A Trip to the Smuggling Tunnels: How Gaza Shows that Fossil Fuels Are Still King

In the endless discussion of how the U.S. might best move away from fossil fuels, it’s important to remember that our climate problem is a global one. While there are a number of reasons for the U.S. to become energy independent, these efforts will yield few results for the health of the planet if the whole world doesn’t get involved.
With that in mind, I headed to the smuggling tunnels in Gaza to investigate the lengths to which people will go to get their hands on fuel. What I found was astounding. Fossil fuels were flowing in every day, and the roads around Gaza were lined with merchants hawking bottles of fuel that had recently come illegally from Egypt.
Even in an energy-rich part of the world like the Middle East, people here are far from considering how best to move away from fossil fuels. To the contrary, I found them going to extraordinary lengths to get their hands on the stuff.
Even with oil prices down and developed countries trying to move away from fossil fuels, visiting the tunnels in Gaza reminded me what a precious and necessary commodity fuel is in much of the world.
So before we put the blinkers on and direct all our energies towards moving away from fossil fuels domestically, we need to consider broader global initiatives to get the rest of the world thinking like us. Even a heroic effort in the U.S. over the coming years would do little to curb global warming if we don’t cast our gaze to the planet at large.