ISIS-linked militants are threatening huge natural gas reserves the world needs badly right now, but the US and others are refusing to help. Here’s why.
This was supposed to be the year: a landmark climate deal for the world, ending the most-badly-maligned and economically devastating industrial era in human history, setting new standards for pollution and global warming. The Trump administration, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, is instead playing the dangerous game of obstruction — turning a blind eye to the climate crisis at the very time it agreed to a binding international agreement to phase it out. And the world’s biggest polluter, the US, is standing in the way.
The Trump administration and others are doing this partly to make themselves look good — as the fossil fuel industry has warned the climate deal could cost jobs. And partly to block any US retreat from a green-energy future. But they’re also doing it because climate change is about more than jobs, and more than protecting our air and water.
It is a threat to a way of life that requires massive human infrastructure to keep us fed, healthy, and safe. Right now, that infrastructure runs on oil. And oil is the only fossil fuel that really provides the clean, limitless, cheap energy our world needs to live within its finite planetary resources. Yet when we’ve exhausted the global oil supply, we’ll be facing that hard question: How will we heat and cool our homes, power the energy-intensive factories, transform our transportation systems, and supply energy to grow our economy? Without it, humanity would be facing far more severe, and far deadlier, challenges.
‘We are not going to lose the fight’
But here’s the problem: The US and other countries are running out of fossil fuels. As climate change accelerates, the planet is heading toward a point of no return. Without an influx of new, clean-