COMMENT: We are fighting the wrong war

Imagine if an alien bug invaded the earth. I'm not talking about the big slick black monsters that bite your head off from the Alien franchise. I'm talking about tiny little nondescript bugs that gnaw away at plants and have a taste for the additives in concrete.

Assume this bug takes years to do its damage, and they're so small and breed prolifically making them next to impossible to eradicate easily. You would have thought that when crops start to fail and buildings start to collapse, governments around the world would take action to combat the bugs in the same way that campaigns have been mounted to extinguish mosquitos or the Asian longhorn beetle.

What I've just described is more or less what the climate crisis is doing. The difference is there is nothing to see or hit with a shoe. The Climate Crisis is an abstract and extremely slow moving problem.

Now imagine that the Klingons from the Star Trek franchise invade the earth. There is absolutely no doubt that every government in the world would unite and pour as much money and resources into fighting them. That’s pretty much the plot of every Star Trek episode.

Klingons are not abstract. Indeed, their costumes are designed to be about as non-abstract as they can be, with Nazi-esque uniforms and extremely ugly faces to accentuate their evilness.

Which of these two threats is the bigger? The bugs are. They threaten to destroy the ecosystem and bring down every city ever built.bns will eventually starve to death and economies would entirely collapse. All the Klingons will do is enslave the human race, which become useful slave labour. (That was the story line in the original series anyway.)

The difference in these two scenarios is reflected in policy and the effort being thrown into dealing with these two challenges. The problem is not the size of the threat. It’s the immediacy of the threat. more specifically: it’s the immediacy of something that will cause problems inside the current election cycle.

Military vs climate spending

Over the last decade an estimated total of between $6 trillion and $7 trillion has been invested into fighting the Climate Crisis – almost entirely by private companies.

In just the last year, a total of $2.9 trillion was spent on spent on weapons, according to the more recent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates. The top three military spenders — the US, China and Russia – accounted for half of that on their own.

Yet there's no sense of urgency as the climate crisis unfolds. The Climate Crisis is accelerating. The IPCC says that the Paris Agreement goal of keeping temperature increases to less than 1.5°C-2°C above the pre-industrial benchmark has already been missed and temperature increase are on course to reach a catastrophic 2.7C-3.1C by 2050. At that point extreme temperature events will become routine and large parts of the world start to become uninhabitable.

But there is a very great sense of urgency for the Developed world to rearm. Last March, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched Europe’s €800bn ReArm programme to re-equip the EU’s military. Finland just announced a hike in defence spending and also cuts to social welfare spending to fund it. Germany has borrowed €500bn to pay for its goal to create the largest conventional army in Europe.

The new German budget will see defence spending increased by over 20% to €140bn on top of a special €100bn fund put in place by the previous government. Climate spending is channelled through the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF) of around €35bn a year – and a big chunk of that is actually energy price subsidies to protect consumers and industry from the high energy prices, although the largest share goes on energy-efficient building renovation.

The US has gone rogue and not only has US President Donald Trump gutted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its authority, he campaigned on his “drill baby drill” promise to increase oil and gas production. The US is now the biggest producer and exporter of folssil fuels in the world. At the same time Trump has doubled down on defence, hiking the budget to almost a record breaking $1 trillion dollars to finance his accumulating military adventures. The Pentagon has already requested approximately $1.5 trillion in defence spending for fiscal year 2027 — which would be the largest defence budget request in US history.

Government’s have no qualms about investing into weapons, a non-productive use of capital where the product is designed to be immediately destroyed or never used if diplomacy goes well. But they are more reluctant to invest into green tech – with the very glaring exception of China. Most of the investment so far has gone into building green power generating capacity, as that earns profits. But the parallel political actions needed is going less well. The EU has been champion promoting its Green Deal, but as Europe’s economy becomes increasingly dysfunctional, Brussels has started backslide on its commitments calling them a “policy disaster” in an effort to bring business some relief by easing the rules.

Pundits and politicians are constantly hyping the Russia threat, the China threat, the terrorist threat and Trump’s need to ensure “national security” by bizarrely annexing some of America’s oldest and most loyal allies. While the Climate Crisis is not being ignored, it is not getting this kind of attention.

Switching defence spending to climate would solve the problem

Given that some $7 trillion has been spent on the climate since 2015 – about $700bn a year – and governments are currently spending just under $3 trillion a year on defence, what would happen if we swapped this spending around?

The short answer is that the Climate Crisis would almost certainly be quickly solved.

A total of about $28 trillion has been spent on defence since 2015; four times more is spent on defence every year than is spent on the climate. It all goes on wars that very rarely happen. That makes sense if we were in danger of dying from a war that would happen if we were defenceless. However, those wars remain theoretical. Coming back to the analogy in the lead, the threat of death from the invading alien bug of the crisis is not theoretical; it is very real and people are already dying in their hundreds of thousands from extreme weather events, wildfires, droughts and storms. The 2025 SONAR report from Swiss Re insurance company found that extreme heat is likely to account for an excess 500,000 deaths a year already. Insurance companies around the world are already in a panic and reassessing their premium models as the cost of environmental damage is expected to explode in the coming years.

Indeed, one study found that $28 trillion worth of damage has already been done by extreme weather events – again, almost exactly the same amount that that has been spent on defence since the Paris summit. It seems again that the defence spending is defending us from the wrong dangers.

What does $2.9 trillion per year actually buy? The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that reaching net zero by 2050 requires clean energy investment to reach approximately $4.5 trillion per year by 2030 and stay there. We are currently at roughly $1.3 trillion. The gap is approximately $3.2 trillion per year — which is almost exactly the current global defence budget.

So, redirecting global defence spending to climate would close roughly 90% of the annual clean energy investment gap needed to hit net zero by the IEA’s deadline. The numbers align almost perfectly.

The shopping list for this spending could include:

Solar and wind buildout: At roughly $1 per watt installed for utility-scale solar, $2.9 trillion would install approximately 2.9 terawatts of solar capacity per year — against the current global installation rate of about 0.6 terawatts per year. The entire global electricity system could be decarbonised within roughly 10-15 years at that pace.

Grid storage: The main constraint on solar and wind is storage. At current battery costs of approximately $100-150 per kilowatt-hour, $500bn per year — less than 20 per cent of the notional budget — would install sufficient grid-scale storage to make variable renewables fully reliable within a decade.

Green hydrogen: The hard-to-decarbonise sectors — steel, cement, shipping, aviation, fertiliser — require green hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels. Current estimates put the cost of scaling green hydrogen to industrial relevance at approximately $300-500bn in infrastructure investment. One to two years of the redirected budget.

Reforestation and carbon capture: Restoring forests and scaling direct air capture at meaningful levels is estimated to require $200-400bn per year to remove 5-10 gigatonnes of CO₂ annually — a meaningful offset against residual emissions.

Developing world energy access: The primary reason the developing world continues building coal and gas plants is cost. At this spending level, wealthy nations could finance the entire clean energy transition of Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia — eliminating the need for new fossil fuel infrastructure in the regions where most future emissions growth will otherwise come from.

In purely financial terms, $2.9 trillion per year is more than sufficient to solve the climate crisis within the 2050 net zero window. The IEA, the IPCC and virtually every major energy economics institution have concluded that the problem is not technological or even financial in the aggregate — it is a question of political will and resource allocation.

Crisis accelerating

As we head into what will almost certainly be the four hottest year on record and yet another disaster season, it is already clear that Paris has failed. The Climate Crisis is accelerating.

Governments are distracted by concrete and immediate dangers; things that will affect the population inside an election cycle. At the same time, floundering leaders like German Chancellor Friedrich Merz like posturing on the podium, pointing to the “enermy at the gate” and the need to bolster the armed forces as a way of appealing to natioanlisitic popularism and making themselves look strong. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who actually started a war, has used this to great affect in Russia, where patriotism is at an all-time high, off seting to some degree the increasing economic pain the war is causing. Russia’s Gazprom is one of the two biggest emitters on the plant and remains unshackled to emit as much as it likes.

It can be done. Spain just won plaudits for meeting 100% of its power demand for the first time in April from just renewables. Electricity prices there are now a quarter of the European average, that is already buffering it from the worst ever energy price shock that is sweeping the world as a result of the Gulf war. It’s a question of political will. Despite being the world’s biggest emitter, China is well on its way to becoming the world’s first electrostate and is the only major economy where emissions have passed peak. Italy, by contrast, which has ample solar and wind potential, still relies on fossil fuels for half its primary energy generation. It also has some of the highest power prices in Europe.

Money talks

The Paris agenda has been hijacked by big oil lobbyists that have gutted the last three COP summits of any meaningful action and prevented the wind down of the use of fossil fuels. The US has reneged on its role as global leader and has been complicit in stymieing climate action under the previous special climate envoy John Kerry, who helped gut the COP28 summit results. CO₂ emissions continue to rise at records rates and all of the environmental warning lights are already flashing red. As IntelliNews reported, just 111 global companies are responsible for half the world’s emissions, which could be regulated if there was the political will to do it.

The value of human life is not included on the balance sheet. The liberal democratic system which valued freedom, happiness and prosperity has been usurped by a system dominated by capital. Shareholders interest have quietly superseded the well-being of the worker since around 1970 onwards in the West when wage growth in the US and elsewhere started to stagnate.

The combination of rising temperatures now coupled with a food shock connected to the disappearance of fertilizer exports from the Persian Gulf is going to plunge hundreds of millions of people into hunger this year. But that change will disproportionally affected Asia and the Africa – the populations of the Global South where the vast majority of the planetary population live. The Global North, which is disproportional responsible for emissions, will be much less affected. Yet governments are still pouring money into the defence sector to build more bombs in order to kill soldiers in the Donbas and Middle East, but urgent investments into grid modernisation and the roll out of gird-level battery storage to complete the green transition revolution are going slowly or are being ignored.

A recent study found that the lack of fertilizers alone could halve agricultural yields in the Global South removing the equivalent of the 3.5bn people's daily caloric intake – and that is before falling crop yields caused by rising temperatures is taken into account. However, other studies have shown that yields in the more temperate climates of Europe will probably improve in the short term as more agricultural lands further north is opened up and growing seasons are lengthened.