Climate Connection: U.S. Military Emissions

The U.S military consumes more energy and emits more carbon pollution than any other single institution in the world. It has seen climate change as a threat multiplier, putting its 900 domestic installations and nearly 800 foreign bases at risk of flooding and other forms of severe weather, as well as increasing the threat of world unrest and war due to crop failures and climate migration. Most of its energy use is non-combat use, moving people and equipment around, training pilots, testing aircraft, and keeping its bases running. Of the energy used to supply electricity at bases and to fuel planes, ships, and land vehicles for direct military and training use, 55% of it is jet fuel for aviation. 

The current federal administration has added massively to the military’s budget, with $156.2 billion more in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill passed on July 4. The military is now being deployed against U.S. citizens within our borders in defiance of constitutional norms. An academic study, published last month, examined military budgets and fossil fuel use from 1975 to 2022 to determine the impact of budget increases and decreases on fossil fuel use. If the military wanted to decrease its carbon bootprint, it could decrease its budget, close some of its bases, accelerate its miniscule renewable energy use (0.95% in 2022), and retire older, less efficient vehicles, vessels, and planes.

In the 1997 Kyoto Protocol about lowering greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide nations accepted the U.S stipulation not to count its military, aviation, and shipping emissions. Although the U.S. never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the succeeding efforts to establish Nationally Determined Contributions still exempts military emissions. The current administration has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Accords again and is not participating in the 30th Conference of the Parties this fall in Brazil. Although it is not preparing a Nationally Determined Contribution this year, the U.S. did participate in the recently concluded international U.N. plastics conference to ensure the defeat of the overwhelming consensus that plastic production be curtailed. Instead, the U.S. argued that plastic waste be recycled which is a false solution to microplastic pollution. In this, the U.S. joined other petrostates including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, all seeking to protect their fossil fuel producers turning to plastic production as fossil fuel use decreases worldwide. 

As the federal administration is remaking America by radical changes in the role of government, health, welfare, education, and foreign affairs, we must engage in imagining what we would like to see in the future. Our taxes spent on our military, the world’s largest polluter, is money not available for other uses. That the military’s carbon bootprint is obscured in even reporting its petroleum consumption to Congress is unfortunate when we have few years to contain the devastating future for mankind foretold by our relentless global warming attributable to fossil fuel use.

– Kay Kreiss, Transition Sitka