Secretary of Energy Chris Wright was also present, as the president and other officials celebrated the first tanker of Venezuelan oil’s Corpus Christi arrival. For some reason, a song by Sinéad O’Connor played in the background. “Millions and millions of barrels of oil are pouring right in here. It’s a great thing,” Trump said.
It was either totally surreal or totally normal in the context of this particular presidency. Less than two months ago, the Trump administration had captured — essentially kidnapped — Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Now he was casually hinting that the administration would do regime change again, this time in Iran instead of Venezuela, all while putzing around a city that’s on the brink of running out of water.
“Without significant rainfall, Corpus Christi is headed for a ‘water emergency’ within months and total depletion of the system next year, according to the city’s website,” Inside Climate News reported this week. The situation has been intensified by historic drought that has shifted precipitation patterns. What better place for Trump to celebrate the very petrochemicals that are causing these dramatic shifts — which could actually make it harder to import or export energy in the future. After all, you can’t refine crude oil into gasoline, or ship it anywhere, without water.
All of this foreshadowed the attacks on Iran in a way that perfectly encapsulates our suicidal moment, as climate change accelerates and more wars, large and small, break out all over the planet. Trump was even asked during his Texas visit about his whether he might join Israel in striking Iran. He declined to answer, once again pointing at the enormous oil tanker. “Right out of Venezuela. Look at that,” he said.
A week later, oil was literally raining down over Tehran thanks to petroleum facilities bombed and destroyed by Israeli jets, unleashing massive, coal black clouds of toxic gas that wept down on the city below. Such condensation can be “highly acidic and dangerous, causing chemical burns to the skin and severe lung damage,” the Iranian Environmental Protection Organization warned, according to NBC News. Residents described headaches and an unrelenting bitter taste in their mouths as the stench of smoke filled their homes. The head of the World Health Organization warned that food, water and air all risked being contaminated, with children and the elderly especially at risk. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called for restraint over this incident, which might feel odd given how avidly he has cheerleaded this war.
In addition to attacking numerous cargo ships trying to pass through the maritime chokepoint known as the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has also been credibly accused of attacking petroleum facilities in the UAE, Bahrain and other neighboring countries. From the sky, these complexes look a lot like Corpus Christi. Miles and miles of refineries and their stinking tailings ponds, adjacent to beach resorts that run on desalination plants. The air is rife with hydrogen sulfide, carrying the familiar smell of rotting eggs. As each side bombs each other, we should consider these facilities that have become prime target this war, the machinery producing the toxic fuels that feed the entire global economy.
“We should also openly discuss the fact that the U.S military is the No. 1 polluter on Earth. No oil company or coal-burning utility even comes close.”
One widely noticed side-effect of this conflict has been the abrupt spike in oil prices, as if the cost of a barrel of crude — or a gallon of gas at the pump — were the only important casualty in this mess. It’s understandable, on a certain level, why so much more attention has focused on those numbers, perhaps more than the civilian casualties America has created with the push of a button. But this myopia is literally killing us. It’s true that the American cost of living is getting worse — so much for “affordability”! — and it’s human nature to focus on what’s right in front of us, selfish as that may be. We’re all just trying to get to work and feed our families without too much price-gouging.
We are constantly reassured by the Trump administration that the rising price of gas and groceries is temporary, that it somehow amounts to short-term pain for long-term gain. Trump has even claimed the war itself could be over soon, though apparently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a different opinion. Either way, Trump’s reassurances may calm the oil market temporarily, but are undermined by the hydra’s-nest of competing narratives coming from the White House, a fog of lies so suffocating that it can be hard to keep up: Iran has been at war with the U.S. since 1979; Iran was weeks away from building any number of nuclear bomb. Then there’s the fundamental falsehood that this war isn’t a war at all.
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Nonetheless, it is disturbing how few of these breathless economics articles mention that continuing to burn fossil fuels are making this planet uninhabitable for billions of humans, animals, plants and everything else that makes this giant rock something more than a dead zone like Mars or the moon. All such articles should also consider the 7 million deaths from air pollution that happen every year, or the 500,000 deaths from extreme heat exposure, statistics that are predicted to keep rising.
We should also openly discuss the fact that the U.S military is the No. 1 polluter on Earth. No oil company or coal-burning utility even comes close. By some estimates, the American military creates more pollution than 140 individual countries. The amount of toxic crap that our armed forces generate as a byproduct of even their most mundane operations is mind-boggling, not to mention criminal on a planetary scale. That also creates a devastating feedback loop: As climate change accelerates, the likelihood of international conflict increases. More war and more global heating leads to more war and more global heating. We are standing on our own flaming funeral pyre and dousing it in gasoline.
But a third factor is entangled in this equation: access to food and water, both of which become more difficult to acquire as wars spread and global temperatures ratchet upward. Famine, or the threat of it, has been one of the most pivotal catalysts for war throughout the last 20,000 years of human history, according to Julian Cribb, author of the 2019 book “Food or War,” who wrote that “there is no country, no matter how food secure it may deem itself, that is immune from this type of conflict once politics, climate, environmental collapse, and military power compound their lethal brew.” When I reviewed the book for Undark, I was hoping it wouldn’t age so well. But as Cribb predicts, these dynamics — climate change begets war begets famine and back and forth — have only accelerated in the last few years:
The world food system depends critically on soil, water, nutrients and a stable climate to supply humanity’s daily need for nutriment — and all of these essential resources are in increasingly short supply, chiefly because of our own mismanagement of them and our collective failure to appreciate that they are finite. On current trends, the existing food system will tend to break down, first regionally and then globally, owing to resource scarcity from the 2020s onward, and especially towards the mid century — unless there is radical change in the world diet and the means by which we feed ourselves. This will lead to increasing outbreaks of violence and war. Nobody, neither rich nor poor, will escape the consequences.
But Trump doesn’t merely deny that any of this is a problem, dismissing climate change as a “hoax” — he, along with Netanyahu and other bullies of the world, are actively weaponizing this phenomenon. Desalination plants, crucial to fresh water supplies in many Middle East nations, became early targets for both sides in this war, though that appears to have stopped for now. Perhaps the belligerents realized that attacking this critical infrastructure threatened to create a catastrophic humanitarian disaster. People die of thirst much more quickly than of hunger, a crucial factor in the staggering death toll of Israel’s war in Gaza. Climate change makes both kinds of death more likely.
This crisis that some have designated World War III could become among the first “water wars” of the 21st century. Many countries in the Middle East get more than three-quarters of their drinkable water from desalination. That includes Iran, which is straining under a historic drought made worse by years of mismanagement, while climate change jacks up temperatures and reduces rainfall. Meanwhile, back in Corpus Christi, desalination plants are being developed as a way of solving the water shortage in South Texas.
These parallels should remind us that we our deeply interconnected on this planet, and that the “butterfly effect” isn’t just a bad Ashton Kutcher film. Poor rainfall in Texas is connected to fossil fuel extraction in Tehran is connected to melting Arctic ice caps and to burning Amazon rainforests.
While Hormuz may be closed, now oil is pouring forth from other areas of the globe. In an attempt to staunch the bleeding, Trump has now lifted sanctions on Russian oil, penalties enacted over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, another disastrous war with stark environmental consequences in which climate change benefits the aggressors. As a 2023 review in the journal WIREs Climate Change noted, “Russia benefits from maintaining global reliance on fossil fuels and from climate change itself, because warming may increase the extent and quality of its arable land, open a new year-round Arctic sea route, and make its harsh climate more livable.”
Putin, like Trump, doesn’t seem to realize that this pursuit of global dominance while burning it all down will just make them kings of a pile of lifeless rubble. Thankfully, most others don’t see it that way. The widespread domestic opposition to this war is completely unprecedented. That should give us hope that, even in America, more people realize that ending war and combating the climate crisis are the same fight. Polling from Reuters/Ipsos found that only 27% of Americans approved of the attacks on Iran (43% disapproved and 29% were not sure), while a PBS poll found an outright majority of 56% disapproved.
We can try to find another silver lining in reports that, with one-fifth of the world’s oil supply cut off, many nations are trying to jumpstart their shift to renewable energy. On the other hand, as the New York Times reports, some countries may be forced to go back to outdated and even dirtier resources like coal. No matter where we live in the world, if we don’t want to live in a superheating world of accelerating warfare, we have choices to make.
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