Wars, ecocide and the Doomsday Clock

It's a disturbing sign of the times that the global levers of power today are controlled by genocidal murderers, sex offenders, megalomaniacs, war criminals and rapacious billionaires who should all be in jail. Collectively, these psychopaths are driving the human race ever closer to the seventh mass extermination, this time of homo sapiens — which is probably a good thing from a planetary perspective, for we do not deserve this wonderful orb.

Any one of three forces — artificial intelligence (AI), climate change, war — has the capacity to exterminate us, but it gets even worse: the last three years has demonstrated that all these three forces are now coming together to do the job under the guidance of the sociopaths mentioned above.

As we edge ever closer to a war-driven holocaust in Ukraine and West Asia, this three-way synergy is becoming more pronounced and evident. AI is being used to assassinate leaders, military chiefs and scientists, to communicate and surveil, to guide missiles and bombs, to make war itself autonomous. The fate of "enemies" is now being decided by algorithms, not rational persons.

This harnessing of AI for war has been exposed in the tussle between Anthropic and the Pentagon, when the latter refused to accept the guardrails which Anthropic had inserted into its algorithms to prevent their misuse. Anthropic was blacklisted for taking an ethical stand, but Open AI and others quickly filled the void. AI is making even conventional/ non-nuclear wars more lethal and opportunistic/ acceptable for those nations which possess the technology.

This AI is being being used by robber baron warlords, criminal syndicates masquerading as elected governments, to wage illegal wars, driving us ever closer to climate Armageddon by destroying the natural environment, increasing the emission of GHGs (green house gases), and polluting the soils and waters of a dozen nations. Sadly, however, no one is talking about the environmental catastrophe unfolding in larger concentric circles, all eyeballs are fixated on missiles, drones, aircraft carriers and the straits of Hormuz.

A study has revealed that three years of the Russia-Ukraine war has released an additional 350 million tons of pollutants/ GHG/ CO₂ into the atmosphere — 1 per cent of annual global emissions — through bombings, explosions and fires.

The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Kherson region of Ukraine by Russia in 2023 flooded 600-plus sq. km of the downstream area, causing a humanitarian and ecological disaster on an unparalleled scale: more than 83,000 tons of silt contaminated with heavy metals (lead, cadmium, nickel) has been deposited downstream, making the soil and water there toxic and poisoned for decades.

The entire 365 sq. km of the Gaza Strip has been carpet bombed by Israel to an extent that there is now no farmland or green area remaining. Thousands of unexploded ordinance are buried in its soil and cities, 80 per cent of all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, and according to an estimate by the UN this has created 63 million tons of rubble, which will take 15 years to remove if 200 truckloads are removed every day! The cost will be more than a billion US dollars. Effectively, the entire 365 sq. km has been degraded into a wasteland.

The environmental impact of the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran will be much worse, both for the land and the sea, especially now that oil facilities are fair game for all parties. Israel initiated this new phase of environmental warfare by bombing Tehran's oil storage tanks in the second week of March: the resultant massive plumes of black smoke which persisted for days was bad enough.

Worse was the rain that fell, 'black rain' containing all the released pollutants which have now leached into the soil, making it toxic and barren for decades, and contaminating the ground water. Israel's attack on Iran's Pars gas field on the 18 March is the beginning of an ecocide in the whole region: it processes 600 million m³ (cubic metre) of natural gas every day.

With such a humongous volume being set on fire, the toxic fumes will envelop not only Iran but the entire Gulf region, and could travel even as far as Pakistan and India. Iran's inevitable retaliation by bombing the oilfields of Israel and the Gulf countries will exponentially multiply this pollution. One shudders to even imagine how much pollutants all this will add to the atmosphere.

Tens of millions of litres/barrels of oil are contained in the ships, both military and civilian, riding on the Persian Gulf, all in harm's way of the war. More than 13 million barrels of oil and 500,000 tons of gas are presently locked up in the Strait of Hormuz alone in 300 ships. If even half-a-dozen of them are sunk, the waters of the Gulf shall be contaminated for decades, all marine life destroyed. Have we conveniently forgotten what happened during the Iraq war, when Saddam Hussein spilled millions of litres of oil in the sea? That marine area has yet to recover, even after 26 years.

A recent study quoted in The Guardian reveals that 5 million tons of CO₂ has been emitted in the first 14 days of the current war, from destroyed buildings (2.4 million tons), fuel for military vehicles (529,000 tons), bombing of oil facilities (1.88 million tons), destroyed military hardware (172,000 tons), munitions (55,000 tons). This is equivalent to the annual carbon budget of the 84 lowest carbon-emitting countries in the world. 

The Netanyahus, Putins and Trumps of the world are not only waging illegal wars and trashing humanitarian covenants, they are committing ecocide on a horrendous scale. This is another reminder that fossil-fuelled geopolitics is incompatible with a liveable planet.

The Doomsday Clock in Chicago University, set up so that midnight signifies total Apocalypse, is getting ever closer to that point in time. It was at 17 minutes to midnight in 1991, today it is at 85 seconds to midnight. The world is running out of time fast, and that is not just a metaphor.

Views are personal. More of the writer's works can be read here

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and author of Holy Cows and Loose Cannons — the Duffer Zone Chronicles and other works. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com