When climate becomes an alibi.
In a recent interview, a writer engaged in environmental issues claimed that wars and geopolitical crises “divert resources and attention” away from the fight against climate change. If he were “a conspiracy theorist,” he added, he would say that wars exist precisely to distract from that battle.
The idea that war is a distraction is more widespread than it seems. But it is also dangerous. It starts from a flawed assumption: that armed conflicts and the climate crisis are two separate spheres, competing for public attention. In reality, they are deeply intertwined.
Every war accelerates ecological collapse. It produces massive emissions, devastates ecosystems, destroys energy and agricultural infrastructure, triggers forced migrations, disrupts local environmental policies, and pushes states to reinvest in fossil fuels for security reasons. Conflicts do not distract from the climate crisis. They worsen it.
But the problem is not only empirical. It is also political.
Describing wars as distractions implies that current human suffering is just a narrative obstacle to be bypassed in order to stay loyal to the “real” cause. This teleological approach reduces everything that does not fit into the climate mission to background noise: pain, justice, history, bodies.
There is an even more serious side effect: dehumanizing the dead. Seeing every victim merely as a slowdown in the path toward an ecological goal empties life itself of meaning, denying that it has value even when it produces no “progress”.
But if we are unable to face the innocent deaths of today, how can we speak of those that will come tomorrow, when the climate crisis will trigger droughts, famines, migrations, and conflicts with the same violence as war?
This blindness is amplified when climate action is framed as the triumph of efficiency. The World Economic Forum is often celebrated for its efforts on sustainability, as if environmental progress could be separated from the structures of power that shape it. But WEF stands for World Economic Forum, and what moves it is not ethics but capital. Behind this machine that appears clean, rational, and solution-oriented stands an economic elite that protects its interests, even when those interests are tied to governments and industries complicit in ongoing violence. Celebrating their “climate achievements” without questioning the political and financial systems behind them means ignoring that the same mechanisms funding green innovation can also fund wars, occupations, and destruction.
Isn’t the battle against climate collapse already a war, even if without trenches? A war against time, against the logic of capitalism, against inertia and ignorance?
Erasing the human dimension from this struggle in the name of efficiency means forgetting that the climate is not an enemy to defeat, but the very fabric of our coexistence.
The ecological crisis is not a closed compartment. It is a system of interwoven crises, environmental, social, and geopolitical, that feed into each other. Splitting them into thematic hierarchies may offer the illusion of clarity, but it produces blindness.
Fighting climate change means also confronting its political roots and the conflicts it generates. Ignoring war to save the climate is like ignoring the fire to save the forest.
