Groundbreaking Report Gives Us a Glimpse of the US Military’s Gigantic Carbon Footprint

Source: GITMO

by Brian Kahn • Thursday, June 13, 2019

There are a lot of superlatives that can be used to describe the U.S. military. It represents the biggest chunk of the federal budget. It's extremely good at killing people. And it's also a prolific carbon emitter and serial oil user.

A new report from Brown's Watson Institute examines the Pentagon's day-to-day carbon footprint, oil use, and how much carbon the unending War on Terror has emitted. It shows that while the military is progressive in terms of acknowledging the threat climate change poses to the world, it's also a huge part of the problem. And while this represents one of the most comprehensive analyses of how much carbon the military emits, it likely doesn’t capture just how bad of a polluter the Pentagon is.

The military is notoriously cagey about its carbon footprint. The Kyoto Protocol—the 1997 precursor the Paris Agreement—required the world's developed countries to account for their emissions but left a notorious loophole to opt out for reporting or reducing military emissions. (The loophole was engineered by the U.S., which then, of course, didn't sign the treaty). The Paris Agreement closed that loophole, though it doesn't say anything about reducing countries' military carbon footprints. The Department of Defense has a huge vehicle fleet, manages roughly half a million installations, and has a well-known love of secrecy, which creates further roadblocks when it comes to estimating its environmental impact.

"The war machine is thirsty for oil."

The new report scours public records from the Department of Defense on its fuel use as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy, which track all federal agencies' carbon emissions. The findings show that since 9/11, the military bought an average of 120 million barrels of fossil fuel annually. In 2017, it emitted 59 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. If it were a country, the military would basically be Portugal.

"The war machine is thirsty for oil," Neta Crawford, a political scientist at Boston University who wrote the report, told Earther. "That's a given because of their need for mobility and they operate in areas with extreme temperatures. They need a lot of energy. Well, 'need' should be in quotes."

On the carbon emissions front, the report estimates that the War on Terror campaign the U.S. military launched in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks is responsible for 35 percent of all its emissions in the 21st century. The report notes that U.S. Central Command, the command center responsible for military operations in the Middle East and thus waging a vast swath of the post-9/11 war, has been a huge source of those emissions.

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