There is a lot of excitement regarding the coming to Glasgow of the Cop 26 conference, our supposed time to remedy the failings of the past and put our planet's ecological balance to rights. However looking at the track record of these sort of things, I prefer to call it the Cop-out 26. There will lots of hot air, grandstanding speeches and photo opportunities for the good, the bad, and the ugly. I will also lay a bet that one of the world's largest polluters will not even get a mention, I refer of course to the Pentagon. This monstrous fossil fuel guzzling machine of mass destruction will sail on blissfully untarnished by any real criticism of its part in the climate emergency.
The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks, and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.
Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that 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.
In 2017, the US military bought about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted more than 25,000 kilotons of carbon dioxide by burning those fuels. The US Air Force purchased $4.9 billion worth of fuel, and the Navy $2.8 billion, followed by the Army at $947 million and the Marines at $36 million.
It’s no coincidence that US military emissions tend to be overlooked in climate change studies. It’s very difficult to get consistent data from the Pentagon and across US government departments. In fact, the United States insisted on an exemption for reporting military emissions in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This loophole was closed by the Paris Accord, but with the Trump administration due to withdraw from the accord in 2020, this gap will will return.
Roll on Cop-out 26, let's see what formula you produce to stop the impending man made climate disaster, and let's see how the various states follow through. Capitalism will trump climate change, unless we destroy capitalism, it will continue to destroy the planet and our existence on that planet. Just remember, Planet Earth has no escape capsule.
