Can the world’s billionaires lead the climate change fight as politics fails?

Technically, the US “war on terror” is over as of today, September 11. Since the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the United States will have spent US$4.7 trillion waging war by the end of 2022 – excluding a further US$1.1 trillion in interest on debt used to finance the wars and US$2.2 trillion in future obligations for war veteran care – according to the Brown University Cost of War study.

Such financial and human costs of the “war on terror” might be trivial compared with the coming climate change costs to the whole planet. War costs only add to climate warming. The Brown University study found that the US Department of Defence was the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and a key contributor to climate change.

Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that the planet is running out of time to deal with the problem. This is an existential crisis not just for one country, but the whole of mankind. Like the Covid-19 pandemic, we need a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to act decisively.

The European Union has got its act together with its Circular Economy Action Plan. It sees the problem clearly: “There is only one planet Earth, yet by 2050, the world will be consuming as if there were three. Global consumption of materials such as biomass, fossil fuels, metals and minerals is expected to double in the next 40 years, while annual waste generation is projected to increase by 70 per cent by 2050.”

The world spent US$2 trillion on military expenditure in 2020, four times the amount spent on energy transformation. The first can only add to global carbon emissions and more human and natural destruction, while the other addresses our common fate.