Neta C. Crawford (MIT Press)
IN JUNE, the secretary-general of NATO that the military alliance would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. As the website , observers objected to important details being left vague, such as which countries it covered.
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Since the first international climate summit, military emissions have been largely exempt from reporting and reduction targets. It is time this changed, says Neta Crawford, an international relations expert at the University of Oxford.
In her new book, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the rise and fall of US military emissionsshe puts numbers to the emissions produced by NATO鈥檚 largest member, the US military. Using only publicly available sources, she finds that in 2019 the US military and its manufacturers were responsible for emissions equivalent to 105.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. The official number cited is about half that.
Crawford鈥檚 estimate includes fuel for jets, ships, tanks and electricity used in global bases. It also includes emissions from weapons manufacturing and its supply chains. Crawford omits trickier emissions, those generated by US operations resulting in burning buildings or bombed fossil fuel infrastructure, or rival powers aiming to match US military might.
Even incomplete, the figures show that the US Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest single institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, contributing more than the 45 lowest-emitting countries combined. That is tiny compared with total US emissions 鈥� less than 1 per cent 鈥� but military emissions are larger than the sum of their gigatons. 鈥淢ilitary demand for fossil fuels has been and continues to be a key driver for the adoption of fossil fuels,鈥� Crawford writes.
Her steady narration traces the history of the US military through its increasing dependence on fossil fuels, and its efforts to secure them. The Navy鈥檚 transition in the 19th century from sail-powered ships to those powered by coal was the first major shift.
The US military used more coal than oil until just after the second world war, when petroleum became its lifeblood, powering ships, land vehicles and planes. As with coal, securing the military鈥檚 access to oil shaped US strategy, influencing the location of bases and driving measures to protect access to oil, especially in the Persian Gulf.
According to the DoD, US military emissions peaked during the Gulf war at around 110 million tonnes. The decrease since then is mostly due to energy efficiency, switching ships to natural gas and nuclear power, and closing bases.
The great irony is that the DoD has been among the loudest voices in federal government on climate change, recognising threats such as bases flooding or the melting of Arctic ice making submarines easier to detect. It has also grasped that climate change may lead to conflict.
Because the DoD assumes the worst effects of climate change are inevitable, Crawford writes, it has backed adaptation over solving the problem. Fossil fuels are so integral to the US military it is hard to see how this history could have been much different.
But Crawford convinces us that US military emissions should be accounted for like any others and that it should work harder to cut them, not just for the planet, but to shed a dependency dating back to the US civil war, which still shapes domestic energy policy today.
