If you go looking, you can find one haunting image after another from our new Iran war.

Displaced people in Lebanon, explosions rattling Tehran and Beirut.

But over the last few days, the images that have stuck with me have been shot from much

further away, from space, actually.

They show sooty black clouds streaming across the Middle East, the result of oil tanks being struck in Oman,

or fires smoldering for days at a refinery south of the Iranian capital.

I look at these images, and I can't help but think, in addition to all the human misery this war is

causing, how much damage are we doing to our planet?

Damage that's going to be hard, if not impossible, to fix.

It turns out one group has tried to tally the environmental impact.

The Climate and Community Institute says the first

two weeks of war released 5 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

We are setting oil tankers on fire and bombing natural gas sites and those toxic clouds that you're talking about probably not so good for

people trying to breathe or drink the water and also not great for climate.

Catherine Rampel has been following all this over at the bulwark.

Yeah, I mean, the Guardian characterized the Middle East as a gigantic

environmental sacrifice zone, which when I read, I was like, oh, I hadn't really even thought

about it that way. Yeah, we know, of course, war is lethal. But yeah, killing people and

destroying the planet in all sorts of new innovative ways.

For both me and Catherine, all this devastation, maybe, had one potential upside. With all these

fossil fuels on fire and oil tankers unable to travel the straight of Hormuz, it felt like there

was a new incentive to invest in cleaner energy, in energy independence.

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