The US military is “one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate changing gases than most medium-sized countries,” Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, and Patrick Bigger reported for The Conversation in June 2019. By burning fossil fuels, the US military emitted more than 25,000 kilotons of carbon dioxide in 2017. If the US military were a country, they wrote, its fuel usage would make it “the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.” [Note: The US military’s status as the world’s worst polluter was story #2 on Censored 2011’s top 25 list; see “US Department of Defense is the Worst Polluter on the Planet,” in Censored 2011: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009–10, eds. Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), 15–24. For a synopsis and update of Project Censored’s original story, see Chapter 2 of State of the Free Press | 2021.] Noting that studies of greenhouse gas emissions usually focus on how much energy and fuel civilians use, Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger wrote that US military emissions “tend to be overlooked in climate change studies.” Nevertheless, they reported, “Significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget and shrinking its capacity to wage war would cause a huge drop in demand from the biggest consumer of liquid fuels in the world.” This report for The Conversation summarized key findings from a research article they wrote with Cara Kennelly and published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, a peer-reviewed academic journal, in June 2019. In the study, they examined how US military supply chains impact the world’s climate, by analyzing bulk fuel purchases, as documented by the US Defense Logistics Agency–Energy (DLA-E). A sub-agency of the US Department of Defense, the DLA-E manages “the US military’s supply chains, including its hydrocarbon fuel purchases and distribution.” The authors obtained data on US military fuel purchases through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to the DLA-E. “It’s very difficult to get consistent data from the Pentagon and across US government departments,” Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger wrote. A loophole in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol exempted the United States from reporting military emissions. Although the Paris Accord closed this loophole, they noted that, “with the Trump administration due to withdraw from the accord in 2020, this gap…will return.” Nevertheless, based on the data they were able to analyze, the authors in the Transactions article concluded that if “the US military were a country, it would nestle between Peru and Portugal in the global league table of fuel purchasing,” going on to observe that the military’s carbon emissions for 2014 were “roughly equivalent to total – not just fuel – emissions from Romania.” Moreover, Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger found that US “forward operating bases” (FOBs) located in Afghanistan and other overseas theaters of operations have enormous fuel requirements and spew huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. They wrote that “a single US Marine Corp brigade operating across… a network of FOBs requires over 500,000 gallons of fuel per day.” Noting that “action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine,” They recommended that “money spent procuring and distributing fuel across the US empire” be reinvested as “a peace dividend, helping to fund a Green New Deal in whatever form it might take.” The Conversation is a network of not-for-profit media outlets publishing news stories and research reports online, with accompanying expert opinion and analysis. Student Researcher: Fabiola Gregg, Faculty Evaluator; Jennifer Levinson. (City College of San Francisco). |
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