No War for Oil, No Oil for War

Combine the strengths of the environmental and anti-war movements to defeat U.S. Middle East policy, end the Iraq War, and join the global community in the common struggle for a sustainable future.

On the march against the war in Washington, D.C. on January 27th, thousands of marchers wore buttons proclaiming, “No Blood for Oil,” and some held placards demanding “The Separation of Oil and State.” These slogans only begin to explain the link between war and environment, and especially, today, between war and warming. It was Earth First! leader Judi Bari who framed the demand best: “No war for oil. And no oil for war.” Because we not only have to stop oil wars, we have to renounce the oil economy and the destructive and wasteful use of fossil fuels. As energy conservation visionary Amory Lovins points out, the Pentagon is the world’s largest buyer of oil and the nation’s largest single user of energy — five billion gallons a year, 85 percent of all government energy use.


A few days after the march, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the first installment of its Fourth Assessment Report. In its peculiarly measured language, the report concluded that human-caused “[w]arming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is not evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level.” Likely or more than likely developments include heat waves, heavy rainfall events, increased areas of drought, increased tropical cyclone activity, and increased incidence of extreme high sea level. The conclusion of the summary report is that continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce larger future changes in the global climate system. Simply to stabilize at current levels of climate disruption would require roughly a one-third decrease in CO2 emissions. Ominously, in playing out various scenarios for future global economic development and cooperation, none of the report’s scenarios include additional climate initiatives, even at the very modest level of implementation of the major global treaties on climate, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or the emissions targets of the Kyoto Protocol.

The connections have never been as visible or as urgent as they are today. Understanding the link between America’s Middle East strategy and what Michael Klare calls the militarization of U.S. national energy policy reveals a new imperative for both the environmental and antiwar movements. We must now be working to unite these struggles to combine moral outrage at a criminal war with our determination to transform the fossil-fueled American Way of Life. Only this unified approach can ultimately eliminate the U.S. government’s imperative for its Middle East interventions.

Monthly Review