“Access to resources has always been part of conflict and warfare. But given the dramatic effects of climate change, this will quadruple the effect” said Wopke Hoekstra to the Financial Times. The European Union’s climate chief is tasked with corralling the bloc into becoming the first net zero continent by 2050, and he is arguing that security and climate change go hand-in-hand. Some may think that notion is absurd, but just look at the Arctic. As Tiernan Cannon detailed for Splinter in his interview with Sergiy Slipchenko of Arctic Pod, Donald Trump’s desire to claim Greenland does “hint that he understands perfectly well the growing geopolitical importance of the Arctic.”
As the Arctic warms up and melting ice creates new pathways, Slipchenko notes that “the things that were previously inaccessible—like natural resources, sea routes—are now becoming much more accessible to all these countries. And they’re seeing the economic benefits, or, at least, the economic potential of exploiting the Arctic.” About 30 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves are in the Arctic, so if you doubt the EU climate chief’s assertion, understand that the world is already experiencing a grand competition right now between hostile militaries entirely because of the effects of a warming world.
A 2019 Stanford-led study found that climate change has already influenced between three percent and twenty percent of armed conflict risk over the last century, and in our increasingly likely scenario of 2 degrees Celsius of warming beyond preindustrial levels, Stanford estimates that “the influence of climate on conflicts would more than double, rising to a 13 percent chance.” According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “90 per cent of the world’s refugees originate from countries that are already impacted by the climate emergency and/or have the least capacity to adapt to an increasingly hostile environment.” If anything, conflict follows climate change.
Those commies over at **squints** CNBC wrote about a study published by a military geography and environmental security specialist which suggests that “water shortages are likely brewing future wars — with several flashpoints across the globe.” The Trump Administration and MAGA at large can try to put their heads in the sand and pretend that climate change isn’t real and won’t have effects on the planet, but all the evidence of the entire past century and alarmingly warming present point to climate change leading to increased conflict across the world as we speak.
And frankly, why wouldn’t it? Climate change destroys the natural resources that underwrite our prosperity, and so as resources become scarcer and life becomes more precarious, more groups will literally fight to claim additional resources to replace what they have lost. Add in the fact that the world has been shaped by weapons contractors over the last near-century, and the ability to wage an armed conflict is near ubiquitous.
And so is climate change. The planet has likely warmed at or beyond the previous 1.5-degree target/hope, as the World Meteorological Organization recently estimated a 70 percent likelihood that 2025 to 2029 will average more than 1.5-degree warming, and now the 2-degree limit set by the Paris Agreement looks to be squarely in our sights along with the potential for armed conflict to more than double. This past generation of global elites will be remembered as the people who plundered the globe’s dying empires while the world burned, and the armed conflicts of the future will also be a central part of their sordid legacies.
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