This is counter-intuitive but it is the same argument we used to read about "virtual water". Those arguments are fine in a spreadsheet, it gets advocates worked up, but fails in the real world as readily as most economic projections do.(1) The authors argue that they correlate armed conflict and the environment.
"Correlate", "linked to", and "suggests" are always clues you are reading EXPLORATORY claims using population-level statistics, the same thing that led the left in America to believe vaccines caused autism and the right to believe horse dewormer cured COVID-19.
To believe that more pollution causes violence(2) means ignoring a lot of confounders.
Violent countries are often going to be poor. They're violent because poverty is a hard life. It is well-known that when the cost of basic needs comes down, society improves across the board. I can get that down to one basic need - energy. When you make energy affordable, food becomes affordable. Less income is devoted to food and more goes to libraries and culture. Violence plummets. In one generation after the Tennessee Valley Authority brought affordable electricity to that region, the difference was starling.
We prevent that from happening. That's right, all of us. There are 2,000,000,000 poor people who use dung and wood for fuel. Both the Obama and Biden administrations told the World Bank they would not fund any centralized energy that was not solar or wind, which we know do not work. Even 1980s coal would slash emissions from using dung and wood in homes and Clean Coal Technology that has existed for 20 years would already have stopped emissions if we hadn't instead spent trillions of dollars on gimmicks so flawed that even Germany is undoing its anti-nuclear agenda.
Dr. James Hansen, the Godfather of Global Warming, showed nearly 20 years ago that with Clean Coal Tech nothing else needed to change. No environmental war on natural gas and hydroelectric power, no solar and wind gimmicks that are so disastrous even a windy place like Denmark can't get any company to bid unless the government agrees to fund the entire cost.
They don't have centralized energy, which means worse sanitation infrastructure and huge levels of pollution per capita, but their populations are not large so they are overwhelmed in population-level data by a country like the U.S., even though the U.S. has lower emissions per capita than it had 100 years ago.
Yet the paper ignores all of that and says western countries need to self-flaggelate more for owning air conditioners and care about the human dignity of poor countries.
So be noting that low GDP, not pollution, is the concern. Instead of lamenting that we have air conditioners, the regressive approach of modern progressives, especially in academia, let's get everyone air conditioners that use affordable, clean energy rather than overpriced placebos we've tried and failed to make work for 15 years and trillions of dollars.
If having air conditioners means world peace, that's a great dividend.
NOTES:
(1) The one thing no one fights over in the mideast is water, despite there being so little of it.
(2)That is always what International Agency for Research on Cancer when they suggest pickle juice is linked to cancer, and everyone who invokes statistical significance, wants you to do. Those papers shield themselves by writing 'does not imply causation' down at the bottom where Guardian journalists never read.
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