Asian Angle | Carbon bootprints: how war is fuelling climate catastrophe
The military-industrial complex’s vast carbon footprint is deliberately hidden from public view, while we get gaslit into using paper straws
At the heart of this nightmare is the old Western world, desperate to retain ill-gotten privileges and hegemony, even as a multipolar order takes shape. Their inability to reconcile with a fairer global landscape drives them to lash out – and the whole world pays the price.
The proliferation of digital media has inundated us with an endless loop of mutilated bodies and bombed-out hospitals, numbing us to the suffering. On social media, mourning war’s victims is both common and curiously performative; yet we must not deny the horrifying ease with which violence has become background noise for our coffee breaks. Thoughts and prayers trend, but distractions follow in the next instant.
Tragically, contemporary climate debates are reduced to corporate slogans, “net zero” fairy tales and performative guilt over individual carbon footprints. Western leaders feign concern for islands at risk of submersion even as they ignore the military-industrial complex’s colossal environmental and climate damage. The machines of destruction roll on, enriching the merchants of death with every bomb manufactured, sold and detonated.
The global war industry profits directly as innocents pay the ultimate price, the environment is devastated and future generations inherit a toxic world. The systematic exclusion of military emissions from “environmental, social and governance” (ESG) reporting is not mere negligence; it is deliberate complicity, orchestrated by powerful capital market actors closely linked to the war industry. The public is kept in the dark. This is not just a blind spot; it is a calculated deception.
Loopholes and hypocrisy
Let’s not pretend the ESG industry is a reluctant accomplice. It is designed to distract from the war industry’s role, obsessing over the impact of coffee cups while ignoring militaries’ unchecked consumption of fossil fuels and the destruction of cities. The greatest climate criminals wear suits, not uniforms, yet no UN summit dares challenge them.