Military Emissions Are Too Big to Keep Ignoring
Thomas Dworzak / Magnum
The world is finally talking about them.
by Zoë Schlanger #ClimateCrisis
For as long as the world’s diplomats have gathered to talk about slowing the march of climate change, the one institution pointedly missing from the agenda has been the military. This has been by design: At the behest of the U.S., reporting military emissions was largely exempted from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the document that set binding emissions targets for nations that signed. The 2015 Paris Agreement overturned the old exemption but still did not require reporting of military emissions. Data remain stupendously spotty. Only late last year, in the lead-up to the COP28 United Nations climate meeting in Dubai, was the connection between the military and climate change brought up in brief mentions in a key report.
Perhaps this was because, in some cases, militaries themselves have begun announcing programs to “green” their operations. Or because the nations at COP28 gathered against the backdrop of two active wars. Or because the climate situation has become dire enough that the world can no longer afford to ignore any major source of emissions. Maintaining a military is on its own a highly energy-intensive endeavor, and war, in addition to its immediate human toll, can rapidly produce even larger spikes in greenhouse gases.
Whatever the reason, military emissions are now up for the tiniest amount of discussion. A line in the UN’s 2023 “Global Emissions Gap Report” noted that emissions from the military are “likely nontrivial” but remain “insufficiently accounted [for]” under current reporting standards. This was the first time the issue has ever appeared in a UN emissions gap report, Linsey Cottrell of the Conflict and Environment Observatory told me at COP28. Her organization has attempted to estimate the global carbon footprint of the military using available information and put the figure at 5.5 percent, which is more than the total emissions of the continent of Africa.
Another first, per Cottrell: The European Union put out a call to include military emissions in national net-zero targets in its COP28 resolution. “We were always a bit hesitant in our legislation to include military,” Peter Liese, the chair of the EU’s delegation, said when one of Cottrell’s colleagues asked about the language during a press conference in Dubai. He called it a “tricky” issue. “It is of course sensible,” he added. But now “the military itself” is addressing it openly: “They understand that they also need to look at the climate effect of what they are doing.”
The U.S. military, meanwhile, is the single largest institutional consumer of petroleum in the world, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. It uses all that oil to fly its jets, power its ships, and fuel its roughly 750 bases across 80 countries and territories. Because of incomplete data, comparing the emissions of the world’s militaries is difficult. The United Kingdom’s House of Commons estimated that the U.K.’s military, which also has an extensive global presence, was responsible for 3.3 million metric tons for fiscal year 2021–22, though that number did not include its defense industry, which would likely bump it up far higher. China, which is currently the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has among the largest number of active-duty military personnel and a comparatively small global military presence but does not report its military emissions, Cottrell said.
The U.S. Department of Defense puts its own emissions at 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in fiscal year 2021, which was roughly the same as the emissions produced by Sweden. (In response to an inquiry about the military’s emissions disclosures, a spokesperson pointed me to this report, which was congressionally mandated.) About half of the total came from jet-fuel use. That’s more than three-quarters of the U.S. government’s total emissions, and 1 percent of the total emissions of the country in 2020. And that’s to say nothing of defense contractors, who are not presently required to disclose their emissions. Crawford estimates that if the industrial complex that supports the military—weapons manufacturing, for example—were included, the total would make up about 2 percent of U.S. emissions.