I can’t stop thinking about the images that I saw earlier this month of black smoke engulfing the skies of Tehran. Photos and videos revealed streets ablaze, with people in the middle of it all unable to breathe. It looked like nuclear winter.
The U.S. government wants you to believe that it bombed a school of mostly young girls, killing 160 people, because Iran might be developing a nuclear weapon — but the reality is that the U.S. and Israel are already creating a level of devastation that looks like the impacts of a real one. They bombed oil depots and refineries in Tehran, causing toxic black smoke and oil rain to fill the atmosphere. It’s not hard to figure out why the U.S. is really bombing Iran, just like it’s not hard to understand why the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, or why it uses Israel as a proxy state, or why it’s currently attempting regime change in Venezuela: oil. Iran has the 3rd largest known oil reserves in the world.
When Iran’s democratically-elected government nationalized its oil in 1951, the U.S. orchestrated a coup that overthrew its prime minister and installed the Shah of Iran as a dictator. Today, nearly 75 years later, the U.S. continues its attempts to destabilize the region, aiming to seize more and more control of the global oil trade. The U.S. military is acting as the enforcement mechanism for the fossil fuel industry, tech billionaires, and weapons contractors. These intertwined industries are all about to meet in Houston for CERAWeek, one of the largest oil and gas conferences in the world. So why is the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the largest environmental organizations in the country, a partner to this conference?
Ask the Environmental Defense Fund why they’re partnering with the people killing the planet
CERAWeek is truly an all-star lineup of everyone threatening our existence. Some of the speakers include executives from tech companies that have partnered with Israel over the past several years of genocide, companies that have started building deadly data centers around the country: Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, to name a few. Also featured are mining companies such as Rio Tinto and Glencore, who partner with the tech companies to extract resources from sovereign countries, often creating horrific labor conditions and murdering millions to gain access. The Pentagon’s General Randall Reed, the head of the U.S. Transportation Command of the military, will be a featured speaker as well, not to mention the executives of most major oil and gas companies on the planet. These are the companies that are driving the massacres in Iran.
Research from the Conflict and Environmental Observatory has found that the toxic impact of bombing Iran’s oil facilities, nuclear facilities, and military installations, and now the world’s largest natural gas field, will last decades. We are still seeing the impact of the last resource war, the so-called “war on terror” which emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from 2001 to 2017. The millions of bullets fired during U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have left contaminants still detectable in children’s hair samples today. Our latest invasion in Venezuela cost 100 lives all to access the world’s largest oil reserves, cutting off a vital path to Latin American energy sovereignty, which is urgently needed to begin a global just transition away from fossil fuels.
The environmental movement has been increasingly joining with a mass anti-war movement demanding “No Blood for Oil.” Chapters of the Sierra Club have been screening Earth’s Greatest Enemy, a film that documents the horrific environmental costs of war. We recently met with the leadership of the Sierra Club, opening up the door to future discussions and work toward building a united movement!
In 2025, the Environmental Defense Fund had a $436 million budget. Imagine what could be done if even a fraction of that money went toward organizing against the greatest threats to our existence. Imagine if the EDF, instead of acting as an “industry partner” for the oil-tech-mineral-military-industrial complex, joined with the thousands of climate justice organizers from the Gulf-South Region converging in Houston to confront CERAWeek. There is no green way to massacre children, nor is there any sustainable outcome in working with those entities and executives who put extraction and profit first. The only way forward is to build an unstoppable movement for the planet.
Invite the Environmental Defense Fund to join us!
👉 For more:
- Sign up to host a screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy for Earth Day! And sign up here to bring screenings of Earth’s Greatest Enemy to the Sierra Club!
- Check out my article on data centers and the war economy!
- Check out the War Is Not Green webpage to learn more.
- Join our bi-weekly War Is Not Green working group!
- Sign up to organize and engage locally!
Until Liberation,
Aaron, Jodie, and the entire CODEPINK team
P.S. Join us to kick off Earth Month with a webinar exploring the environmental consequences of escalation in U.S. led warfare, and how to build a mass movement against it for the people and planet. RSVP HERE!
