The horror unfolding in Ukraine has been met with encouraging, near-unanimous global outrage and massive, immediate action.
Unprovoked aggression was answered with the rapid mobilization of international military and humanitarian support. Crippling sanctions against Russia and Belarus, growing public protest inside Russia and around the world, and urgent action taken by private industry and nongovernmental organizations have severed Russia from the global economy and made it a pariah among the community of nations.
Enormous refugee flows began immediately. Nearly three quarters of a million Ukrainian citizens and residents fled the fighting by Tuesday afternoon, with millions more expected soon. The number of civilians killed and internally displaced is growing quickly. Children have died.
The lives of the Ukrainian people were upended instantly. In just hours, normal, everyday life ended. For many, it was replaced with the life of a refugee seeking safety abroad; for others, they went from office jobs to digging trenches from which to fight and using Google to learn to make gasoline bombs and operate weapons of war.
What may happen from here is terrifying to imagine. Vladimir Putin and his United Nations ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, have spun a fictional — and ominous — web of grievance and invented history as justification for their project, which has come into clear focus as the re-creation of a Soviet-style or Czarist empire. They speak of fighting “Nazis” as they wage unprovoked war as Hitler did. They aim to occupy Ukraine and replace its government through brutality and murder.
Should Russia succeed and install a puppet regime, it will certainly face the coordinated nonviolent resistance and mass noncooperation that Ukrainians used to overthrow a corrupt government in 2004. Indeed, groups of unarmed Ukrainian civilians are already standing in front of tanks and columns to slow the invasion.
Putin may succeed — at incalculable cost to Ukrainian and Russian lives, and with potentially unthinkable impacts beyond Ukraine. The promise of the unified global response so far is that any “victory” will be short-lived.
Like so many, I’ve followed developments closely. I’ve watched the history-making debates in the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly. And anyone who visited the U.N. website on Monday to find the affecting speeches of Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya and others, also found news of the latest devastating report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Approved by 195 nations on Sunday, it focuses on vastly insufficient efforts to adapt to the accelerating impacts of the climate emergency.
Their warning, as it has been for years, was stark: “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” The headlines are familiar, as in The New York Times: “Time Is Running Out to Avert a Harrowing Future, Climate Panel Warns.”
The report also documents how less-wealthy nations and communities face a crisis many times more severe than those better-off. Massive fires, deadly heat waves, extended drought, dwindling freshwater supplies, and enormously destructive storms are destroying lives and overwhelming infrastructure. And the world is doing far too little to address what’s already here and to prepare for what’s coming — even to meet the most optimistic projections of what further warming might bring.
This warning comes amidst the terrible new war in Ukraine. There are grim parallels: As with war, climate disruption upends lives and communities, often instantly. Not from the evil of bombs and bullets, but through the weaponized, once-stable, once-predictable systems of nature we have aimed at ourselves.
Climate disruption has been an accelerating tragedy for decades. It may feel less immediate and be far less terrifying moment-to-moment than what we’re watching in Ukraine, but the result will be the same as what innocents suffer in war: Death, destruction, sudden and ongoing refugee flows and displacement, economic and political instability, and everyday life made impossible. In sum? Immeasurable human suffering.
Fossil fuel export revenues fund Putin’s war machine. That demands an even faster transition away from oil, gas, and coal. Energy independence is a geopolitical necessity both for European security and our own. But not via an expansion of oil and gas drilling or burning more coal, as the usual suspects in the United States are again promoting. That short-term answer will mean long-term disaster.
Instead, we must mobilize governments, the private sector, and people worldwide to vastly accelerate unprecedented investment in distributed, carbon-free energy systems. The national-security benefit of reducing reliance on imported energy is well-known, as are the economic gains that will come from millions of clean-energy jobs.
The Ukraine crisis is evidence, yet again, that such coordinated, rapid, international action is possible to meet urgent threats to innocents. Even with imperfect national and international institutions, a clear and immediate peril to the safety and well-being of millions — or billions — of people can inspire previously unthinkable change to business-as-usual politics, economics, and international affairs.
As we head into another summer filled with record-setting heat, intense and destructive storms, and wildfires that threaten countless lives, let our global collective action on behalf of Ukraine be a powerful reminder of what’s possible to organize — quickly — with, and on behalf of, one another.
And while success is by no means guaranteed, aligning facts with our concern and action is what moral, engaged, global citizenship looks like. And that’s true whether confronting the dangers of this horrific new war or trying to head off environmental catastrophe.
Bill Shein’s column appears every Wednesday.
