Climate Inaction is Fueling the Modern War Machine

IN PERHAPS THE most honest prayer in the history of Christendom, a young Augustine (at this point far from a saint) asked the Lord to “make me chaste—but not yet.”

Timing is always the trouble—we put off till tomorrow what we know we should do today, and trouble results. In our lives, and also in our lives as nations and as a world. What is the tragic and hideous war in Ukraine but the result of changes left too long? For instance, we’ve known for many years that Putin’s regime was brutish and careening toward something truly ugly. There’s little doubt that his henchmen assassinated Russian dissidents in the streets outside the Kremlin and Russian exiles in the streets of Britain; they tried (and very nearly succeeded) to kill his main political opponent by poisoning his underwear. But there were luxury apartments to be sold to his apparatchiks (the British capital has been nicknamed Londongrad; Trump’s son boasted that “we have all the funding we need out of Russia”).

And, of course, we’d long known that we needed to do something about climate change—after all, the Arctic is melting, which seems like the kind of sign that doesn’t require much interpretation. But we’re used to the world we live in; doing the work to change our lives was rarely a priority.

These two avoidances combined to power Putin. Remember, for instance, that the CEO of ExxonMobil (and eventually Trump’s first secretary of state) Rex Tillerson literally accepted an “Order of Friendship” from the Russian dictator, long after it was clear what kind of man he was. (“Friendship” was defined as Exxon having heavily invested in the project of developing Russia’s Arctic oil, a project only possible because we’d already melted most of the ice.)

So, Putin was able to invade Ukraine because he had a war machine paid for by oil and gas (literally—60 percent of the country’s exports consist of hydrocarbons. Try to find something of Russian manufacture in your house). And he was able to cow Europe by threatening to turn off its gas supplies.

Now, belatedly, at enormous expense in lives (and in treasure), we are rallying ourselves to the tasks we should have undertaken long ago: converting Europe and perhaps America to renewable energy, shutting down the money pipeline that has made Putin’s regime work. The people who paid the price for our delay are the ones sheltering in subway stations and pulling bodies from bombed hospitals; we must, sadly, pray that they will be the only ones, and that the whole world won’t pay in a radioactive cloud.

We are at a place in world history—on a crowded, hair-trigger planet—where putting off clearly necessary tasks because they are hard is the greatest dereliction of duty. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” is reasonable advice only if we actually heed it, which means taking that evil seriously when it arises, not putting it off in the hope that someone else will take it on.