Earth is not a chessboard

Global power competition begets climate disaster

Trump threatens to take over Greenland, but backs down – for the moment. His tariffs roil global markets and supply chains. Middle powers are rushing to find a new equilibrium. Geopolitics today is top of the mind. But do we pause to reflect upon its impact on the planet?

Oceans Rise Empires Fall, by Gerard Toal, looks at what geopolitics does to the environment and ecology.
From a traditional perspective of international relations, the environment may appear to have little to do with geopolitics. However, this view overlooks the ‘geo’ of geopolitics and underplays the brutal competition for territory and resources. That in turn has had catastrophic environmental consequences. The author says geopolitics has helped set modern human civilisation on a trajectory towards a hothouse Earth. Geopolitics hastens future climate catastrophe.

This, on second thought, is logical. The fallout of a nuclear war will be felt by the whole planet. It would likely prompt an initial global cooling as debris clouds prevent the sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface. Radiation would spread wide, poisoning the biosphere.

When the French conducted nuclear tests in French Polynesia, the fallout contaminated the idyllic atolls and residents.

Similarly, the first US nuclear test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, saw continent-wide fallout with 46 American states and parts of Canada and Mexico being affected.

US, in a way, nuked itself. All for strategic, military and geopolitical power.

Second, the author argues that geopolitics prevents collaboration on climate change mitigation. For example, any meaningful climate compact needs China (currently the largest producer of emissions by tonnage) and US (historically the largest emitter) to cooperate. But that is unlikely because of geopolitical tensions between the two, especially over Taiwan.

Plus, if maintaining large, sophisticatedmilitaries is crucial for geopolitical power projection, then that too is contributing to the climate disaster through the production and deployment of war machines that guzzle millions of barrels of hydrocarbons.

In fact, an American M1A1 Abrams battle tank (which was deployed in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war) consumes two gallons of jet fuel per mile. Fighter jets burn even more fuel. Note also that Ukraine has flagged environmental destruction caused by the Russian invasion as ecocide, treating this as a war crime – wars pollute the world.

So, it’s not just arms companies profiting from war and geopolitical tensions, but also oil companies. In 2022, ExxonMobil earned a record $55.7bn in profit. Saudi Aramco recorded a whopping profit of $161bn in the same year. Therefore, there is a strong incentive for oil companies and producer states to literally fuel geopolitical tensions and ‘greenwash’ the damage they are doing to the environment.

So, what’s the solution? Unless action is taken, the world is on course for a catastrophic global surface temperature rise of 2.5°C or more over 1850-1900 by the end of the century. The challenge is to stop thinking of the Earth as a strategic chessboard.

Today, geopolitics has returned to the German lebensraum idea – the quest for ‘living space’ in a mad race for new territories and resources that will power capitalist growth, even as colonialism and its post-World War II avatar have polluted large swathes of the biosphere that are yet to be cleaned up.

Climate change is the planet physically rejecting the superstructure of polluting human civilisation. We need to Earth geopolitics, is the author’s excellent case.