The fossil-fueled military beast chewing up nearly 60 percent of the national budget is energy inefficient and environmentally self-defeating.
Research published in the journal Pediatrics in May, 2018, revealed that “children are estimated to bear 88 [percent] of the burden of disease related to climate change.” Nevertheless, public health agencies don’t discuss what war costs our climate when they discuss what climate change will cost our children.
The paper’s opening summary outlines four major benefits of further decreasing DOD’s fossil fuel use:
- First, the U.S. would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This would thereby mitigate climate change and its associated threats to national security.
- Second, reducing fossil fuel consumption would have important political and security benefits, including reducing the dependence of troops in the field on oil, which the military acknowledges makes them vulnerable to enemy attacks. If the U.S. military were to significantly decrease its dependence on oil, the U.S. could reduce the political and fuel resources it uses to defend access to oil, particularly in the Persian Gulf, where it concentrates these efforts.
- Third, by decreasing U.S. dependence on oil-rich states the U.S. could then reevaluate the size of the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and reevaluate its relationship with Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region.
- Finally, by spending less money on fuel and operations to provide secure access to petroleum, the U.S. could decrease its military spending and reorient the economy to more economically productive activities.
Crawford, in her piece for The Conversation, concluded that “climate change should be front and center in U.S. national security debates. Cutting Pentagon greenhouse gas emissions will help save lives in the United States, and could diminish the risk of climate conflict.”
July 31, 2018 byStacy Bannerman in Common Dreams Is Climate the Worst Casualty of War?
The money misspent on the Iraq War—a war for oil, let’s not forget— could have purchased the planetary conversion to renewable energy. Just sit with that a moment.
“The cost of America’s post-9/11 wars is approaching $6 trillion,” writes Bannerman, “and the price tag will continue to climb right along with sea levels, temperatures, atmospheric CO2, and methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.” (Photo: Debra Sweet/flickr/cc)
How do you clear a room of climate activists? Start talking about war. It’s not just environmentalists that leave; it’s pretty much everyone. Mission accomplished by the Bush Administration, which sent the military and their families to war and the rest of the country to an amusement park. The military-civilian divide has been called an “epidemic of disconnection.” But the biosphere doesn’t see uniforms, and the environmental devastation caused by bombs, burn pits, and depleted uranium cannot be contained to a combat zone. We haven’t counted the massive carbon footprint of America’s endless wars because military emissions abroad have a blanket exemption from both national reporting requirements and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. There will be no exemptions in the coming climate collapse. We’ve all got skin in the war game now.
The cost of America’s post-9/11 wars is approaching $6 trillion and the price tag will continue to climb right along with sea levels, temperatures, atmospheric CO2, and methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. We can look forward to an escalation in global food insecurity, climate refugees, and the release of long-dormant, potentially highly lethal bacteria and viruses. Research published in the journal Pediatrics in May, 2018, revealed that “children are estimated to bear 88 [percent] of the burden of disease related to climate change.” Nevertheless, public health agencies don’t discuss what war costs our climate when they discuss what climate change will cost our children.
Religious communities are mobilizing on the behalf of the healing and protection of the planet. But with few exceptions, such as MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign resurrected by a trio of ministers, the topic of America’s literal war on the world is still off the table. Although he surely knows creation is God’s cathedral, His Holiness Pope Francis spent only a handful of words on the ecology of war in the beautifully rendered Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home. And the big environmental organizations seem to have tacitly agreed that the U.S. military is the entity we won’t talk about when we talk about the biggest contributors to climate change.
The Pentagon uses more petroleum per day than the aggregate consumption of 175 countries (out of 210 in the world), and generates more than 70 percent of this nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions, based on rankings in the CIA World Factbook. “The U.S. Air Force burns through 2.4 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, all of it derived from oil,” reported an article in the Scientific American. Since the start of the post-9/11 wars, U.S. military fuel consumption has averaged about 144 million barrels annually. That figure doesn’t include fuel used by coalition forces, military contractors, or the massive amount of fossil fuels burned in weapons manufacturing.
According to Steve Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International, “The Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007.” That’s more CO2e than 60 percent of all countries, and those figures are only from the first four years. We downsized the war in December of 2011, but still haven’t left, so the U.S. invasion and 15 years of occupation has likely generated upwards of 400 million metric tons of CO2e to date. The money misspent on that war—a war for oil, let’s not forget— could have purchased the planetary conversion to renewable energy. Just sit with that a moment. Then stand up and get back to work, please.
We’ve got wind farms to build and pipelines to stop. We’ve got solar panels to install and water to protect. We need torchbearers from every tribe and nation to walk the green path and light the Eighth Fire. But to do so while continuing to feed the fossil-fueled military beast chewing up nearly 60 percent of the national budget is energy inefficient and environmentally self-defeating. We cannot cure this man-made cancer on the climate without addressing underlying causes. In order to achieve the massive systemic and cultural transformations required for mitigating climate change and advancing climate justice, we’re going to have to deal with the socially sanctioned, institutionalized violence perpetrated by U.S. foreign policy that is pouring fuel on the fire of global warming.
The Department of Defense (DOD) has the largest carbon footprint of any enterprise on the planet. The DOD is the single greatest manufacturer and disseminator of tools and toxins like Agent Orange and nuclear waste that are inherently destructive to ecosystems. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. environmental disasters classified Superfund sites by the EPA have been caused by the Pentagon, which is a primary polluter of U.S. waterways. There should be no surprise, then, that at least 126 military bases have contaminated water, causing cancer and birth defects in service-members and their families. (So much for supporting the troops.)
We have to replace the flawed patriotism desperately clinging to the idea that we can’t win without war (all evidence to the contrary) with a bipartisan paradigm so powerfully devoted to liberty and justice and freedom for all that creating an intelligent, muscular peace becomes a national priority. If we do not, we will never become the America we have said that we are. In the end, it’s what we haven’t included in the cost of war that may end up costing the most.
We simply cannot continue the moral, spiritual, fiscal, or environmental policy of benign neglect that underwrites the decimation of land, air, and water around the world. That, my green friends, is the single most unsustainable policy on this nation’s books.
I know a lot of folks have decided not to speak out about war in order to avoid being labeled a traitor, or accused of being anti-military. If we learn nothing else—and it seems we have not—from the Iraq War, we learn that silence is a luxury we cannot afford when lives are on the line. The hands of the Doomsday Clock are two minutes from midnight. Life itself is on the line. It is time to find your voice.
We have to de-frock the sacred cow grazing at the Pentagon, because climate may be the worst casualty of all. My whole existence was a casualty of the Iraq War, and too many of my friends have gotten a Gold Star. I don’t use the word “casualty” lightly. When I tell you the pain of losing everything you love because of war is a pain you do not want, I beg you to believe me. We have to keep working to “Keep it in the ground,” but if we don’t get serious about stopping the United States War Machine, we could lose the biggest battle of our lives.Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
June 12, 2019byCommon Dreams New Report Exposes Pentagon’s Massive Contributions to Climate Crisis Post-9/11
Failing to curb the U.S. military’s fossil fuel use, Costs of War Project co-director warns, “will help guarantee the nightmare scenarios” forecast by scientists byJessica Corbett, staff writer
A Luke Air Force Base F-35 Lightning II stands by to take off April 15, 2015, at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. (Photo: U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Thomas Spangler)
From the 2001 launch of the so-called War on Terror to 2017, the Pentagon generated at least 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases—with annual rates exceeding the planet-warming emissions of industrialized countries such as Portugal or Sweden—according to new research.
Boston University professor Neta C. Crawford details the U.S. Department of Defense’s massive contributions to the global climate emergency in a paper (pdf) published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
“The U.S. military’s energy consumption drives total U.S. government energy consumption,” the paper reads. “The DOD is the single largest consumer of energy in the U.S., and in fact, the world’s single largest institutional consumer of petroleum.”
“Absent any change in U.S. military fuel use policy, the fuel consumption of the U.S. military will necessarily continue to generate high levels of greenhouse gases,” the paper warns. “These greenhouse gases, combined with other U.S. emissions, will help guarantee the nightmare scenarios that the military predicts and that many climate scientists say are possible.”
Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project, estimates U.S. military emissions—which largely come from fueling weapons and equipment as well as operating more than 560,000 buildings around the world—from 1975 to 2017, relying on data from the Energy Department because the Pentagon does not report its fuel consumption numbers to Congress.
In the paper, she also examines patterns of military fuel use since 2001 in relation to emissions and the Pentagon’s views on “climate change as a threat to military installations and operations, as well as to national security, when and if climate change leads mass migration, conflict, and war.”
Writing about her research for The Conversation Wednesday, Crawford noted that DOD’s annual emissions have declined since reaching a peak in 2004, as the Pentagon has, over the past decade, “reduced its fossil fuel consumption through actions that include using renewable energy, weatherizing buildings, and reducing aircraft idling time on runways.”
The paper’s opening summary outlines four major benefits of further decreasing DOD’s fossil fuel use:
- First, the U.S. would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This would thereby mitigate climate change and its associated threats to national security.
- Second, reducing fossil fuel consumption would have important political and security benefits, including reducing the dependence of troops in the field on oil, which the military acknowledges makes them vulnerable to enemy attacks. If the U.S. military were to significantly decrease its dependence on oil, the U.S. could reduce the political and fuel resources it uses to defend access to oil, particularly in the Persian Gulf, where it concentrates these efforts.
- Third, by decreasing U.S. dependence on oil-rich states the U.S. could then reevaluate the size of the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and reevaluate its relationship with Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region.
- Finally, by spending less money on fuel and operations to provide secure access to petroleum, the U.S. could decrease its military spending and reorient the economy to more economically productive activities.
Crawford, in her piece for The Conversation, concluded that “climate change should be front and center in U.S. national security debates. Cutting Pentagon greenhouse gas emissions will help save lives in the United States, and could diminish the risk of climate conflict.”
She is far from the first to highlight how the Pentagon is fueling the world’s climate crisis and call for urgent reforms. Just last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a climate “resiliency and readiness” plan for the U.S. military as part of her 2020 campaign for president. However, as Common Dreams reported at the time, anti-war critics of Warren’s plan charged that “trying to ‘green’ the Pentagon without addressing the destructive impacts of its bloated budget and American imperialism is a misguided way to combat the emergency of global warming.”
Author and advocate Stacy Bannerman, in an op-ed for Common Dreams last year, warned that “if we don’t get serious about stopping the United States War Machine, we could lose the biggest battle of our lives.”
“In order to achieve the massive systemic and cultural transformations required for mitigating climate change and advancing climate justice,” Bannerman wrote, “we’re going to have to deal with the socially sanctioned, institutionalized violence perpetrated by U.S. foreign policy that is pouring fuel on the fire of global warming.”Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
