Dahr Jamail was working in Alaska’s Denali National Park in the early 2000s when he decided to travel to Iraq to better cover the U.S.-led invasion of the region, on the now debunked basis that Iraq’s president was hiding “weapons of mass destruction.”

“I was so aghast at how it was being covered in the corporate media,” Jamail says. “[I]t was literally an overt resource war.”

This trend of resource grabs hasn’t abated in the two decades since that invasion, he says. Jamail joined the Mongabay Newscast to discuss the context behind current global conflicts, and how resource-based conflicts exacerbate — and are influenced by — the planet’s stressed ecological limits.

It’s important to note that the true justification of specific conflicts, such as the war in Iraq, are still publicly debated today. However, scientists have warned governments like the United States against contributing to them, and to instead invest the time and money in transitioning their economies to more sustainable models. Today, the total cost of ignoring this call stands at 4.5 million to 4.7 million lives and $8 trillion (to the U.S. alone) for all post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

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Banner image: All post-9/11 wars are estimated to have contributed 1,267 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University. A convoy of U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV), assigned to D/Company, 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marines Division, arrives in Northern Iraq, during a sandstorm. Image by the United States Marine Corps via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

Rachel Donald is a climate corruption reporter and the creator of Planet: Critical, the podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis. Her latest thoughts can be found at 𝕏 via @CrisisReports and at Bluesky via @racheldonald.bsky.social.

Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram.