Photograph by Ryan Molnar / Connected Archives
WORDS BY OLIVIA ROSANE
On Friday, January 12 in Yemen, before the sun crested the horizon at dawn, the United States and United Kingdom launched airstrikes against the Houthis—the militia group that controls the western part of Yemen, including its capital, Sanaa.
The U.S. and U.K. said they acted to stop the Houthis’ attacks on the “freedom of navigation,” targeting the military equipment the group used to attack vessels traveling through the Red Sea. The Houthis, meanwhile, claimed they are only targeting Israel’s ships or ships bound for Israel until it stops its bombardment and invasion of Gaza and allows for humanitarian aid.
The roughly 70 airstrikes on January 12 which killed at least five people, the militia group said, would “not go unanswered or unpunished.”
Later that day, as escalation became more likely, the price of oil rose by 1% as a growing number of oil tankers changed course, turning around rather than risking the Red Sea. Rather than pass through the Suez Canal, through which 10% to 15% of the world’s oil traffic passes, tankers have been taking the long route around South Africa, extending their voyage by over a week. That has increased shipping costs, which will likely increase prices, especially in Europe, according to The Washington Post.
“This case reflects the very close links between conflict and fossil fuels,” said Jatin Dua, a sociocultural anthropologist at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
As military conflict rages on in Ukraine, Gaza, and now the Red Sea, scholars and activists are increasingly calling out how oil and gas interests motivate war and fund its perpetrators.
“The control of oil and gas resources has been a key factor in many conflicts and geopolitical imperialism, either by providing part of the motivation for an invasion or by helping countries fund their militaries,” said Farhana Sultana, a professor at Syracuse University, in an email.
“Conflict, in turn, feeds production by driving up oil and gas prices,” she added, especially when it kicks off in a major oil-producing region like the Middle East.
It’s a feedback loop, where the quest for oil and gas fuels global conflict, which in turn stimulates more oil and gas extraction. But now, there’s a growing call to break the cycle, as peace and climate justice movements have united in a collective cry against war and fossil fuels.
“The control of oil and gas resources has been a key factor in many conflicts and geopolitical imperialism.”
Dua, whose research focuses on maritime piracy in the Indian Ocean, said the ability to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas had been a priority for empires beginning with the Portuguese in the 15th century. The U.S., U.K., and EU see themselves as the contemporary protectors of this connection.
“Part of the current U.S.-U.K. focus is tied to their self-appointed role in keeping this chokepoint open given the extensive oil and geopolitical interests for both governments,” Dua said.
Yet when it comes to safeguarding the movement of fossil fuels, the air strikes may have backfired. The Houthis have continued their maritime attacks, and Qatar announced that it was pausing the shipping of liquified natural gas (LNG) through the Suez Canal. Now, the entire global LNG fleet appears to have abandoned the route, which Dua said could raise global LNG prices. Meanwhile, Shell has suspended all its Red Sea shipments.
The world risks teetering toward the more dire scenarios outlined in an October 2023 report from the World Bank, which warned that a regional escalation of Israel’s war on Gaza could raise oil prices from 3% to 75% depending on the severity of the disruption.
“If things deteriorate, certainly, commodity markets will be affected,” said report coauthor John Baffes, senior agricultural economist at the World Bank.
This includes oil. And, as with any commodity, an increase in price leads to an increase in production.
Fellow report author Valerie Mercer-Blackman, a lead economist at the World Bank’s Prospects Group, said that an increase in global oil prices could incentivize OPEC in particular to boost its production, which it has been limiting to prop up plummeting prices.
Speaking as the news broke of the strikes in Yemen, Baffes maintained that the probability of severe disruption as outlined in the World Bank report remained low.
“But still, they are out there,” he said.
These developments come as the burning of fossil fuels has pushed 2023 to be the hottest year on record. Scientists warn that the global economy can only burn oil, gas, and coal at current levels for six more years and still limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. By expanding the hells of present-day conflict, do world leaders risk locking in future ones?
This question was already raised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the energy crisis that followed, which incentivized record U.S. oil production last year and gave the fossil fuel industry an argument for expanding LNG export infrastructure. Already, there are deals in place to supply LNG to China and the EU at least until 2050.
Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a global research scholar with the Center on Global Energy Policy, noted that a significant amount of LNG infrastructure was built or started before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent Europe scrambling for alternatives to Russian gas. Of the roughly 280 billion cubic meters per year (bcm/y) of LNG infrastructure currently under construction, she said, around 180 had commenced before 2022. The remaining 100 bcm/y—80 of which are based in the U.S.—moved forward in 2022 and 2023. “You can argue that they were facilitated/accelerated by the war in Ukraine,” Corbeau said in an email.
The projects that made the U.S. the world’s leading natural gas exporter in 2023 all started operations before the war. “You can only argue that operators were very motivated to run their plants to the maximum,” Corbeau added.
“Our movements for climate justice and anti-war are increasingly working together, especially as young people are making the connection between fossil fuels and conflict more clearly than ever.”
But on top of these existing plants, the industry is now seeking approval for more than 20 new export terminals along the U.S. Gulf Coast. If the LNG buildout goes according to plan, the new exports will account for more annual greenhouse gas emissions than the entire EU, climate campaigners say. Activists further argue that Europe’s initial post-invasion needs have already been met.
“Europe is awash in gas,” 350.org and Third Act cofounder Bill McKibben, who is one of the activists organizing a sit-in in Washington, D.C. next month to stop the buildout, told Atmos in an email. “They’re trying to use this excuse for the next round of LNG facilities, and it’s absurd. It’s actually going to go to Asia.”
Collin Rees, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, said the Ukraine war “gave the oil and gas industry an extremely convenient excuse to do what it was already planning to do, which was recklessly expand fossil fuel production that deepens climate and environmental injustice.”
At the same time, Rees argued the Russian invasion “had a nuanced impact on the energy transition.”
“It initially slowed momentum for a phaseout of fossil fuel production and sparked a major oil and gas industry-led push for expanded extraction and export, but it also led to a significant increase in renewables buildout and a decrease in gas demand across Europe,” he said.
It has also led to a “major uptick in awareness of the connections between fossil fuels and conflict,” Rees added.
When Russia first attacked, Ukrainian climate scientist and IPCC contributor Svitlana Krakovska called it a “fossil fuel war” because Russia was funding its military by selling oil and gas. Krakovska told Atmos she stands by this assessment “even more” today.
“It was for me evident that stopping [the use of] fossil fuels will help [the] climate system to combat climate change and for us to combat Russian aggression,” she said.
Krakovska added that it was a “powerful message for many climate activists” because they felt chastened in the immediate aftermath of the invasion from speaking out on climate when people were being killed. With Krakovska’s framing, instead of remaining silent, “they were encouraged to speak more” on both issues. The Ukrainian civil society group Razom We Stand, for example, has called for both the liberation of Ukraine and a green energy transition.
“The climate justice movement calls for a restructuring of an extractive economy that is harming people and ecosystems, but such aspirations and militarism are fundamentally at odds.”
It’s not as if these connections had never been made before: The slogan “No Blood for Oil” was marshaled against the Vietnam War as well as the Iraq War. But the timing of the Ukraine invasion, coming amidst a global movement to phase out fossil fuels, “supercharged the conversation,” Rees said.
The newly galvanized cause was aided by the internet and the increasingly global connectedness of youth movements. This awareness was maintained in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has killed more people per day than any other twenty-first century conflict and prompted charges of genocide.
As Atmos reported in November, some Palestinian rights advocates believe Israel’s onslaught and its support from the West is motivated partly by the desire to access the oil and gas that lie beneath Palestinian land or off its shores.
Sultana agreed it was fair to say the invasion of Gaza was motivated partly by the offshore gas reserves, within the context of Israel’s larger settler-colonial project in Palestine. She said gas may even provide a link between the Russia-Ukraine and Middle Eastern conflicts.
“Natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza and the West Bank have been identified, and given its profitability and alternative source demands for gas given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is unsurprising [that] Israel has moved to capture such a resource,” Sultana said.
Several prominent climate groups and activists including Greta Thunberg have expressed solidarity with Palestine and joined the call for a ceasefire.
“Our movements for climate justice and anti-war are increasingly working together, especially as young people are making the connection between fossil fuels and conflict more clearly than ever,” Rees said.
Israel’s attack on Gaza, and indeed the U.S. and U.K. strikes against the Houthis, may be interpreted as transactions of blood for oil, while Russia’s use of petrodollars to fund its invasion of Ukraine may be a case of oil for blood—but all have revealed the entanglements between militarism and fossil fuels.
“There is absolutely a feedback loop between fossil fuels and conflict,” Rees said.
As the world gears up for the next U.N. climate negotiations at COP29, the Russia-Ukraine war in particular presents a conflict of interest for its host—Azerbaijan—which has both promised to double gas exports to the EU by 2027 and helped fund Russia’s invasion. Russian oil company Lukoil holds nearly 20% of the country’s Shah Deniz field, a report from Global Witness recently noted.
“We all want a more peaceful world, and unfortunately, whilst we are locked into fossil fuels, conflict is more likely as nations and companies compete for finite resources. Azerbaijan benefits directly from the world’s continuing use of fossil fuels and the high prices driven by conflicts such as those in Ukraine and the Red Sea,” Dominic Eagleton, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, told Atmos.
“We know that petrostates have used clandestine or even brazen tactics to slow down world progress on renewables as they continue to make huge profits off the back of wars around the globe,” Eagleton added. “We need a rapid and just transition towards limitless renewables on a global scale that will make democracies less reliant on authoritarian petrostates.”
Whether or not this happens will come down to movements and the policies they can advocate for. “It takes bold political leadership to stand up [to] the fossil fuel lobby and say no,” Rees said.
Perhaps the same could be said for de-escalating geopolitical conflict.
Sultana argued that global anti-war and climate justice movements should deepen their coordination.
“The climate justice movement calls for a restructuring of an extractive economy that is harming people and ecosystems, but such aspirations and militarism are fundamentally at odds,” she said.
As the united front against war and fossil fuels have made abundantly clear, we won’t stop one without stopping the other.
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.
The Vicious Loop of Blood and Oil
