By Diana Duarte, Director of Policy and Strategic Engagement for MADRE, a global gender justice organization and a feminist fund, and Jean Su, Energy Justice Director and a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, where she works on international and domestic U.S. campaigns to end fossil fuels and develop just energy systems.
The harmful connections between fossil fuel extraction and violent, militarized resource domination have long been documented and exposed – and disgracefully continue today. Just recall the complicity of the oil company Shell in the military detentions and executions of environmental activists in Nigeria, or the ways that competition over oil has fueled conflict from Iraq to Syria. Environmental activists opposing the East African Crude Oil Pipeline – slated to be the world’s longest heated oil pipeline – have met Ugandan military violence in retaliation. Here in the U.S. that same militaristic violence accompanies fossil fuel expansion: thousands of Indigenous water protectors have been targeted, assaulted, and jailed for challenging Canadian oil giant Enbridge’s Line 5 and Line 3 oil sands pipelines.
Now, as policymakers and climate advocates seek a transition away from the fossil fuel era, we have a vital opportunity to break from that violent dynamic. We could imagine a future where we all not only enjoy safe, plentiful and regenerative energy, but where the way we create that energy is peaceful and rights-based.
But there are warning signs that show we’re heading down a dangerous path. Right now, there is not only a risk of militarizing the “clean” or “green” energy agenda – and reproducing the harmful approaches of the fossil fuel era – it’s already underway. In the US and around the world, governments have propped up the notion of a “green” military as part of their climate agenda. Governments and corporations, with military and police collusion, are displacing communities to make way for hydroelectric dams, wind farms, and lithium mines. Environmental activists and community leaders who press for rights-based, inclusive energy policymaking that leaves no one behind have been met with harassment and violence.
Our futures depend on renewable energy, but urgent energy and climate priorities cannot justify violent action and militarized policy. What’s more, as the volatile, conflict-ridden fossil fuel era has amply demonstrated, reliable and effective access to energy cannot be sustained at the point of a gun.
The pathway out of this toxic dynamic is to create and resource channels for global progressive social movements to integrate transformational values of care, peace, and human rights in our climate and energy policymaking. These movement-driven values can serve as guiding lights to illuminate a way out of the global climate catastrophe, particularly by identifying and building power around policy demands constructed in partnership with frontline communities.
Militarizing the Transition to Renewable Energy
In 2021, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin named the destabilizing impacts of climate change and called it an “existential threat,” paving the way for additional Pentagon budget requests for billions in “climate investment” for military infrastructure and capacities. U.S. military bases have also been called “proving grounds” for clean energy usage.
We’re living through a climate emergency, where every day brings horrific news and more warnings that time is running out for lifesaving climate action. So there’s no doubt that the climate crisis is existential, requiring significantly scaled up action from many sectors of our societies. Yet the urgency and scale of the crisis does not mean that every action is justified, effective, relevant or safe. In our deeply militarized world, armed agents of states already have immense power and capacity, with the US military atop that hierarchy. Policymakers too often and too easily default to thinking that there must be a military solution to every problem. But as policymakers choose a way forward, they must reckon with the consequences of marshaling military might into the fight for the climate.
Our already astronomical Pentagon budget and the default to deploying US military force have denied funds from urgent domestic priorities like health care, education, and housing. Rather than “green” the military, we should demilitarize, reducing not only the immense carbon footprint of the US military but also the over-propensity towards the use of violence as a means to confront global crises. Rather than touting clean energy upgrades to our military bases, we should demand actual justification for the excess and documented harms of some 750 bases in some 80 countries – more than any other country or people in history – and reduce this massive network. The greenest thing any military can do is reduce the scale and scope of its operations.
The greenest thing any military can do is reduce the scale and scope of its operations.
While it is impossible to quantify the full, intangible cost of what people and communities lose when forced from their homes by climate change or extractive industry, the Climate Action Network has adopted $1 trillion a year in grants and equivalent finance as the dollar target for climate action in developing countries. While the costs of a climate transition will be real, a green energy transition rooted in care can offer outsized yields relative to the money set aside for it. One trillion dollars is also, in real terms, just over two-fifths of the $2.44 trillion total global spending on militaries in 2023. The Department of Defense, for fiscal year 2025, requested $849.8 billion, or an annual figure 85% of the way to a trillion. Budgets are moral documents, and compared to the shared peril from climate change, massive spending on violence through the military offers far less returns for human security.
Moreover, militarized approaches – that tend to prioritize domination, competition and control – divert attention away from a foreign policy rooted in diplomacy and cooperation, essential qualities in confronting a collective threat like climate breakdown. Climate change is a threat against our shared security as humans and all beings that live on this planet. But a militarized formula for protecting a limited view of “national” security – against a threat that respects no borders and that requires collaborative action to confront it – will only set us back.
Climate change is a threat against our shared security as humans and all beings that live on this planet.
Meanwhile, grassroots activists worldwide have sounded the alarm that people’s rights to livelihood, land, health and more are already being cast aside in the rush for land and resources to feed the energy transition. In many of these cases, activists who have sought to push back have been met by police and military force.
For instance, the military junta in Myanmar this year announced plans to restart a major hydroelectric dam project. Some 13 years ago, environmental activists organized to block the dam’s construction, speaking out for communities that would be displaced and benefit little from an arrangement to send 90% of the energy produced to neighboring China. Given the military’s intensified repression of activism since its coup in 2021, these environmental defenders are in increased danger today.
South America’s “lithium triangle”–a stretch of the Andes and salt flats of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile–is witness to rampant Argentinian police oppression and excessive violence against Indigenous peoples and environmental activists. Argentina holds the second-largest deposits of the metal in the world, and recent amendments to the Jujuy area’s constitution opens the door to greater extraction without prior, free and informed consent from Indigenous communities.
These frontline communities know all too well that peace, human rights, and climate justice are inextricably linked. They have lived out the interconnections between militarism and extractivism, a poisonous blend already seeping into the “green” transition. Importantly, they have nurtured grassroots and global movements to channel this holistic expertise into policy spaces.
Another Way Forward
The way forward lies in applying a core set of values in our policy efforts, moving us towards a demilitarized, care-oriented future. A pathway that transitions us to resilient renewable energy systems essential to averting catastrophic climate harms of the fossil fuel era, must also be one that does not repeat the violent, extractive private-government practices of the fossil fuel system. Several animating principles illustrate what this transition can look like.
Centering grassroots leadership and meaningful consultation
The realm of climate and energy policymaking is often dominated by the language and priorities of political and corporate elites, far removed from the analyses and lived experiences of communities impacted by climate disaster, by destructive and militarized megaprojects, or by energy inequity. Few channels exist for movements and civil society to articulate and press their demands before policymakers, and those that do are often difficult to navigate, inconsistent, or actively delegitimized.
This confluence of threats to democratic policymaking is often referred to as “shrinking civil society space,” and it’s one of the most significant obstacles to achieving a just, peaceful climate policy.
Important efforts have been undertaken to address this threat and build a stronger infrastructure between grassroots movement and policy spaces. For example, Diana’s organization, MADRE, as an international human rights organization and feminist fund, has partnered for decades with Indigenous women’s organizations in frontline communities worldwide, whose work provides immediate and lasting care for frontline communities. This work is further animated by collective, generational wisdom that prioritizes stewardship of ecosystems and balance among living beings. MADRE has created opportunities for these grassroots partners to inform and shape US policymaking, transmitting their recommendations such as for governments to ensure and resource Indigenous women’s policy leadership, enact international human rights protections in national law, and collect disaggregated data and evaluate policies using inclusive and participatory methods.
This work is further animated by collective, generational wisdom that prioritizes stewardship of ecosystems and balance among living beings.
The Feminist Green New Deal Coalition, of which MADRE is a part, has also hosted a series of consultations over the past year, bringing together grassroots organizers and human rights advocates to envision a future beyond fossil fuels and create guidelines for policymakers to advance a just and feminist energy transition. The Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) has worked with feminist advocates worldwide to spell out clear guidance for U.S. policymakers on transforming our energy system.
Gendered divisions of labor, particularly in rural communities worldwide, often assign women the responsibility to provide for household energy needs, increasing their care burden while also generating valuable insights into how decentralized energy access can and must operate. The SHINE Collab, which advocates support for women-led, community-driven and decentralized renewable energy, has used participatory methods to document women’s gendered energy needs and insights. These are among many examples of the direction that civil society organizations can provide to policymakers on just approaches to the energy transition.
The need for consultation with impacted communities has been encapsulated in the language of international human rights. The global Indigenous movement already spent decades honing a framework that can guide us now: the concept of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). That principle is captured in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, signed by all UN member states except an ignoble few, including the US. Effective, meaningful implementation of FPIC at the national and local level would require that governments set up transparent, accessible and predictable channels to share full information with communities that will be directly impacted by energy projects, and that policies would not proceed without consent and integration of communities’ priorities.
By definition, free, prior and informed consent cannot be coerced; it cannot be militarized.
Too often, we’ve seen superficial and manipulative attempts by governments and corporations to seek out so-called community consent. In Guatemala, where land activists have been murdered to silence protests, Indigenous women have taken a leading role in organizing community opposition to hydroelectric mega projects. They named the injustice of corporations promising to provide poor Indigenous communities with benefits like health care and education, while obscuring the reality that communities would also lose access to their water and receive no electricity from the project.
To compel policymakers to consistently engage in real engagement and consultation with frontline communities requires power and leverage. We can achieve that by combining our strengths across movements.
Consolidating shared strategies across peace and climate movements
In many policymaking spaces, peacebuilding and climate concerns are not as siloed as they once were, and policymakers and advocates more routinely make links between threats like resource depletion triggering intercommunal conflict, or the harms of war impacting local environments.
Increasingly, however, climate and peace advocates are going beyond simply naming these causal loops and are instead embracing the interconnections between struggles, building cross-movement infrastructure and seeking collaborative opportunities to co-create shared strategies.
For instance, in October 2023, anti-war and climate advocates gathered in Washington, DC for a day-long strategy session to map out the intersections between their campaigns and identify shared threats and opportunities. The discussion coalesced around key directions for collaborative action, such as: creating narrative frameworks that offer up care and climate justice as alternatives to militarism and extractivism, engaging in research and analysis to map the linkages between the military-industrial and fossil fuel complexes, and consolidating our networks to advocate in US foreign policymaking spaces around climate and peace.
As we de-silo our work and analyses through such collaborations, advocates also reveal that the threats we face are not only the specific violence of wars or climate disasters. By examining where policymaking power lies and how it functions, we better understand that the root causes of these particular threats are entangled militarist and extractivist frameworks that have captured our policymaking, nationally and internationally.
Confronting this embedded power is no small feat, and requires that climate and peace movements combine our capacities to map out opportunities to compel policy change, to strategize our entry points, and to mobilize a wider constituency for change.
