Arms Dealers Shoot Down Accountability
(AP Photo/Libkos)
The country’s top weapons manufacturers rejected shareholder motions to expose their emissions policies and human rights practices.
his month, the country’s four largest weapon manufacturers shot down proposals from their shareholders that would have required them to disclose how their largely opaque emissions-spewing practices align with climate change mitigation goals and human rights policies.
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing Company, and RTX Corporation, formerly known as Raytheon, are among the top five contractors working with the U.S. Department of Defense, bringing in billions of dollars in revenue. These companies have directly profited from the ongoing war on Gaza, producing weapons that have contributed to the deaths of more than 35,000 people.
Along with the human toll, such weapons have a huge environmental impact. The Department of Defense is the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world, with Lockheed Martin producing 33 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 — the most of any company in the military sector. That’s comparable to the emissions produced by countries like Finland, Switzerland, and Ireland, and directly contributes to rising global temperatures.
To address the companies’ role in climate change, activist shareholders — stockholders who use their equity in a corporation to force change to company practices — took action. A handful of groups submitted proposals to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX leading up to the corporations’ annual meetings this May requesting information on how the weapon manufacturers intend to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Northrop Grumman also received proposals calling for more transparency around how their business practices align with both their internal and international human rights policies.
However, each of the corporations’ boards of directors recommended voting against these proposals, and all six failed to pass.
This is not the first time these companies have nixed such requests: Last year, the majority of Lockheed Martin’s, RTX’s, Boeing’s, and Northrop Grumman’s investors also rejected greenhouse gas emission and human rights proposals, according to the companies’ filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“We should still be surprised that these enormous corporations don’t want to take the extra steps to be accountable to their shareholders and also any citizens that are affected by their business practices,” said Lauren Parker, a senior research analyst at LittleSis, a nonprofit public interest research organization focused on corporate and government accountability. “These are the largest weapon manufacturers in the U.S. — they hold billions of dollars in defense contracts, [and] our taxes fund these contracts.”
Emissions Transparency
The military has long been known as a significant polluter, with the biggest energy use coming from military bases, the operation of military equipment, and arms production.
Yet the exact amount of emissions produced by the defense industry isn’t entirely clear.
“While a few militaries report their greenhouse gas emissions, others do not, often citing national security concerns,” according to a blog post by the Conflict and Environment Observatory, an organization dedicated to exposing the environmental impacts of military activities. “Most militaries lag far behind private sector and other public sector organizations on emissions reporting and mitigation.”
This is despite the fact that the military considers climate change a serious threat to national security. In a 2021 report, the Department of Defense wrote, “Increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks and creating new security challenges for U.S. interests.”
Shareholders’ climate proposals to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX requested that the companies issue a report disclosing how they intend to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to align with goals set forth by the 2015 Paris Agreement. This agreement aims to limit global temperature increase this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 34.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
The board of Lockheed Martin — the largest emitter of the three manufacturers — argued that the shareholder activists’ proposal failed to “take into account the unique challenges the Company faces in reporting” such emissions. Instead, they blamed the governments that use their products, stating that these nations are not obligated to “report on or make commitments” on greenhouse gas emissions made through the supply chain or when their product is used. The board also argued that the proposal “ignores the meaningful actions that the Company has taken and continues to take to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions.”