Mahanth is Editor

The answers are right under our nose if we just follow the money. I don’t care who you are, what country you live in, what your religion is, whose “side” you’re on, who you think is “good” or “bad” or “right” or “wrong”- no matter, this is for YOU.

Russia and Ukraine are mired in a blood-soaked World War I style stalemate in Eastern Europe as their soldiers play “whack-a-mole” up and down the lines of control that are about as frozen as the trenches they shiver in. All the while Israel plays a deadly game of “whack-a-mole” in Gaza, West Bank, and Lebanon while America plays perhaps the most futile version of “whack-a-mole” of all by exchanging fire with militias in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. None of the above are effective long-term strategies for approaching an endgame of peace because “eye for an eye” applies to all of the quagmires. If these cycles continue there is no end in sight to the cycle of violence that I can discern, with escalation more likely than ceasefire. Meanwhile a firehose of billions upon billions of dollars that could be used more constructively elsewhere by governments (for example spending it on the welfare of their own people- what a radical idea!) are being pissed away into the wind by all the bickering groups: US, NATO, Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Israel, etc.

It would be fair to ask what a better long-term strategy might be? Let’s first examine some facts deep at the root level of how finance works.

OIL AND GAS paid for Al Qaeda’s attack on 9/11, which started the $7 TRILLION AND COUNTING War on Terror which never ended for those American boots still stuck knee-deep in the Middle East sand. US soldiers are still sustaining serious injuries, and still dying there in 2024.

OIL AND GAS pay for the Russian war machine, giving it the superpower to keep fighting indefinitely.

OIL AND GAS pay for Iran and other oil dictators to fund Hamas, its training, its tunnels, and its rockets, etc.

OIL AND GAS pay for Iran to fund Hezbollah, its training, its rockets, etc.

OIL AND GAS pay for Iran to fund the Houthis, their training, their drones, their rockets, etc. that have almost blockaded commercial shipping through the Red Sea, without a navy for the first time in human history.

OIL AND GAS pay for a hornet’s nest of nihilistic Mideast militias itching to fight, in some cases to die, even agreeing to suicide, to fulfill deviant sexual fantasies involving 72 virgins, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and elsewhere. (These guys have no idea how annoying it will be for them to deal with 72 virgins alone for a single minute- I hope killing themself will make them want to kill themself, but they can’t and are stuck in the worst punishment of all)

OIL AND GAS lobbyists, political donations including “dark money” exert outsized control over foreign and domestic policy in Washington, DC including a chokehold on Congress, in tandem with the military-industrial complex lobby. (sorry Americans, we aren’t off the hook)

OIL AND GAS are fueling the rise of China and India toward superpower status, except they’ll never get to enjoy that superpower status because before then their powerhouse coastal economic engines like Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen will all be buried under the ocean.

So, humans: let’s accelerate the weaning off our damned bloody addiction to OIL AND GAS while saving the planet from roasting from bombs and climate change, all at the same time.

How? Biodiesel. Solar. Nuclear. EVs. Wind. Waves. Dams. LEDs. Battery storage. More and better mass transit. Lithium recycling. Geothermal. Green roofs. Eco-homes. And much more, some of which I don’t know about, can be part of the solution. Humans have been given the gifts to reason and to innovate, shame on us if we can’t figure this out and resort to just being apes who bash each other on the head in perpetuity instead.

How to pay for it? Simply transfer all that capital allocation from the billions being pissed into the wind in the above games of “whack-a-mole.” 

And, most of all: consume less power when it’s not needed, something Americans are particularly bad at. At residence and commercial property: turn off the damn lights, and computers, and TVs, and ACs, when they’re not needed!

Iran, Russia, and other petro-states will realize they’ll be better off diverting their economy toward innovation, including green tech, instead of just sucking fossil fuels out of the ground forever to make a living while engaging in foreign misadventures all related to oil and gas. It’ll be better for them, too: fossil fuels will eventually run out anyway, unless before then climate change will have wiped them, and all of us, out.

Alternative: go home right now to your family, and in particular if you have children and grandchildren, look them straight in the eye and tell them the brutal truth: that YOU DO NOT LOVE THEM as much as oil and gas, and you are leaving them to fend for themselves in a world in far worse condition than it was when you were born.