The US Military Exemption from Environmental Regulations Undermines All Our Climate Efforts
Not content to destroy and oppress the current victims of American imperialism, the US military is set to pull the walls down around us all when it comes to climate change.
The Army employed sixty thousand soldiers solely for the purpose of providing petroleum, oil, and lubricants to its war machines, which have themselves become increasingly fuel-heavy. The sixty-eight-ton Abrams tank, for instance, burns through a gallon of fuel for every half mile. With its inefficient, 1960s-era engine, the Abrams tank burns twelve gallons of fuel an hour just idling.
So much time and money is spent fueling the American fighting machines that, according to the head of the Army Materiel Command, a gallon of fuel delivered to the U.S. military in action can ultimately cost up to $400 a gallon. Indeed, 70 percent of the weight of all the soldiers, vehicles, and weapons of the entire U.S. Army is pure fuel. - Journalist Sonia Shaw, quoted in Ian Angus’ Facing the Anthropocene
It should be relatively widely accepted by now that world governments’ actions to thwart environmental destruction and mitigate the already-destructive effects of climate change have been direly insufficient. The excuses offered by these governments and their mouthpieces in the media range from the policies’ costliness in terms of jobs and stock prices to overriding concerns such as the war in Ukraine and soaring energy prices. The former kind of rationale is less useful to climate denialists, because the degraded environment (in addition to the ongoing, now silently buried pandemic, which is more related to climate than is commonly thought) is already costing jobs and productivity, and promises to cost much more in the near future: extreme heat alone significantly reduces potential working hours and is forecast to cost millions of jobs and billions of dollars as early as 2030. The latter argument is more useful because the assumption that more pressing concerns can override the need to do everything in our power to mitigate the coming catastrophe plays into our very human inability to think in long-term geological scales, which was the topic of the last several entries on this site (1 2 3). “We cannot meaningfully address a long-term problem, because these short-term issues take precedent” is a well-travelled and surprisingly effective method of rhetorically postponing the inevitable. The war in Ukraine, for example, was recently cited by the current US President as a more pressing concern:
In 2021, the U.S. promised to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions this decade, and send long-overdue money to help developing countries transition to cleaner energy and protect residents from rising seas, heat waves, food instability and other dangerous climate effects.
If the U.S. follows through, it's still possible to keep global temperatures from rising catastrophically and prevent tens of millions of unnecessary deaths, according to scientists and economists.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine might put many U.S. promises on hold. Months after renewing its pledges at the international climate conference in Glasgow, the U.S. has not passed any major climate legislation. The Biden administration has rolled back limits on domestic oil and gas drilling to cope with rising energy prices. This spring, Congress allocated less than one third of the international climate funding it pledged, even as it rushed billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine.
As previously written here, there will always be a war in Ukraine, or some other reason to keep the military industrial complex going, which has acted as a sort of band-aid on capital’s woes for nearly 80 years by spurring industrial production and decreasing unemployment, effectively externalizing the inherent contradictions of our economic system and passing them off on innocent bystanders abroad. Economic imperialism is an inextricable part of our capitalist system, and periodically it requires a physical manifestation of that predatory exploitative regime in order to resolve those contradictions. Ian Angus writes in Facing the Anthropocene, about the American post-WWII boom which is typically thought of as peaceful, but was predicated on military spending:
Liberal historians like to present the postwar years as a rapid, virtually seamless transition from wartime austerity to the long boom. Thanks to the wise policies of the Truman government, and the accumulated savings of workers and soldiers, the “conversion” brought universal prosperity without disruption. In his pioneering history of the CIO, Marxist historian Art Preis disputed that:
“This falsification is accomplished by lumping the years of the Korean War boom with the preceding years of stagnation and decline. It hides the real conditions that prevailed during the peacetime years of Truman’s administration. It tends to cover up the most vital fact of modern American economic history: At no time since 1929 has American capitalism maintained even a semblance of economic stability and growth without huge military spending and war debt.”
Political economist Lynn Tergeon agress:
“Although the postwar economy of the United States was stabilized by the pent-up demand and forced savings built up during the war, the Marshall Plan and Point 4 and its successor, Foreign Aid (later the Agency for International Development), the transition to a peacetime economy was remarkably sluggish. Real income in 1950 was little higher than it had been in 1945, and it wasn’t until the Korean War boom that the economy overtook the annual production at the end of World War II.”
The Depression-ending Second World War morphed into a perpetual, lucrative war against communist ideology which saw widespread brutality in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Central and Latin America, and elsewhere. The problem with wars is that they end upon victory, and so do the many benefits they bring to capital. With this in mind, the military industrial complex curated the Cold War, a conveniently unwinnable and unending casus belli that was later adapted into the War on Terror, which under Obama became the even more opaquely named Overseas Contingency Operation. Wars are now being fought against non-existent opponents, as capital drums up a perpetually illusory threat to cover up and ameliorate its many failings and bring certain well-connected executives lucrative no-bid cost-plus contracts, a gambit that is now so important that its masters are willing to pull us all down into hell in order to maintain the charade.
These concerns have resulted in a virtual regulatory exemption for the US military, which is a significant polluter, to the extent that we are aware of its actual emissions—records about its environmental impacts are being kept mostly secret:
But when she went to look up the figure, she couldn’t find anything reliable. Instead, she found scattered and incomplete data on how much fuel the military consumed and how much carbon it emitted. The information that did exist largely didn’t include overseas operations, even though the United States had been at war for nearly two decades. Major categories of fuel consumption, like much of the fuel used for aviation, seemed to be missing.
In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol—the world’s first legally binding, international climate treaty—created a reporting loophole for militaries, exempting many of the greenhouse gases emitted during military operations from counting against a country’s emissions totals. While the 2015 Paris Accords did away with this exemption, they didn’t replace it with an obligation. Rather, the decision of whether to report military emissions—and how to calculate them—was left up to individual countries.
The result is a gap in our understanding of the United States’ climate footprint. Research from academics like Crawford, who now studies the issue, shows that the Department of Defense is a major producer of greenhouse gases, with more emissions than many industrialized nations. The United States—and other countries—have said they are committed to reducing military emissions, and earlier this summer, NATO released its Action Plan on Climate Change and Security, acknowledging that better emissions data would help guide member states’ military planning. But there is no consistent methodology and reporting requirement for these emissions. As the United States and other countries work toward net-zero emissions by 2050, Crawford and others say, the lack of clear data from the U.S. Defense Department—the world’s largest employer—and other militaries is a major stumbling block.
“We’ve got these kind of just little fragmentary bits of information and data about how big this problem is,” says Doug Weir, the research and policy director for the U.K.-based Conflict and Environment Observatory, which studies and works to reduce the environmental consequences of military activity. “Until states actually start reporting it, then you can’t really do anything about it.” …
Nearly 20 years later, the 2015 climate agreement signed in Paris did away with the automatic exemption for military emissions. Now, the choice of whether or not to report those emissions—and what, exactly, to report if a country chooses to do so—is left up to individual governments. As a result, the full picture of military emissions, from the United States and other countries, is still unclear.
“The level of reporting between countries varies a lot,” says Linsey Cottrell, the environmental policy officer at the Conflict and Environment Observatory. “Sometimes reporting is not occurring, [or] it’s reported elsewhere. So it’s hard to determine what contribution the military makes to the overall totals.”
The United States does report military emissions to the United Nations—sort of. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that military emissions, if reported, should be included in a category marked “nonspecified.” That same category also includes things like civilian waste incineration, so it’s essentially impossible to parse out which specific emissions come from military sources. And certain major military sources of emissions—like fuel during multilateral operations—are listed in the United States’ reporting as “included elsewhere,” though it’s unclear where. Other categories of military fuel consumption aren’t reported at all.
Our current President’s climate plan, such as it is, explicitly exempts the military outright, despite its ponderous, certainly underestimated emissions:
There’s a Pentagon-size hole in President Biden’s plans to cut government emissions.
Biden signed an executive order earlier this month directing the government to reach 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. It also calls for eliminating climate pollution from federal buildings and vehicles.
But the executive order exempts anything related to national security, combat, intelligence or military training.
That means Biden’s order covers only a fraction of federal emissions. While military leaders insist they share the president’s decarbonization goal, there is no plan for them to meet it.
Since 2001, the military has accounted for 77 to 80 percent of federal energy use, according to a 2019 study released by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. And it consumes more petroleum than any other institution in the world — more than most countries. (The administration estimates the military’s pollution is roughly 56 percent of federal emissions, but independent estimates suggest it’s much higher.)
“Clearly, if you reduce [emissions from] the rest of the U.S. government but leave the military untouched or let them sort of go at their own pace — that’s not going to get you the kind of reductions that you want out of the U.S. government,” said Neta Crawford, co-director of the Watson Institute’s Costs of War Project and author of the study estimating U.S. military emissions.
The Defense Department has no decarbonization targets. It has counted on other sustainability policies to include climate benefits.
While the military is planning for climate change and looking at restructuring its coastal bases, it is not committed to taking any actions to reduce its own role in causing the imminent sea level rise, heat stress on bases, and other complications. A betting individual would find this cause for alarm—that military leaders are creating policies to deal with the ramifications of climate change but not altering their actions to prevent it may indicate their knowledge of both its severity and inevitability. Their trepidation would best be taken as a dead canary in the coalmine.
The climate exemption for an unnecessary, wasteful make-work project like the US military is an indictment of our commitment to saving the planet, as if this commitment was ever plausibly strongly maintained. The promise of green technology has proven time and again to be a charade:
The offsetting rules that the credits were created under ignored the emissions associated with the extracted oil.
Nearly 3 million credits from the three projects, which cannot generate new offsets following a rule change, have been used by buyers to compensate for carbon emissions. Each offset is supposed to represent a ton of carbon that has been permanently avoided or removed from the atmosphere.
“Offsetting emissions with these credits is complete nonsense,” said Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch. “If the captured carbon enables an increase in oil extraction, then obviously this must be part of the calculation and would likely negate any supposed climate benefits.”
Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage (CCS) at Edinburgh University, said that in the US it had “never been accepted that the extra oil produced [by the EOR process] has a carbon footprint.”
Daimler Trucks, eBay, and a US energy company were among the recent buyers of carbon offsets created by projects that involved injecting carbon dioxide underground in order to extract more oil.
Three US-based extraction projects were eligible to generate credits because their processes involved the capture of CO2. But this was used as a way to extract fresh oil that would otherwise have been inaccessible, a procedure known as “enhanced oil recovery” (EOR).
4500 US high temperature records were broken in the month of May. While the earth begins to cook before our eyes, companies continue to put short-term profits front and center, dreaming of ways to pay lip service to our collective environmental responsibility while sidestepping any actions that would be so much as a minor inconvenience. Even Europe, which has occasionally taken the existential threat more seriously then the United States, is falling far short of the necessary gravitas, with Norway undergoing a project to build the largest offshore windfarm in history…to power oil and gas production:
Production of power is expected to begin from the third quarter of 2022 and the entire capacity will be used to partially meet the energy demands of the Snorre and Gullfaks offshore oil and gas fields.
Equinor, a Norwegian power company and one of the partners in the project claims that the floating wind farm will meet approximately 35 percent of the annual energy demand of the fossil fuel platforms while offsetting 200,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions and 1,000 tonnes of NOx emissions every year. …
While Norway leads the world in the adoption of electric cars, it is also the fifth largest exporter of oil and third-largest exporter of natural gas, the Nordic Energy Research website states. Petroleum products account for 60 percent of Norway's exports and it is unlikely that the country will switch this to meet the EU's climate goals.
By investing in a project that makes a polluting project a little bit greener, Norway is hoping to continue its oil exploration for much longer and with added capacity in the future, the country could even claim that its production process is 100 percent green.
In more direct way, the US military is already poisoning people throughout the world (see depleted uranium, white phosphorus, Agent Orange, burn pits in Afghanistan, the recent poisoning of aquifers in Hawaii, many other examples). On Okinawa, the US military is viscerally hated by the locals, and for good reason:
Host to 31 U.S. military bases, Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, is no stranger to the risks of bearing the burden of the U.S.-Japan alliance. In 1959, the U.S. military accidentally shot a nuclear rocket into a local harbor; six years later, it lost a hydrogen bomb in nearby seas; then in 1969, a leak of nerve agent on the island so shocked the world that President Richard Nixon was forced to renounce his nation’s first-use policy on chemical weapons.
But these incidents pale compared to what Okinawans are facing today: the U.S. military has polluted the drinking water for 450,000 people – a third of the prefecture’s population – in the worst case of environmental contamination in the island’s history.
The chemicals causing the problem are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (aka PFAS) which are used in the production of food wrapping, nonstick cookware and military firefighting foams. PFAS are highly resistant to heat, oil and water, but in these strengths lie their dangers. Virtually indestructible in nature, they accumulate in our bodies, taking decades to expel. According to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, health problems linked to PFAS include cancers of the kidneys and testicles, high cholesterol and decreased vaccine response – a particular concern during the current pandemic.
Given that we know the US military does not exist in a vacuum but rather greedily and megalomaniacally creates the conditions that justify its own existence, its use as a rationale to forestall action on climate is particularly problematic. The War in Iraq should have forever put the quietus to the theoretical need for a large standing military in the US, but even the undeniable fact that our last major wars have all been aggressive boondoggles from all but the most blinkered, ahistorical perspectives has not awakened us to the fact that it is the single most emblematic aspect of our inability to sufficiently address climate change. Without a clear countenance of the military in general, its polluting ways will never be addressed, and any claim that we are consistent and serious in our climate initiatives will be forever invalid. A large standing military begs to be used, by its generals and enlisted warfighters as well as the business owners who stand to greatly benefit from conflict. The consequences in the short term (more than a million dead in Iraq, countless more displaced and injured, and the nation in shambles, to name just one example) are unacceptable, and in the long term will ensure the termination of our very civilization. There is no aspect of the United States Armed Forces’ existence which is not ultimately parasitic, and it must be removed by any means necessary.
Instead of taking stock and moving toward a less bellicose and more sustainable society, the deadly boondoggle has been extended beyond the terrestrial earth with the creation of the United States Space Force, seen here celebrating its second anniversary in 2021:
Like every other step taken in the last 100 years, this one is firmly in the wrong direction, and we are all going to be worse off for it.