Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing genocide in Palestine have exposed the undeniable connections between the climate crisis, fossil fuels, and war. This is not a new phenomenon: For decades, fossil fuels have shaped, exacerbated, sustained or prolonged conflicts across the world, unlike any other commodity. For instance, revenues from Russia’s oil and gas exports continue to sustain its brutal war against Ukraine. At the same time, fossil-fuel powered conflicts and military activity accelerate climate breakdown. Large-scale ecological harm and skyrocketing greenhouse gas emissions are among the documented results of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Because fossil-fuel use and war are mutually exacerbating, peace and climate justice activists have much to gain in developing joint strategies. Conflict prevention and resolution are necessary steps in cutting global emissions; and a fair and just phase-out of fossil fuels must be part of any strategy for building a peaceful world for all.

Fossil fuels as fuel of war

Fossil fuels interact with domestic and international politics in complex ways, but there are striking historical correlations between fossil fuels and war. No other commodity has shaped international wars more than oil. For instance, an estimated one-quarter to one-half of all interstate wars have been linked to oil since the 1973 Oil Crisis, the beginning of the modern energy era.

Disputes over the sovereignty of physical oil reserves have often led to war. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, for example, was motivated by the expected profit from seizing Kuwait’s oil fields (although the prospect of expanding Iraq’s influence in the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was also a factor.) More recently, disputes over territorial and national sovereignty have reignited between Venezuela and Guyana. Although Venezuela has claimed the Essequibo territory since 1811, the discovery of great oil production potential in the Guyanese region in 2015 added to its economic and strategic value. It is estimated that Guyana has the potential to produce at least 12-15 billion barrels of oil equivalent, overall – possibly as many as 25 billion BOE. While the contested borders remained relatively quiet under the administration of the late Hugo Chávez, President Nicolás Maduro announced in early December 2023 that he had taken steps to formalise the incorporation of Essequibo as part of Venezuela, raising fears of possible military action and prompting actors such as Brazil to step in as diplomatic mediators.

The prospect of market-domination of the energy sector can be another incentive for foreign intervention. While the role of oil in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq continues to be the subject of debate, the sum of US military interests in Middle Eastern oil reserves is marked by what Jacob Mundy describes as ‘oil for insecurity, a dynamic in which war, militarisation and autocracy in the region have been entangled with the economic dominance of North Atlantic oil companies, US hegemony and discourses of energy security’. Once Saddam Hussein was removed from power, the United States set up a provisional government that privatised the Iraqi oil industry. The Global Centre for Climate Justice argues that this ‘benefitted Anglo-American oil companies like Shell and BP, granting them 30-year contracts that allowed them to keep most of the profits from Iraq’s oil extractions and export them abroad’.¹Katya Forsyth and Frederick Kerr, “The Toxic Relationship between Oil and the Military,” Global Center for Climate Justice, 2 March 2022 According to a study released in 2018, the US military spends $81 billion a year in monopolising global oil supplies.² “The Military Cost of Defending Global Oil Supplies,” Securing America’s Future Energy, 21 September 2018

The evidence tying fossil-fuel extraction to war and military intervention keeps piling up: oil-exporting states engage in about 50% more international conflict than non-petrostates, on average.³Jeff D. Colgan, “Oil, Domestic Politics, and International Conflict,” Energy Research & Social Science 1 (March 2014) Oil exporters tend to spend significantly more money on military and security forces than non-exporting countries. This trend is particularly prevalent among autocracies, such as Libya under Qaddafi or Iran under Khomeini, which tend to engage in what scholar Jeff D. Colgan has termed ‘petro-aggression’. Qaddafi intervened in the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-79, sending Libyan military forces and equipment in support of Uganda, and changing the course of the war. In the 1980s, Libya provided substantial support to more than thirty foreign insurgencies and terrorist groups around the world. Similarly, Iran’s oil revenue has enabled its military and financial support to external actors such as Hezbollah, which played a significant role in opposing Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982.

The lens of ‘petro-aggression’ can also be applied to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Between the invasion and November 2023, Russia accumulated more than €550 billion in revenue from fossil-fuel exports.⁴“The Carbon War: Accounting for the Global Proliferation of Russian Fossil Fuels and the Case for Unprecedented International Sanctions Response,” Razom We Stand, December 2023 Global Witness has found that, in 2023 alone, Russian crude-oil exports to the European Union produced €1.1 billion in direct tax revenues: enough to buy over 1,200 Kalibr cruise missiles or 60,000 Shahed drones, both of which have been used to bomb cities and kill civilians across Ukraine. According to RAZOM We Stand, a Ukrainian organisation working for a ban on Russian fossil fuels and a global renewable energy transition, Russia seeks to allocate almost a third of its total state expenditures to the military and military-industrial complex in 2024, a 70% increase of national defence spending from 2023.

Fossil fuels do not only shape war and conflict through ‘petro-aggression’ or states’ desire for market domination – they also provide the very lifeblood for powering conflicts and military activity worldwide.

Fossil fuels and militarism

Beyond the relationships between war and oil grabs, and between oil revenues and military spending, militaries are particularly dependent on fossil fuels as an energy source. The global military-industrial complex is among the largest institutional consumers of fossil fuels, even in the absence of active conflict. Conservative estimates suggest that military activity contributes at least 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.⁵Stuart Parkinson and Linsey Cottrell, “Estimating the Military’s Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Scientists for Global Responsibility and Conflict and Environment Observatory, November 2022 To put this into perspective, the global emissions of the civilian aviation industry account for roughly 2.5%. Increases in military expenditure correlate with rising emissions – in 2023, global military expenditures reached an unprecedented high of $2443 billion. Reporting these emissions is not yet mandatory under the agreements of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, despite civil-society pressure at the yearly COPs.

Military activity, conflict and war produce emissions through destruction, and also through subsequent reconstruction. The use of missiles and bombs and the resulting destruction of infrastructure and entire ecosystems, including carbon sinks such as forests, combine to create immense increases in emissions. For example, the first year of the war in Ukraine released additional emissions roughly equal to the annual output of Belgium.⁶Lennard de Klerk, Mykola Shlapak, Anatolii Shmurak, Oleksii Mykhalenko, Olga Gassan-zade, Adriaan Korthuis, Yevheniia Zasiadko, “Climate damage caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine,”  Initiative on GHG Accounting of War,  June 2023More recently, the study A Multitemporal Snapshot of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Israel-Gaza conflict revealed that the first two months of the war in Gaza produced emissions comparable to the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations – and 99% of these emissions come from Israel’s military operations. Since the reconstruction of infrastructure and buildings also relies on fossil fuels and other emissions-heavy material, such as concrete, the same study estimated that reconstructing Gaza will entail total annual emissions that are higher than those of over 130 countries.⁷Nina Lakhani, “Emissions from Israel’s War in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe,” The Guardian, 9 June 2024

Fossil fuels and the wartime-peacetime continuum

Fossil fuels also play a role in exacerbating violence, insecurity, and conflict within countries. They are implicated in civil wars and separatist movements, but also in systemic human rights violations, including gender-based violence. Feminist activists and women’s civil society movements have argued that violence against women and girls operates on a peacetime-wartime continuum – where acts of violence are not standalone incidents but have their roots in existing peacetime inequalities and harmful gender norms.

In terms of civil wars and internal armed conflict, Global South countries producing oil are twice as likely to suffer from internal rebellion as non-producing countries.⁸Micheal L. Ross, “Blood Barrels: Why Oil Wealth Fuels Conflict,” Foreign Affairs (2008) The presence of oil resources increases the likelihood of civil war, such as in Sudan, or the emergence of separatist movements, such as in the Niger Delta. The risk of armed conflict is also increased when ethnic groups both live close to oil deposits and are excluded from national political systems.⁹Victor Asal et al., “Political Exclusion, Oil, and Ethnic Armed Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 60(8), (2016) Some research has indicated that the presence of oil is correlated with intensification of violence during armed conflict, and influences the activities of armed groups, including the decision of armed groups to settle in particular regions or areas, as was the case in the Colombian municipality of San Vicente de Chucurí in the 1990s were paramilitaries forced peasants off their land to enable oil exploration. ¹⁰Juan David Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “The connection between oil wealth and internal armed conflicts: Exploring the mechanisms of the relationship using a subnational lens,” The Extractive Industries and Society 6(2), (April 2019)

Internal conflicts and the activities of armed groups are driven by complex and context-specific factors, and are mediated by colonial legacies and an international financial and economic architecture that continue to disadvantage many Global South countries. Additional motivations for these conflicts include control of oil rents, the symbolic power afforded by control over such resources,¹¹Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “The Political Economy of Secession,” (2002) and grievances resulting from ecological destruction, human rights violations, and economic inequalities around fossil-fuel extraction sites.

Aceh, Indonesia, is a case in point: Disputes over oil revenues after the discovery of natural gas in 1971 intersected with grievances resulting from human rights violations and economic inequalities, as well as longstanding questions of sovereignty and self-determination. The siphoning of oil and gas profits out of Aceh, along with the forced displacement of communities near oil and gas infrastructure, and the increased presence of Indonesian security forces around extraction sites, gave rise to Aceh’s first separatist insurgency. The Free Aceh Movement waged a war of independence against the Indonesian military for approximately 30 years, from the mid-1970s until 2005. The Indonesian government sought to retain control of Aceh in large part due to its wealth in oil and gas. The armed conflict only came to an end after the 2004 tsunami, which killed almost 200,000 people in Aceh. The resulting peace agreement, the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding, stipulated that 70% of oil and gas revenues should stay in Aceh.

In South Sudan and Sudan, the discovery of oil in the 1970s added decisive impetus to the existing North-South divide rooted in tribal, economic, religious, social, and political factors. The first export of crude oil in 1999 marked a turning point, becoming the principal cause of conflict. Communities in the oil-producing parts of South Sudan and Sudan did not benefit from this infrastructure and therefore developed grievances, resulting in attacks on oil infrastructure and hostage-taking. The sharing of oil revenue was a key component of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, and was again brought into the discussion after the split of the country in July 2011. In the same year, South Sudan invited international investments into a newly opened oil field expected to generate $1.3 billion in oil revenue per year. However, the majority of revenue from petroleum extraction and related value-additions accrued to the multinational corporations who controlled it, and since opening the oil field the government has lost more than $4 billion to oil companies alone, in unpaid taxes.The sudden wealth associated with the oil field compromised South Sudan’s stability, and by 2013 the elite scramble for South Sudan’s oil riches triggered a new conflict that may have killed as many as 400,000 people, while displacing millions. Despite a 2018 peace agreement, South Sudan’s population continues to suffer from the lack of basic services, often on the brink of starvation, while oil revenues paid for ‘off-budget expenditures, undisclosed debt payments, and allocations to its opaque state oil company Nile Petroleum’.

Another stark example of fossil-fuel extraction leading to militarisation and violence instead of prosperity is the case of Cabo Delgado in Mozambique. In 2010, offshore gas fields were found in Northern Mozambique, with multinational corporations from the Global North rushing to draw up extraction plans. Three large Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects have been developed since, with most of the gas likely to be exported to Asian and European markets. The gas projects have had significant negative environmental impacts, and the development of onshore support facilities has displaced communities, costing farmers and fishermen their livelihoods. Many are still waiting for compensation for their forced resettlement.  All of these changes exacerbated pre-existing discontent in the region, and led to violent insurgencies from 2017 onward. Islamic state (ISIS) militants, most of whom were initially motivated to join the insurgent group by perceived socio-economic exclusion, perpetrated horrific attacks on civilians and triggered a humanitarian crisis that has displaced close to one million people. The Mozambican government responded by bringing in private military and security companies, which have also committed human rights violations, further exacerbating violence and longstanding resentments. The conflict has resulted in grave cases of sexual and gender-based violence against women and girls, from abduction by insurgents to rape and sexual assaults by government soldiers, as well as forced prostitution. The combined presence of Mozambique’s army allied foreign troops, and private military and security companies (PMSCs) helped to reclaim significant territory from the insurgents and re-establish basic services, but military action won’t resolve a conflict rooted in deep local grievances.

In Latin America, fossil fuels have played a key role in sustaining criminal activity by non-state actors, exacerbating violence and insecurity. In response to a government crackdown in 2007, Mexican cartels diversified their operations to include theft of hydrocarbons from oil pipeline networks. After 2009, one cartel, Los Zetas, monopolised hydrocarbon theft in the states of Puebla and Veracruz, while another, the Gulf Cartel, controlled illegal hydrocarbon extraction from pipelines running in the state of Tamaulipas. This led to a substantial increase of homicide rates in municipalities traversed by the oil pipeline infrastructure, with violence also spiling beyond those locations.¹²Iván López Cruz and Gustavo Torrens, Hiddren drivers of violence diffusion: Evidence from oil siphoning in Mexico, “ Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization (February 2023)

Certain groups of people at proximity to fossil-fuel extraction sites are uniquely impacted, depending on intersecting identities such as race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, and caste, and suffer in different ways from the peacetime-wartime continuum of violence. Fossil-fuel extraction has been extensively demonstrated to facilitate systemic violence and human rights abuses, including gender-based violence, among marginalised communities. Indigenous peoples, for instance, have been and continue to be exposed to the negative impacts of fossil fuels. Oil infrastructure projects have often been sites of conflict, violence, and Indigenous-led resistance. In the northern Amazonian territory in Peru, for instance, 566 oil spills were registered between 1997 and 2021 in Indigenous ancestral territories. A resulting series of protests between 2019 and 2020, against the Canadian Oil company PetroTal and the Peruvian government, was met with extreme repression. The police fired on the demonstrators, killing 15. In North America, the peaceful resistance of Indigenous peoples at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, against the Dakota Access Pipeline, was also met with excessive force by state officials, the North Dakota National Guard, and PMSCs — including pepper spray, strip searches, and one episode in which at least six people were bitten by attack dogs.

The militarised repression of Indigenous peoples, including around fossil-fuel infrastructure sites, has unique gendered impacts. In a study produced by the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the group of experts stressed that conflict over Indigenous land has led to the sexual assault, gang rape, sexual enslavement, and killing of Indigenous women and girls in India, Kenya, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor-Leste.¹³Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, “Impact of militarization on the rights of Indigenous Peoples,” 8 August 2023

The Fossil Fuel Treaty – a climate tool for peace

Against this backdrop of harm, a swift and just transition away from fossil fuels is indispensable to the building of a peaceful and sustainable world. As well as alleviating the climate crisis, a phase-out of fossil fuels has the potential to protect communities from the many ways in which fossil-fuel exploration and extraction produce and re-produce inequalities, violence, insecurity, and conflict.

The peacemaking potential of renewable energy depends on a transition that is just and equitable, ensuring alternative economic opportunities for countries and communities currently reliant on fossil-fuel revenues. The transition must be based on energy democracy and decentralised energy-production systems underpinned by equitable public ownership – as covered by other articles in this dossier. Many proposals for mitigating economic losses for Global South petrostates, and for mobilising global public finance, already exist – from the Climate Damages Tax Proposal to debt cancellation and other innovative fiscal policies. These opportunities can prevent grievances and violence that often stem from the lack of benefits for communities near fossil-fuel extraction sites, while creating support for just transition efforts where workers and impacted communities are meaningfully included in setting the terms of a phase-out agenda.

However, there isn’t yet a binding international instrument to end the expansion of coal, oil, and gas, and to ensure the transition. The Paris Agreement adopted in 2015 requires states to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, but there is no roadmap for how this should be done, and governments and corporations are hiding behind false solutions such as ‘net zero’, and unproven technological fixes, in order to continue the burning of fossil fuels. As a result, governments around the world continue to approve new coal, oil and gas projects that are incompatible with the Paris Agreement’s objective.

The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty proposal is one mechanism that can foster international cooperation and contribute to the roadmap that is missing from the Paris Agreement. The treaty proposal includes three pillars: 1) A global just transition away from fossil-fuel dependence and toward scaling up access to renewable energy; 2) Non-proliferation of fossil fuels, by ending all new exploration and production; and 3) Fair and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels, with the largest historical emitters to transition the fastest.

The Treaty proposal draws inspiration from other successful international treaties, such as the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, which has contributed to fewer injuries and deaths worldwide, and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which has increased nuclear weapons’ stigmatisation and financial institutions’ divestment from the companies that make them. The Treaty initiative is led by a growing network of Global South countries, including Colombia, Timor-Leste, Fiji, and Antigua and Barbuda, among others, as well as global civil society organisations, such as Amnesty International, Fridays for Future, Global Witness, and Greenpeace. It is endorsed by prominent figures from the climate justice movement, as well as academics, scientists, youth activists, health professionals, faith institutions, Indigenous peoples, and hundreds of thousands of other citizens globally.

Lowering dependence on fossil fuels and transitioning to renewable energy will not automatically lead to global peace. The geopolitical situation is also in flux due to global warming itself, as well as emerging economic incentives within the green-capitalist system. There are many unknowns, and the decline of petrostates is likely to cause tension and conflict, while the scramble to secure access to the critical minerals required to power renewable energy sources poses another risk. While green colonialism, also discussed in this dossier, produces its own types of violence and displacement – such as in the case of Congo with the rush for cobalt and copper, or the impacts of lithium extraction in Chile’s Atacama Salt Flat – there is also increased global competition for the land required for building megaprojects for the centralised production of renewable energy. To prevent dangerous competition and the likelihood of inter-state conflict over these resources, states should foster cooperation, disarmament, trust, and ‘ecological diplomacy’, focusing more intently on conflict and fragile zones and systematically shifting the geoeconomic, regulatory, trade, and multilateral powers toward efforts that advance socio-ecological peace and stabilisation instead of increased militarisation, competition, and mistrust.

The bottom line is clear: Not only must we move away from fossil fuels due to their environmental destruction and the militarisation that accompanies their exploitation, but a truly meaningful transition must also end the exploitative, patriarchal, and colonialist approach to extraction and exports, rather than let these also become the norm for renewable energy. The development of the ‘just transition’ pillar of the Fossil Fuel Treaty is an opportunity to challenge and transform the structures and systems that have led to the grave impacts of fossil-fuel extraction and use, including human-rights violations, violence, insecurity, and war.

Renewable energy, therefore, can only bring peace if the extraction of critical minerals and the use of renewable energy is situated within demands from those at the frontlines of extraction, conflict, inequalities, and the climate crisis. This context also offers a timely opportunity to incorporate demands from other movements, such as degrowth proponents, who call for the reduction of global energy consumption, and advocates for agrarian reform and land justice, in order to address other sources of greenhouse gas emissions and ecological destruction in a framework for peace.

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This article is part of the Energy Transition dossier to be launched in March 2025.

FOOTNOTES

• 1
  Katya Forsyth and Frederick Kerr, “The Toxic Relationship between Oil and the Military,” Global Center for Climate Justice, 2 March 2022
• 2
  “The Military Cost of Defending Global Oil Supplies,” Securing America’s Future Energy, 21 September 2018
• 3
  Jeff D. Colgan, “Oil, Domestic Politics, and International Conflict,” Energy Research & Social Science 1 (March 2014)
• 4
  “The Carbon War: Accounting for the Global Proliferation of Russian Fossil Fuels and the Case for Unprecedented International Sanctions Response,” Razom We Stand, December 2023
• 5
  Stuart Parkinson and Linsey Cottrell, “Estimating the Military’s Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Scientists for Global Responsibility and Conflict and Environment Observatory, November 2022
• 6
  Lennard de Klerk, Mykola Shlapak, Anatolii Shmurak, Oleksii Mykhalenko, Olga Gassan-zade, Adriaan Korthuis, Yevheniia Zasiadko, “Climate damage caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine,”  Initiative on GHG Accounting of War,  June 2023
• 7
  Nina Lakhani, “Emissions from Israel’s War in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe,” The Guardian, 9 June 2024
• 8
  Micheal L. Ross, “Blood Barrels: Why Oil Wealth Fuels Conflict,” Foreign Affairs (2008)
• 9
  Victor Asal et al., “Political Exclusion, Oil, and Ethnic Armed Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 60(8), (2016)
• 10
  Juan David Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “The connection between oil wealth and internal armed conflicts: Exploring the mechanisms of the relationship using a subnational lens,” The Extractive Industries and Society 6(2), (April 2019)
• 11
  Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “The Political Economy of Secession,” (2002)
• 12
  Iván López Cruz and Gustavo Torrens, Hiddren drivers of violence diffusion: Evidence from oil siphoning in Mexico, “ Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization (February 2023)
• 13
  Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, “Impact of militarization on the rights of Indigenous Peoples,” 8 August 2023