If you needed another reason to oppose war aside from the threat of nuclear destruction, massive civilian casualties, violence against women and the concentration of fascist imperialist powers into corporatized hands, this is it. The US Pentagon already is the planet’s largest single institutional emitter of fossil fuels, and US-backed conflicts around the world since WWII can always be tied back to economic gain dominance, especially via the private control of fuel and natural resources. A war with China, which the US has gradually encircled with hundreds of military bases and weaponry, is being provoked for economic reasons as the government and media manufacture the consent of the American public. This will only result in the increase of Pentagon funding (already at $858 billion), siphoning off billions of dollars of taxpayer money to infrastructure and weaponry which is destroying our climate. Many people don’t realize that every solution to climate change already exists – the government simply will not fund it when its priority is making war. Demilitarization is one of the most important things we can do for the climate, and for living beings inside and outside conflict zones. Learn more about the environmental consequences of the war in Ukraine, for example.

While the basic tenets of capitalism are taught in America as economic law, this is hardly the case. This broken and optional system in which we find ourselves –where income inequality is at an all-time high, the poor have little access to healthcare, and the climate is nearing deadly tipping points – is driven by capitalists and federal economists who love to talk about the profit-oriented metric Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. This metric, which is used as an indicator of our country’s well-being, tells us the amount of financial profit produced by economic activity in a given time period. Which is pretty ridiculous when well-being is obviously a function of things that aren’t liquid cash, like quality of education, healthcare, and biodiversity. Essentially, under a GDP-oriented economy, half of a country’s forest cover could be destroyed and the poverty rate in all major cities could double over the course of a year, but as long as billionaires continue to increase their profits, the illusion of progress persists. But if we manage to change how we measure progress in this country, we may actually be able to achieve some. Genuine Progress Indicator is a metric which places value on things like improving air quality and food security. With GPI in place, lawmakers and activists would have the most undeniable picture yet of the cost of war on people and planet. Learn more here.

“No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” President Biden uttered these words on the campaign trail in 2020, swearing up and down that he would be the climate champion we need in this moment and ban fossil fuel extraction on federal land. Well, this man lied. He has approved more federal oil and gas leases in his first two years in office than Donald Trump did in his. The degree to which our sitting president lied to get into office is appalling – this wasn’t a mere fib. Biden’s disregard for his own climate promises will shrink the time we as a species have to reach net-negative greenhouse gas emissions before it is too late to avoid climate collapse. That time stands at just over 6 years. President Biden must revoke his approval of the Willow Project for the sake of every living being on this planet, and to make good by the young voters he courted on the campaign trail with his climate promises. He must then follow through and legally protect all federal land from further extraction. We don’t have time for him to wait.