Military vehicles, along with the forces that use them and the industries that supply them, represent a huge climate problem, accounting for 5% of the world’s carbon emissions every year.
There’s no bigger actor in that space than the US military, which sucks up more petroleum than any other institution on earth to fly jets, heat buildings, and ferry food, and supplies to 750 bases spread across the world, a process that, all told, produces an emissions footprint greater than that of the entire country of Sweden.
That might be changing, though. The Department of Defense (DOD) has embarked on a decarbonization push in recent months, claiming to be in the process of building a greener American fighting force. However, many environmentalists and academics say that fully decarbonizing the country’s current military and its vast network of overseas bases simply isn’t realistic. Carbon cuts, they argue, will come with trade-offs, and at some point we will have to make a difficult choice to scale down our armed forces to avert ecological catastrophe.
The US military has actually been talking about climate change for a long time, even as the issue has fallen in and out of political favour. Almost two decades ago, for instance, when the Bush Administration was still denying that human-caused climate change was real, the DOD’s Office of Net Assessment commissioned a controversial 2003 report on how rising temperatures could affect US national security. Many more reports have followed, with strategists and planners routinely studying how a changing climate will impact the military’s mission.
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…in recent months, emissions moves from the DOD have at least come as a long-overdue acknowledgment that the military’s climate footprint is a serious issue—even if they don’t seem to be quite getting to the root of the matter. “I liken it to Alcoholics Anonymous,” says Doug Weir, research and policy director at the UK-based Conflict and Environmental Observatory. “The first step is admitting that you have a problem.”