Are the peace movement and the climate movement the same thing?

It struck me the other day that ‘peace’ is a word we’re not using much at present. Our war in Iran is unpopular, for sure, but there’s not really a ‘peace movement’ to end it (though the midterm elections are in some measure a proxy for that). When we talk about it, it’s in the context of ‘forever wars,’ as in ‘what a pain for us to have to fight,’ or it’s about the way that war has raised prices. We seem barely to have noticed that we have attacked another country, killed its leaders, bombed its schools, made life as impossible as we can for its citizens, not to mention billions of other humans who are dealing not with higher prices at the pump but with no access to fertilizer or fuel. But actually this is the perfect moment for a revival of the peace movement—because it’s easier now than ever before to imagine the rapid transition to a more peaceful world. That’s because all of a sudden we have an alternative to oil, and if you look around us, oil is the cause, the weapon, and the casualty of our current round of conflicts. More than at any point in our past, oil has become inextricably bound up in warfare, which means we could in short order move past it, in ways that I don’t think we’ve focused on clearly enough. I write this newsletter so I can share ideas like this; if you find them useful, and if you can afford it, please take out a modestly priced and voluntary subscription. If you can’t afford it, then don’t worry about it, just read! I’m thinking about all this because I’ve taken a day off of the campaign trail to come to Independence, Missouri (just a stone’s throw from the Kansas Senate race!). The town is best known as Harry Truman’s home, but it’s also the headquarters of a denomination, the Community of Christ, that had been unknown to me until they asked me if I’d accept their annual International Peace Award, which had gone in previous years to some of my real heroes: Dolores Huerta, Rev. James Lawson, Terry Tempest Williams, Jane Goodall. As it turns out, the Community of Christ is an interesting group—they’re descended from the Mormons who didn’t follow Brigham Young to Utah but instead stayed in the Midwest with the family of Joseph Smith after he was killed by an armed mob. Over the years they drifted apart from their Utah brethren, until in the last generation they’ve become much closer to the Protestant mainline, indeed an avowedly progressive church, led by a woman, committed to LGBT participation, and very focused on peace. As I write this, I’m looking out on a Japanese garden, planted with a sister community in that country, in recognition of the complicated role that Independence and its most famous son played in the planet’s nuclear history; I’ve just come from a daily Prayer for Peace service. If I had to describe this group, I’d say: imagine Unitarians, except that they believe in Jesus and are earnestly Midwestern in their manners and customs. I like them very very much; they’ve built something special. Anyway, the fact that I needed to give a talk as part of this awards ceremony got me more focused than I usually am on questions of peace, and the more I thought, the simpler my task seemed. The world is obviously at war right now; in fact, one Times columnist mused last month that World War III may already be in its early stages. Vladimir Putin is hammering civilian infrastructure across Ukraine, as his ongoing and unprovoked attack nears the five-year mark. The U.S., having attacked Venezuela and then Iran, finds itself running short of missiles and interceptors, bad news for the Saudis who are suddenly facing strikes from renegade Yemenis. There are plenty of other conflicts around the world, some military and some for the moment just running on intimidation and coercion—the U.S. siege of Cuba, for instance, which is killing silently. (In 2018, infant mortality on the island was four per thousand births, lower than in the U.S. Now, thanks to us, it’s more than double that). War, of course, has many causes—ethnic and religious supremacy, personal ambition—but it is very simple to see the degree to which oil plays a crucial part in so many of these conflicts, as cause, as weapon, and increasingly as vulnerability. Consider. We attacked Venezuela, holder of the world’s second-largest oil reserves—as far as I can tell there’s been no effort by our leaders to explain this in terms of human rights or democracy, but only as an effort to secure its oil supplies. Read the “fact sheet” the White House put out this summer about our purposes there: In the biggest oil deal in world history, President Donald J. Trump has secured U.S. majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela – vastly expanding our current U.S. territorial proven reserves of roughly 46 billion barrels. This deal secures our energy dominance for the next century—all at zero cost to the United States. The deal, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, gives the U.S. government powerful governance rights, economic ownership, and guaranteed low-cost off-take from a new private Venezuelan oil champion, which will be the second-largest private oil company by reserves in the world. Our attack on Iran was somewhat more complex, clearly affected by Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to cripple the Tehran regime (and stay out of jail) but also clearly driven by Trump’s fascination with the world’s third-largest oil and gas reserves. In March, for instance, Trump said in a social media post that that the U.S. would hit Iran "VERY HARD TONIGHT" and would "assume total control" of Iran's oil and gas industries, including the key Kharg Island oil terminal, in the "not too distant future." As he explained to the Financial Times, "To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people." And whatever the cause, oil has clearly become the weapon in this ugly and stupid war, with each side trying to close off the other’s crude traffic, in hopes of forcing economic capitulation. Trump may be in the harder place here, because he’s facing an election soon, and despite his best attempts to render the electorate impotent, it appears we will actually be allowed to vote somewhat freely, and that $6 diesel may be coming close to “mutilization of our children” as a campaign issue. Trump’s clever response to this dilemma has been to betray the people of Ukraine. Remember, Putin was able to attack them because of his country’s oil wealth (John McCain’s classic line: “a gas station with nukes”), and he used his hydrocarbons to try and win the war early on, cutting off the supply to western Europe in an effort to get them to abandon the defense of Kyiv. Now he’s using his supply of diesel (and the lure of lots of “ deals ” with Trump associates) to get America to walk away from its one-time ally; Trump yesterday suspended the Lindsay Graham Act sanctioning Russian oil, in an act that even at this late date left diplomats speechless. In particular Putin wants Trump to get Ukraine to stop attacking his oil refineries, the tactic that Zelensky has hit on during the past six months, and which is causing endless pain (and spiking EV sales) in Russia. Trump, of course, has obliged, and his main satrap (or is it the other way round?) Elon Musk has apparently literally sabotaged his Starlink system so as to endanger Ukrainians. It is oil top to bottom—cause, effect, weapon. As it is in the Gulf, where the Houthis and the Iranians target pipelines and pumping stations in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who in turn use their oil wealth to hit back. As it is in Cuba, where our main weapon is an oil blockade. Here’s how Trump put that one back in January “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA - ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. Thank you for your attention to this matter.” And in March They have no money, they have no oil, they have no nothing. They have nice land. They have nice landscape. And Marco Rubio, in June: For decades, the regime has stolen and hoarded available fuel — using it for the Castros’ private jet, the security services forces used to repress the Cuban people, to keep empty tourist hotels lit up, and to bus people in for fake protests and political stunts Mostly, of course, they used it to run hospitals and schools and a power grid for people’s homes. But no more. As the AP reported in August: A 20-minute burst of electricity is a small miracle in Havana nowadays — a miracle that sometimes comes at 3 a.m. That’s when 72-year-old Leidis Rodríguez frantically cooked beans after the lights switched on this week following hours of uninterrupted blackouts. “The power has come back on, everyone go!” Rodríguez shouted. Public transportation and cultural events have come to a standstill. So has tourism, the country’s economic engine, especially as tourism companies have withdrawn , leaving 25,000 hospitality jobs vacant. Flights to the island are regularly canceled and workdays have been shortened to adjust to the new reality of a Cuba without power. Medicine shortages have worsened and food rots in fridges without power. “If there’s no electricity, there’s no water because it doesn’t get pumped to the tank. When there’s water, there’s no electricity,” Rodríguez lamented. Anyway, as people in these nations endure horrific lives, and the world edges closer to truly unspeakable catastrophe, the fact that it’s all connected to oil suggests a way out: which is to make oil less important. And there’s really exactly one way to do that, which everyone with a heart or a mind (or a calculator) is edging toward: replacing it with clean, cheap, far-less-vulnerable power from the sun and wind. That’s what Cuba is doing, installing solar panels faster than anyplace else on earth. It’s what Ukraine is trying to do, with leadership from heroes like Svitlana Romanko and Razom We Stand. (I was unsurprised to see that she’d given up on Trump this week: “Europe must now lead, closing every remaining Russian energy loophole this month, and proving that the democratic world will keep starving Putin's war machine even when the White House will not."). And it’s what all the bystanders to these wars are trying to do, as they move decisively towards clean energy and EVs to cope with the fallout of events they did not initiate. Since Trump likes plaques, we should give him one as EV salesman of the decade. We will look back on 2026 as the year that it became entirely clear the Internal Combustion Engine was a relic—sales of electric cars are soaring everywhere . Six hundred thousand electrics were sold in Europe in September, up 39 percent from the year before. As Michelle Lewis reports The UK, France, Spain, Portugal, and Finland all posted their highest monthly EV sales ever. France’s sales climbed 78% year over year to almost 80,000, while Germany’s rose 61% to 117,000. Look: every EV sold drops the demand for oil. Every heat pump sold cuts the demand for natural gas. Every solar system that goes up on a roof or balcony produces clean energy with no need for hydrocarbons. And all of it not only helps take some pressure off the climate, it helps—really, far more quickly—to rein in the siege of warfare now underway. If we lived on a planet that ran mostly on wind and solar power, war would be less likely. It’s hard to fight over sunshine. I’ve heard often from people over the years, asking if the climate movement and the peace movement could be more united, and it seems to me that this is the key. The solar panel is the new peace symbol. Pass it on. Oh, and the picture at the top is the massive steeple of this Community of Christ headquarters set against last night’s setting sun in Independence. Below is what that spiraling steeple looks like from the inside: to me, the interior of a conch shell, stretching far overhead. The architect has managed to bring the living world inside; I’ve rarely been in a more beautiful building. Or a more peaceful one. Share In other energy and climate news: +Daniel Swain, West Coast weather expert, has a new and ominous set of El Niño forecasts for California: While it’s true that the “tilt in the odds” toward a stormier and wetter California winter during El Niño is decidedly modest during weaker events, this year’s El Niño is far from ordinary. Amid an El Niño that will become the strongest, and also easternmost-centered, event on record (if it isn’t already), this year’s tilt in the odds toward wet and stormy conditions in California will be profoundly unsubtle. Indeed, the very latest seasonal update from the international multi-model “superensemble” reflects this quite dramatically. Quite frankly, I’ve never seen anything like it before (and I do not say that lightly!). I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past couple of weeks crunching the numbers and commiserating with other experts in the El Niño space, and here are some key points from my own quantitative and contextual assessment: The likelihood of a wetter than average winter in California is extremely high by historical standards (odds >90% statewide) The likelihood of an extremely wet (top 10%/90th percentile) winter are are much greater than usual (~5x background odds) There is a greatly elevated risk (around ~20x background likelihood) of a record-wet season, and/or individual record-wet months High confidence wet signal extends farther north along CA coast and inland vs typical El Niño; highest confidence region includes San Francisco Bay Area/Sacramento region and points south Peak California impacts will be from December through March, and January & February may feature highest likelihood of extreme wet conditions It’s worth remembering what a record-wet winter for California could mean: the Golden State has seen some truly terrible floods in the past, with the deluge in 1862 killing one percent of the state’s population. Hopefully, good warning and better infrastructure will help this time. +Genevieve Gunther has a powerful essay in Current Affairs, arguing that we’re not really taking on the climate crisis because too many elites have too much invested in the status quo. We already have the technological and behavioral solutions we need to live affluent, modern lives without coal, oil, and gas. The core problem is that the phaseout of fossil fuels would catalyze a serious financial and lifestyle shock to the richest among us. But as a trade-off it would also raise people’s real incomes, making the vast majority of us better off. In a decarbonized and electrified net-zero economy—quite aside from avoided costs of worse heat waves, droughts, floods, storms, diseases, and so on— we would be paying much less for electricity, heating, and transportation, currently a huge chunk of people’s monthly bills. Healthcare costs would decline too , simply due to the public-health benefits of reducing air pollution. (We should think of high health-insurance prices as a sort of fossil-fuel subsidy.) And yes, fossil-fuel phaseout would help to mitigate global income inequality (no more private jets and white boats, for one thing). +While the new permitting reform legislation that I’ve argued against seems for the moment to have the votes required to pass it, more arguments for caution keep emerging. Here’s Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, Executive Director of the Western Environmental Law Center . There’s a fundamental question regarding the directionality of climate policy : do we cede control to capital and markets or do we nest capital and markets within a framework of strong, modernized federal governance? BAAJA, the Lee-Capito-Heinrich-Whitehouse industrial fast-tracking deal, is firmly on the side of market dominance. The bill confers a huge set of concessions to developers of all stripes, including new litigation tools, while attempting to defang public-interest organizations, the public in general, and hobble the next President of the United States. This is precisely what Section 1402 of the bill is all about, which locks in an “all of the above” energy mix, dominated by fossil fuels. It’s touted as a mechanism to counter Trump’s war on renewables—and it may have some marginal benefits over the remainder of his presidency—but I guarantee you that the fossil-fuel industry will weaponize it against the next president, bringing litigation in federal courts with Trump appointees. If a new president says “We’re going to transition from fossil fuels to renewables,” and then executes that statement through executive orders, regulatory actions, and the like, my bet is that fossil fuels or other interests will challenge that as evidence of “disparate treatment” and prima facie evidence, per the bill, of “an intentional course of action undertaken by the Federal Government to create such a pattern.” Meanwhile, Chris Nelder provides a fine account of how to argue with oil companies, including some fine and fiery language from RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: November could make actually a really big difference. What you have right now is a president who is essentially the tool of the worst elements of the fossil fuel industry and unrepentant about it. And a congress controlled by his party that is completely spineless when it comes to any kind of resistance to him, and even worse, when they look around at the fossil fuel industry, which is their major donor. And, I mean, they’ve been doing the job of the fossil fuel industry for a decade or more now. So you have this terrible situation in which there’s almost no resistance to the fossil fuel industry’s command over government and its agencies. That changes very fast, if the power shift changes in Washington to a Democrat-controlled House and or a Democrat-controlled Senate. And in that context, there’s a lot to talk about and to put pressure on. One is dealing with the climate driven insurance crisis that we’re seeing, the great climate insurance collapse, a friend of mine calls it. +My local utility, Vermont Gas, is investing in geothermal power for the first time, highlighting a growing “gas to geo” trend according to Catherine Boudreau: The utility, which serves about 56,000 customers in the northwestern part of the state, is covering the upfront cost of the new infrastructure that will provide heating and cooling for a new affordable housing project. Dandelion Energy is handling the system design and drilling. President and CEO Neale Lunderville told Latitude Media that geothermal networks are good business for Vermont Gas because it allows the utility to continue expanding its customer base even as the state shifts away from fossil fuels. In Vermont, most homes still rely on fuel oil and propane for heating, even as the vast majority of the grid is powered by renewables, such as hydropower imported from Canada. The state in 2020 enacted a legally binding target to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels. “This is an important part of our long-term strategy to diversify our revenue and keep the service we provide affordable for customers,” Lunderville said. +A fascinating episode of whisteblowing by an anonymous insurance executive, who wrote a compelling manifesto and an accompanying essay for the Guardian In the face of ever more extreme and unpredictable climate risks, I am coming under pressure to cut my forecasts for the losses that disasters will cause in order to make insurance more affordable – and get my employer more business. In some instances, the questioning of our numbers and models is justified. But too often, it is not being done to produce more accurate models, but to artificially lower prices. If this is happening at my firm, which is struggling to compete with rivals’ prices, it’s happening elsewhere. In the most basic terms, we are collec