My Take | How the planet subsidises America’s military hegemony
- The US Defence Department, the world’s single stand-alone largest employer, leaves behind a carbon footprint larger than some medium-sized developed countries
In 1997, at the eleventh hour after torturous back-and-forth bargaining that would become the Kyoto Protocol, American negotiators raised one last demand – greenhouse gases generated from military operations should be exempt from being counted against a country’s emission totals.
Since the United States would be in constant war over the next two decades, the loophole, if you can call it that, proved to be farsighted. Outside the Pentagon, probably no one really knows exactly how much the United States military has been contributing to global warming.
While the 2015 Paris Agreement closed that loophole, former president Donald Trump opted out of all participation in the climate pact two years later. In any case, the agreement itself was vague over how a country’s military should count its emissions from actual operations.
But as one of the world’s largest organisations, the US military’s normal fuel consumption – and therefore carbon footprint – outside of war is staggering enough to exceed whole countries.
Summarising their findings, which were published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 2019, a team of researchers at Lancaster University and Durham University wrote: “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. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.”
It’s estimated the US military leaves behind a carbon footprint larger than that of each one of 140 countries out of the world’s about 200 territorial entities.