The US military's footprint exceeds that of nearly 140 countries.
“The Department of Defense, the entity that is the US war machine, is the largest institutional contributor to global warming on planet Earth,” said David Vine, a professor of political anthropology at American University in Washington DC. “And the military does not acknowledge that.”
The US military has about 800 installations in 80 countries and another 740 bases on home soil, of which about 315 are army installations. Yet by its own admission, the Pentagon says the US army operates a third more bases than it needs – it calls this “excess basing capacity”.
“Far greater savings can be achieved by just closing a base rather than making a base that is unnecessary more energy efficient,” said Vine.
The Army Climate Strategy (ACS) admits that the US army’s nearly $740m yearly expenditure on electricity created 4.1m tons of greenhouse gases in 2020 – 1m tons more than the greenhouse gas emissions generated by Switzerland’s heat and electricity sector in 2017.
The US military and army, for example, do not report their fuel usage to Congress, let alone itemize how much fuel was spent where, or on what war. Most US government accounting of US greenhouse gas emissions omit figures on how much the military contributes, even via a relatively easy-to-track measure like fuel consumption.
A 2019 report found that the Department of Defense is not only the largest consumer of energy in the US but is also the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum and, thus, the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases.
Between 2001 and 2017 the DoD was responsible for emitting 1.2bn metric tons of greenhouse gases – equivalent to the annual emissions of 257m cars.
This year it is expected to burn through 82.3m barrels of fuel, more than the total oil consumption of Finland.
The military’s climate impact is “not just about the environmental footprint of the military itself, it’s also about the way the operations are conducted and the way wars are fought”, said Stefan Smith, coordinator at the UN Environment Programme’s disasters & conflicts sub-programme. “War is, by its nature, destructive.”
Postwar reconstruction, for instance, uses up a vast amount of resources. The disposal of rubble and rebuilding from infrastructure destruction is a long, carbon-intensive process, according to Hassan Partow, a UNEP programme manager. “The amount of trucking and emissions that would be required to dispose of this debris is like travelling from the Earth to the moon multiple times,” he said, referring to cleanups that were required in Iraq.
War also degrades land, altering and reducing its carbon sequestration capacity. “The land degradation legacy in Iraq shows that when you change the land and change the soils, that changes the amount of carbon it can store,” said Doug Weir, research and policy director at the Conflict and Environment Observatory. . To what extent is unclear, as it is rarely if ever studied. But soil erosion causes carbon loss, and desertification and degradation reduce land’s ability to hold carbon – all of which probably happened in Iraq, particularly in what was once marsh land. “We know so little about” how much land is destroyed in this matter, Weir said. “No one’s really following or documenting it.” He thinks an even larger contributor to the climate crisis than the emissions caused by fighting is the environmental changes those conflicts create.
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