Activism / March 25, 2024

The Single Most Important Thing President Biden Can Do for the Climate Is Enforce an Immediate Cease-Fire in Gaza

War and warming: US support for Israel’s war in Gaza is deepening the climate crisis—and making it impossible to solve.

Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein
Smoke rises over the Gaza Strip from Israeli bombardment, as seen from southern Israel.(Amir Levy / Getty Images)

The first Earth Day blossomed in Central Park nearly 54 years ago—on April 22, 1970. At the time, it seemed to those of us in the anti-war movement like a diversion from the most urgent tasks of the day: ending the Vietnam war and fighting racism. We were further alienated by President Richard Nixon’s embrace of an environmental legislative agenda coinciding with, and distracting from, his expansion of the war into Laos and Cambodia.

Only decades later, when we joined the environmental movement, did we recognize the deep connection between war and warming, racism and environmental injustice. Today, Earth Day is an opportunity for advocacy. And now must be the climate change moment, with 2023 global temperatures rising to record levels and exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase above preindustrial levels long identified as the catastrophic tipping point by the world’s scientists and nations. Addressing the gathering climate crisis should be a priority that unites people, movements, and governments. Instead, war, genocide, and settler-colonial occupation have intervened and are pushing countries further apart, with the present specter of a widening Mideast war.

And that is why it is clear to us that the single most important thing President Biden could do to for the climate today is to enforce an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza and end the war against the Palestinian people.

The Israeli campaign against Gaza, with US political complicity and military support, and both governments’ contravention of the order by the International Court of Justice to prevent the killing, stop the destruction of the means of life and the interference with humanitarian aid, has ripped the fragile fabric of international cooperation.

Yet that is exactly the fabric on which any hope for mitigating the climate catastrophe rests.

The fossil fuel industry has taken full advantage of the current global disarray: Oil and gas majors, reaping windfall profits from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are already shifting away from even their modest investments in renewable energy, and banks are reneging on their fossil fuel disinvestment pledges. The influential Global Turning Points report released by 200 scientists at COP28—the November 2023 Dubai climate summit last November—warns that rapid changes to nature are reaching the long-feared scale to overwhelm entire societies. The study calls on UN Secretary General António Guterres to convene a global summit on the governance agenda for managing Earth-system risks and maximizing global coordination to speed up mitigation and resilience.

Yet right now there is no possibility of such a convocation. Instead, the United States has become a rogue state, in violation of the International Court of Justice order. Its active complicity with Israel’s war in Gaza places the US among a diminishing group of European nations and in opposition to the sentiment of millions of its own citizens, as well as countless more around the world.

The United States, one of the world’s biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and Europe, a consistent force for emission reduction, both played important roles in global climate negotiations. But meaningful joint global action on the climate emergency is out of the question now—at the very moment when it is the only thing that holds out the hope of real solutions. The world’s largest emitters are now staring at one another across battle lines.

Strengthening the ties between the anti-war/anti-imperialist/peace and environmental/climate/justice movements has long been a priority for both of us. We call this effort “war and warming.” The globe’s two most immediate crises—climate change and genocide—are dimensions of the same system with different facets: Call it racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, environmental racism, or extractivism. Let’s examine this intersection.

According to a report from Brown University’s Watson Institute, the US Department of Defense is “the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases.” In other words, military emissions significantly drive the total of US emissions. And this is a peacetime analysis.

The Nation Weekly

Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You may unsubscribe or adjust your preferences at any time. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

The Guardian reports that planet-warming emissions over the first two months of the war exceeded the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. According to an analysis by researchers in the UK and the US, 99 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted in the first 60 days after the October 7 Hamas attack is attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, while almost half the war’s total CO2 bootprint is from US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.

“From the river to the sea” might be the touchstone slogan on both sides of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, but the Jordan River is currently reported as running at just 10 percent of its historic average flow, while the rise of the Mediterranean Sea is predicted to be impactful by the end of the century—if not long before. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that temperatures in the Mediterranean region are rising extraordinarily fast: about 20 percent faster than the global average. And climate change itself has long been recognized as a conflict multiplier.

These realities should influence our response to the Israeli war against the Palestinian people, as well as the US role in widening the regional war. War is simultaneously deepening the climate crisis—and making it impossible to solve. The linkage is clear. It is imperative for us to reflect this in our organizing, our advocacy, in the streets and classrooms, and in our thinking in ways we have not yet done. As we near Earth Day 2024, let’s make an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza a point of global unity.

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.

Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation

Jeff Jones

Jeff Jones is a New York–based environmental activist and consultant.

Eleanor Stein

Eleanor Stein is a climate justice activist and teaches Climate Change and Human Rights at the State University of New York at Albany.

More from The Nation

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather and take to the streets.

Cornell Championed “Free Expression.” Then It Rolled Out Protest Restrictions. Cornell Championed “Free Expression.” Then It Rolled Out Protest Restrictions.

The university’s overhauled expressive activity policy has been criticized by both pro-Palestine advocates and student and faculty governing bodies.

StudentNation / Gabriel Muñoz

Democratic congressional candidate Ron Dellums, and his wife, Roscoe, left, clasp hands with Mrs. Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King. Mrs. King appeared at a press conference in Oakland October 30, 1970, to endorse Dellums’s candidacy for the Oakland-Berkeley congressional district.

What the Movement for Palestine Can Learn From the Fight Against Apartheid What the Movement for Palestine Can Learn From the Fight Against Apartheid

The successful push to change US policy toward South Africa provides a useful blueprint for our current moment.

Waleed Shahid

The Starbucks Workers United organizing office in Buffalo, New York, on January 30, 2022.

A Faster Path to Collective Bargaining: Majority Sign-Up A Faster Path to Collective Bargaining: Majority Sign-Up

Though approval of unions is at historically high levels, membership remains low. One way to change that is to make it easier for workers to form a union—and to start bargaining.

Rand Wilson and Peter Olney

Postdocs and academic researchers at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory welcome new members to the union.

Grad Students Are Unionizing in Droves. Can Postdocs Lead the Next Wave? Grad Students Are Unionizing in Droves. Can Postdocs Lead the Next Wave?

Postdoctoral fellows are vital to universities—running labs, training students, and writing grants—while being overworked and lacking adequate job protections.

StudentNation / Marie-Rose Sheinerman

Signs wait ready for use as United Auto Workers members and supporters picket outside the Stellantis NV Toledo Assembly Complex in Toldeo, Ohio, on September 22, 2023.

The Call Is Out for Mass, Simultaneous Strikes in 4 Years The Call Is Out for Mass, Simultaneous Strikes in 4 Years

These labor leaders are organizing for 2028. Cooperation across unions and sectors—if carried out on a large scale—would be unprecedented in the 21st-century United States.

Sarah Lazare

Pro-Palestine student protest

What’s Next for the Pro-Palestine Student Movement? What’s Next for the Pro-Palestine Student Movement?

“We are not just going to let campus life start as normal."

StudentNation / Urvi Kumbhat and Sophie Bandarkar