Earlier this week, we saw the contentiousness the offshore oil drilling issue can bring, with McCain protestors and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exchanging jibes on the topic at the Democratic convention. But the fact is, increased need to probe the remote places of the Earth for oil may bring about far larger, more dangerous conflicts.

After amassing an empire on which the sun never set, then relinquishing it at the sunset of colonialism, the nation of Great Britain has once again become very interested in its territorial holdings near Ascension Island. This 35-square-mile hunk of rock, a thousand miles from anywhere, is not claimed by any other nation, but the British are asking to extend territorial waters beyond the 200 miles around the island, based on some geographic evidence that much of its landmass lies underwater.

There may be more than pedantic geography at play here. After all, England, along with the United States, France, the Netherlands and many other former colonial powers, controls isolated islands scattered across the globe. If these formerly barren land masses could be made to include great portions of the wealth of energy and minerals some say offshore drilling holds, there’s a fair chance international conflict is likely to ensue.

After all, less than half of all oceanic claims have been fully delineated, and some countries, most notably Russia, have already moved to stake a claim in disputed areas. While tentative agreements are in place to allow the UN to moderate disputes over seabed claims, the continuing conflict in Iraq and the recent military incursion into Georgia indicate that two of the world’s largest powers may have no qualms about writing their own rules in the interests of solidifying their energy supply. In the end, off-shore oil drilling may end up doing far more harm than good to the security of national energy supplies.

Renewable energy sources offer one of the best solutions to this problem of oil expansionism. While clean energy solutions are not perfect—certainly solar projects to benefit Europe but built in the Sahara bring the opportunity for exploitation and conflict—cleaner tech tends to focus largely on terrestrial or inshore production, and more importantly, extracts power from resources that are essentially infinite, all but eliminating the need for a rush to delineate who owns what.

While the progression of climate change may be too subtle or too easily contested for some people, the very real specter of international war should be a far louder and more pressing wake-up call against continued over-dependence on fossil-fuel based energy supplies.

Photo by Flickr user Troy Burwell