia was gaming parts of the world’s petroleum industry, has very much been made necessary by the role of sanctions in international conflict.

However, amid Western pressures to keep Ukraine supported both materially and financially in our “lukewarm war”, these changes haven’t yet favored climate change mitigation. Rather, they’ve often materialized in harmful energy and military production processes that are easily justified as necessary for the war effort.

Will this state of affairs change? Could our wartime scrambles for alternative energy and production arrangements work out for us in general, given time?

That’s tough to say, especially since there is as of yet no end in sight to Russia’s war in Ukraine: only daily news of an aggressor at risk of becoming even more desperate and violent, the more Ukraine makes progress through retaliatory offensive maneuvers. With cluster munitions now available to both sides, and the nuclear question always hanging overhead, the escalating environmental and human costs of this terrible war have to weigh heavily on most.

But this war will end eventually, some way, somehow.

The more pressing question thus becomes: will this tremendous waste of time, energy, and human welfare end soon enough for us to resist the worst effects of climate change disaster? Can we ever fulfill the promise in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, of a time when the vast majority of humanity will unite in a “War for the Earth”, and no other?