The Climate Consequences and the Impact on Energy Structure from National Disputes

Abstract

Climate change is a specific contradiction between human activity and the natural environment, especially after the Industrial Revolution. War, as the human activity with the highest intensity, plays an important role in the modern era. This paper comprehensively analyzes the negative and positive impacts of war on climate change. On the one hand, the war increases the carbon emission from post-war reconstruction and the direct destruction brought by the war. On the other hand, war especially war involving major energy-producing countries warns other countries to take an effort to reduce their reliance on fossil-fuel that those energy-producing countries are dominating. This will make the war become beneficial for energy transformation from fossil fuel to renewables. It specifically takes the Yom-Kippur War and the Russia-Ukraine War as examples to illustrate this statement. Meanwhile, it presents a hypothesis, trying to explain the reasons behind the cyclical instability and armed conflict in certain energy-rich regions since the 20th century by making the connection between energy and political circumstance, investigating the continuous impact of war on climate change due to the war and regional instability that linger like a recurring nightmare for decades.