If you're a longtime reader, you're probably aware that there's a lot of stuff rattling around in my brain at any given moment. A lot of it falls under the "everything is interconnected" banner. This week, it's war.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the governing body that keeps track of global emissions and tells us about the risks and implications thereof. And with each passing year, they document increased emissions and issue sterner and sterner warnings about what needs to be done to prevent the worst outcomes.

But when you're looking at their data, there's one thing that's a glaring omission: the emissions associated with wars and military actions.

Ukraine? Gaza? Sudan? None of that counts towards the annual emissions data.

This might lead you to believe that military emissions are somehow trivial. You'd be wrong. Estimates suggest that it accounts for 5%-6% of annual global emissions. Time had a good article about the Ukraine conflict in 2023.

So here we are, at a time when we're supposed to have all hands on deck to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and we're not even measuring (let alone mitigating) the carbon footprint of war.

And even if we're not talking about greenhouse gases, war has a lot of downstream effects.

In addition to the obvious problems with uninhabitability in the short term, weapons also pollute water, soil, and air, and restrict access to viable agricultural land.

There are risks to local ecosystem imbalances as plants and animals are killed by weaponry, but also as people find themselves needing to engage in hunting and poaching for food.

​There's also deforestation, both by the weapons themselves, and by the people who need to cut down trees for firewood.

And let's not forget about displacement. Lack of viable agricultural land leads to people moving elsewhere. In addition to the environmental impact of refugee camps, there are also the long-term impacts to those who manage to resettle elsewhere, often living in poverty after having lost everything. These people are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

For years, the U.S. Department of Defense has been tracking climate change as a security threat. In 2021, they said, "To keep the nation secure, we must tackle the existential threat of climate change. The unprecedented scale of wildfires, floods, droughts, typhoons, and other extreme weather events of recent months and years have damaged our installations and bases, constrained force readiness and operations, and contributed to instability around the world.

Climate change touches most of what this Department does, and this threat will continue to have worsening implications for U.S. national security." (I'd link to those reports, but they have been removed from federal websites. Of course they have.)

War is a no-win scenario.

​Can strong tides provide energy? France is going to give it a try. The NH1 tidal project will tap into the Raz Blanchard tidal flow off of Normandy, France. This strong tidal stream is expected to be a new source of renewable energy.

​If we let rivers flow freely, they might be less prone to flooding. It's an interesting idea, though admittedly a challenge in populated areas.

I've often talked about how when BlackRock Capital talks, people listen. When you have a trillion in assets, you have some influence on the marketplace. Previously, CEO Larry Fink had talked about the importance of sustainability, this year his tone has changed. "His next letter is coming soon, and he's hinting there will be less of an emphasis on the environment and reducing emissions. 'I still believe in that, but I also caution that any decarbonizing technology right now is highly inflationary,' said Fink, while speaking onstage this week in Houston as part of CERAWeek, a global energy conference." Thanks, Larry.

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Alisa Bonsignore

Founder, Strategist, and Author