Strife

Prologue

Writing about climate change / chaos in 2025 is like writing fiction or describing Eris / strife. Not that climate chaos is unreal or that weather has changed its anthropogenic acceleration of more violence from physical phenomena, more unpredictable and more punishing. No. Nature is a vast global and cosmic power that does not take orders. From an insect to a human being, any impropriety brings swift punishment. That humans fail to understand nature, is a fact of millennial duration. They think and sometimes act as if they dominate nature. Such behavior is not a mark of wisdom but of hubris and Eris. The Greeks defined hubris as insult, ugly talk and extreme arrogance laced with stupidity. Arrogance triggers war. And Eris / strife is even worse than hubris. Hesiod says Eris was the daughter of Night. Eris gave birth to Ponos / pains, famine, oblivion, sorrows, clashes, battles, quarrels and lies as well as arguments and counter arguments (Theogony 225-230).

Eris / discord even influenced the gods. She convinced Athena, Aphrodite and Hera to claim primacy in beauty. The goddesses did with the Trojan prince Paris choosing Aphrodite for the prize of supreme beauty. Aphrodite won because she promised the most beautiful woman for wife. That spectacular and gorgeous woman was no other than Helen, daughter of Zeus and wife of Menelaos, King of Sparta. Paris visited Sparta and departed with Helen, thus sparking the Trojan War.

The triumph of Eris / strife

The Greeks knew something about Eris / strife – and the Trojan War. They developed institutions like the Olympics to remind them they were all the same civilized people, speaking Greek and worshipping the same gods. However, Eris, also known as Strife, caused endless strife, including civil wars. Poets like Aeschylos, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes had read Homer and Herodotos and understood the causes of strife. Just like Homer, they wrote anti-war plays. These plays were shown at the theater of Dionysos in Athens and other open-air theaters throughout Greece. Athens in fact paid poor people to attend the theater, which had become a school of free speech and democracy. Plays had a cathartic healing effect.

However, 2,500 years later, we have no theaters of Dionysos nor playwrights like those of fifth-century BCE Athens. Eris / strife reigns supreme at home and abroad.

The twenty-first century is the century of denial. Our era has become the turning point for a commodity bred on Eris / strife: energy from fossil fuels. Wars are wrecking societies north and south and causing unfathomable damage to the environment / our Mother Earth.

Climate chaos

The most lasting and explosive harm comes from the strife-loaded energy we use to keep us comfortable at home, power our countless cars, transportation, and factories, as well as our millions of machines and military. Since the industrialization of the nineteenth century, fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas, and coal) have given humanity energy as well as immense strife in the form of global warming. That is, the burning of fossil fuels emits gases like carbon dioxide and methane, which capture solar heat that, in time, are released to the atmosphere, thus raising the temperature of the planet. Higher global temperatures have been slowly unsettling life in the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, forests, land, and villages and cities. Those ecological upheavals manifest themselves in dead corals, less food for water and land mammals and the extinction of animals and plants. The other, often deadly effects of global rising temperatures come from the angry nature. The punishment takes the form of hurricanes, flooding, destructive winds, gigantic fires, heat waves, bomb rains, the melting of ice, chronic drought and less productive crops and the rise of epidemics.

Climatologists have been studying climate change for several decades. Many of them are certain that global temperature is rising primarily because of human activities like mining, vast deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. Yet knowing, now or in the past, did not often translate to actions or policies to stop the harm.

For example, peat bogs absorb considerable amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. But instead of protecting these ancient ecosystems, humans have been decimating them for centuries. According to Frances Mack, an Irish journalist who has studied peat bogs in Ireland,

“Peat bogs are dense, freshwater wetlands that develop over thousands of years. When glaciers retreated during the last ice age, they left behind lake basins that gradually filled with mosses and other plant debris. As these layers of plants accumulated and became saturated with water, they created an acidic and anaerobic environment that inhibits the growth of fungi and bacteria, preventing normal decomposition of plant matter and preserving organic materials—even those as small as a fingernail. Bogs are also vital carbon sinks: Although peatlands cover just 3 percent of the Earth’s land surface, they sequester nearly a third of the world’s soil carbon.”

Energy alternatives to fossil fuels come primarily from the endless light and heat of the immortal Sun and wind.

But the beneficial solar and wind energies are, once again, in trouble. Fossil fuel money and influence elected Donald Trump and Republicans in America in 2025. For the most part, these politicians ignore science and work from the playbook of their funders. Drill, baby, drill. This political support of fossil fuels is undermining, to some degree, domestic and international efforts to kick the bad habit, thus slowing down the unleashed dragon of climate chaos.

Keeping the stuff in the ground?

Bill NcKibben, a writer and passionate supporter of fossil fuel alternatives, explains the games played in the United States in order to reverse the encouraging course of solar and wind energy.

McKibben speaks enthusiastically about a forthcoming climate summit in 2026 and headed by Jerry Brown, former governor of California. McKibben says that the 2015 Paris Climate Accord is “imploding, thanks to Donald Trump.” The United States “blew the whole thing up. So… the notion that the United States is a serious power anymore is… yes, we have a lot of nuclear weapons, but that’s about what we’ve got at this point.” Nevertheless, in the fight over energy, McKibben realizes that the final result is good for the country. He explains:

“This fight for 100 percent renewable energy in community after community is significant. We want pledges to take to that California summit next September from thousands of communities around the world. But the fight to keep the stuff in the ground, to fight every new fossil fuel project, that continues. Even in the face of Trump, people are fighting desperately and valiantly to prevent the Keystone pipeline from getting built, and a thousand others that sprung up in the wake of that Keystone fight. We win a lot of those fights, which is good news.”

“Wind and sun,” McKibben continues, “are diffuse, but ubiquitous. There’s some wind and some sun everywhere on the planet. And so, almost naturally, you begin to have a somewhat more localized and democratized energy system, and that removes some of that power base. It’s why one of the most subversive things that one can do is push hard for renewable energy at this point…. The mistakes we’re making right now are so epic, and the results will be in geologic time.”

Conclusion

Despite the existential dangers of fossil fuels, in countries like Greece, there’s tremendous interest to get American petroleum companies like Chevron or Exxon to drill in the Aegean Sea for petroleum. Moreover, the presence of Chevron south of Crete or south of Peloponnesos will neutralize Turkey’s rhetoric and strategy to grab the Aegean from Greece.

Of course, the American-educated rulers of Greece should have made their country the country of the Sun, taking advantage of their ancient history and current reality. Greece could follow China’s lead and become a largely solar-powered country, producing solar panels and building electric cars. Instead, it is in bed with American petroleum companies. But Greece is not the only country trying to make a buck from petroleum and natural gas under her sovereignty. The petroleum states in the Middle East, and giants of fossil fuel production, Russia and the United States, are leading the planet in this destructive activity.

Seeing and observing the machine domination of America, its petroleum-powered enormous fleets of cars, trucks, leaf-blowers, airplanes, luxury boats, ships, armies, and navies, I am not so optimistic about the future. Yes, electric cars exist, and solar panels produce some electricity. Al Gore and Bill McKibben are confident we can win this fight for civilization and the planet. I am with them. Yet this struggle demands the education of millions of Americans about what is at stake. Are colleges and universities informing and educating their millions of students about the climate dragon?

Second, what about the government? Yes, the Trump administration is resurrecting the bad environmental policies of Ronald Reagan. But on the fundamental question of farming and the quality of food Americans eat, both Democrats and Republicans gave agribusiness the upper hand to wreck this country’s land and biological diversity. They legalized neurotoxins and carcinogens in food. I witnessed this abominable policy for 25 years at the US Environmental Protection Agency. This explains my reluctance to assume that the politicians of this country possess the knowledge and ethics necessary to care for civilization and the planet.

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