According to the United Nations since 1990, at least 18 violent conflicts have been fueled by the exploitation of natural resources, whether high-value resources like timber, diamonds, gold, minerals and oil, or scarce ones like fertile land and water.
Michael Klare, Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts says that fossil fuels are triggering violent conflicts all over the world. Klare zooms in on four areas – Iraq/Syria, South Sudan, the Crimea/Ukraine, and the South China Sea – to argue that the desire to control valuable oil and gas assets is fuelling long-standing historic tensions. “In a fossil-fuel world, control over oil and gas reserves is an essential component of national power,” he warns.
The latest conflicting affecting the world is the Ukraine Russia conflict. Ukraine is not itself a significant energy producer but rather a major transit route for the delivery of Russian natural gas to Europe. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Europe obtained 30% of its gas from Russia in 2013 – most of it from the state-controlled gas giant Gazprom – and approximately half of this was transported by pipelines crossing Ukraine. As a result, that country plays a critical role in the complex energy relationship between Europe and Russia, one that has proved incredibly lucrative for the shadowy elites and oligarchs who control the flow of gas, while at the same time provoking intense controversy. Disputes over the price Ukraine pays for its own imports of Russian gas twice provoked a cut-off in deliveries by Gazprom, leading to diminished supplies in Europe as well.
Wikipedia has a list of wars described as oil wars:
- During World War I (1914-1918), certain operations were planned specifically to secure oil resources.
- Chaco War (1932-1935)
- World War II (1939-1945):
- Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970)
- Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)[5]
- Gulf War (1990-1991)
- Gulf War oil spill
- Kuwaiti oil fires
- Iraqi no-fly zones conflicts (1992-2003)
- Iraq War (2003-2011)
- Conflict in the Niger Delta (2004-present)
- Heglig Crisis, South Sudan-Sudan border conflict (2012)
- Russian – Ukraine Conflict (2014-present): The Russo-Ukrainian War, previously referred to as the Ukrainian crisis in its early stages, is an ongoing international conflict between Russia, alongside Russian-backed separatists, and Ukraine, which began in February 2014 and escalated to a military invasion in February 2022.
Some writers also refer to the Oil War Myth saying that the Oil Wars Myth elaborates on these findings by reassessing the presumed oil motives for many of the twentieth century’s most prominent international conflicts.
It must be accepted though that in any conflict the winners will be the steel and armament industries, and the suppliers of raw materials such as fossil fuels, electricity and energy along with the numerous other commodities needed by hungry armies on the march. That, in turn, will concentrate the minds of those involved in and directing conflicts in such a way that the over accumulation of control over the commodities needed to wage a succesful war become of paramount importance.
In the TED Talk video below Ukrainian energy executive Maxim Timchenko shares how his company has diversified Ukraine’s power structures to survive Russian attacks, highlighting the resilience of renewable energy. Hear more about Ukraine’s present-day challenges, how it’s become a testing ground in the global fight against climate change and the transformative path towards sustainable energy independence.
Timchenko says that for decades, Russia has been weaponizing energy to impose control over countries. It has cut gas supply during the winter, bribed us with cheap gas, built pipelines to bypass Ukraine and under-supply gas to provoke energy shock that hurt all of us. But today, Russia moved from economic war to physical destruction of our infrastructure, launching missiles to destroy our power stations and grids and trying to crush the Ukrainian people.
Timchenko may have a valid point – ditributed energy supplies create difficult, many and varied targets for an aggresor to attack and disable. After the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Russia destroyed or captured more than 30 percent of DTEK power assets. Ukraine’s response was to double renewable capacity, helping Ukraine to become the country with one of the highest growth rates of renewables in the world.