Why the Pentagon Is the World's Biggest Single Greenhouse Gas Emitter - Mother Jones

Why the Pentagon Is the World's Biggest Single Greenhouse Gas Emitter

A new book explains how the US military came to consume more fossil fuels than most countries—and what we can do about it.

MotherJones.com | Ruqaiyah Zarook | October 7, 2022

The US military has spent decades cultivating a corrosive environmental legacy around the world. Just last December, about 6,000 people became sick when jet fuel from a World War II-era Navy storage facility reportedly leaked into the drinking water aquifers of Hawaiian residents. Famously, at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune military base, up to 1 million people were exposed to contaminated drinking water over the course of 25 years. And on military bases constructed for America’s post-9/11 wars, trash was often destroyed in burn pits that contained everything from computers to furniture to medical waste that released toxic smoke, breathed in by soldiers and civilians alike.

But while many people may be familiar with the stories of these environmental disasters, the massive carbon emissions produced by the military’s day-to-day operations have received comparatively little attention.

Neta C. Crawford, a political scientist at Oxford University, aims to fix that in her new book, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions. Although the Pentagon has been at the forefront of climate change research since the mid-20th century, Crawford writes, the US Department of Defense is also the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world. Since 2001, the military has been responsible for 77 to 80 percent of federal energy consumption.

The DOD maintains more than 560,000 buildings on about 500 bases around the world, making up a large portion of its emissions. And like a goliath multinational corporation, it relies on an extensive network of fossil-fueled ships, trucks, planes, and other vehicles to support its operations—from dropping bombs to delivering humanitarian aid—all of which makes the military a key contributor to climate change. And although recent research has demonstrated that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, it still tends to be overlooked in climate change studies...more
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-climate-change-neta-crawford-book/

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Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War

Neta C. Crawford | Boston University
Updated and Revised, 13 November 2019

Summary

If climate change is a “threat multiplier,” as some national security experts and members of the military argue, how does the US military reduce climate change caused threats? Or does war and the preparation for it increase those risks?

In its quest for security, the United States spends more on the military than any other country in the world, certainly much more than the combined military spending of its major rivals, Russia and China. Authorized at over $700 billion in Fiscal Year 2019, and with over $700 billion requested for FY2020, the Department of Defense (DOD) budget comprises more than half of all federal discretionary spending each year. With an armed force of more than two million people, 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, and the world’s most advanced military aircraft, the US is more than capable of projecting power anywhere in the globe, and with “Space Command,” into outer space. Further, the US has been continuously at war since late 2001, with the US military and State Department currently engaged in more than 80 countries in counterterror operations...more
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs%20of%20War%20Revised%20November%202019%20Crawford.pdf

Where is the discussion of this - the biggest US contributor to global warming? Since there is no more "Anti-War" talk this will be shoved under the rug and dismissed.

"We're all Henry Kissinger now" - former Anti-War wackjob