Of tanks and global warming

Sometimes a problem is just so massive, so widespread, and so multifaceted that I don’t see all of the ramifications because I’m focused on a few horrific aspects of it. For example, the U.S. military and the death and destruction it leaves in its wake. I came of age during the slaughter in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but Wikipedia lists “nearly 400 military interventions between 1776 and 2023, with half of these operations occurring since 1950 and over 25% occurring in the post-Cold War period.” The U.S. military footprint now spans 80 countries and 750 bases and facilities, the largest military empire in world history.

According to the Costs of War Project, we have spent $8 trillion since 9/11 on the “War on Terror” alone, at the cost of an estimated more than 900,000 direct deaths, 3.5 million indirect deaths (from injury, malnutrition, disease, lack of clean water) and 38 million refugees and internally displaced people. The U.S. military walked away from those invasions with barely a glance backward and certainly no apology, leaving the people of those countries to fend for themselves.

I was aware of the environmental catastrophes the US military creates. I wrote about the use by the military of Agent Orange in Vietnam and of burn pits in Iraq, and that the disregard shown by the U.S. government for Afghans and Iraqis poisoned by the burn pits is the same disregard shown by the government for the U.S. soldiers and civilian contractors ordered to operate those pits. Because I worked in the environmental consulting industry for more than 20 years, I was also aware that military bases in this country are among the most polluted places on the planet, and that generations of people in the surrounding communities continue to pay for that pollution with their lives and their health. The Department of Defense recently released a report that

confirmed that at least 455 military bases are contaminated by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (or PFAS) and that 275 out of 295 bases checked had released those chemicals “in the proximity” of drinking water supplies.

PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals” because of their inability to naturally degrade, “have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems,” per the Guardian.

Nearly 250 of those bases are in the United States.

Now I read that the U.S. military is a major source of greenhouse gases. (Yes, I’m late to the party.) According to Earth.org,

In 2019, a report released by Durham and Lancaster University found the U.S. military to be “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries.” It established that if the U.S. military were a nation state, it would be the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world.

The Costs of War project calculated that

Between 2001 and 2017, the years for which data is available since the beginning of the war on terrorism with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of GHG. More than 400 million metric tons of GHG are directly due to war-related fuel consumption.

The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world and a key contributor to climate change.

That amount of GHG (1.2 billion metric tons) is equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million passenger cars.

That’s the amount of GHG the U.S. military emitted while rampaging through the Middle East. What about the GHG that will be emitted while those countries try to recover from the devastation? Let’s take Gaza as an example, because Israel destroyed Gaza with U.S. military equipment. (Israel will walk away from the destruction it caused the way the U.S. walks away from its wars — with impunity.) One study estimated that the removal of 32 million metric tons of debris created by Israel would release 80,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Another study estimated that reconstructing 100,000 buildings there would release 30 million metric tons of GHG.

The Pentagon insists it is serious about environmental stewardship. But no matter how many electric generators it buys, the math isn’t there. Everything the U.S. military does causes the release of GHG, from the manufacture, testing, storage, and transport of weapons, through their use on the battlefield. Everything the U.S. military destroys has to be rebuilt. Every decision to invade another country or to empower a proxy to invade or subjugate, every decision to use the U.S. military to prevent a people from exercising their right to self-determination, adds to the climate crisis.

Fortunately for the Pentagon, military activity was exempted from the binding emissions targets in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and was made optional in the 2015 Paris conference. Funny how things seem to work out.