The solution to all our problems?
We continue to find ourselves increasingly exposed to news of war and armed conflict of one kind or another. Simultaneously, the global presence of the US Army unavoidably connects us both politically and morally to international conflicts.
Typically, ethical/moral and political conversations about war and international conflicts revolve around human suffering and destruction induced by the use of lethal weaponry. While this may be the most obvious and horrific effect of war, we pay very little attention to another, less obvious threat/destruction-multiplier that is deeply ingrained in modern-day warfare and particularly instituted by the US military: the military’s destruction of the environment.
First, it’s important to look at some of the mind-blowing numbers: Militaries around the globe are responsible for more than 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the independent UK-based research institute Conflict and Environment Observatory. And, since the US military to this day reserves the position of the most potent and highest-funded military force globally, its contribution to these emissions is quite significant, if not the vast majority.
Brown University’s Cost of War project estimated total greenhouse gas emissions by the US Department of Defense for the 2018 fiscal year were about 56 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. While only a small portion of total US emissions, US military emissions are, in any year, larger than the emissions of many countries. According to the research by Brown, the Pentagon would rank as the world’s 55th largest CO2 emitter if it were its own country, emitting more than entire industrialized nations like Hungary or Portugal. This makes the US Armed Forces the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world.
In addition to the magnitude of its emissions, the US military also has a record of polluting waters and devastating land through nuclear testing and foreign interventions. Both have reportedly resulted in severe decades-long and long-lasting damage to whole populations and entire ecosystems, causing thousands of deaths through life-threatening diseases and a loss of biodiversity while accelerating desertification.
Yet the environmental aspect of our military’s destruction power is largely overlooked and barely mentioned in conversations about climate change. But why? Two main reasons explain the blind spot in global efforts to tackle this issue, and they are directly linked: inadequate reporting and political unwillingness.
First, the US in 1997 successfully created a loophole in the historic Kyoto Protocol climate agreement to generally exempt the report of any military emissions even though the protocol’s core aim was to rigorously slash global emissions. The result of the exemption most likely succeeded. The already-skyrocketing US military emissions, if curbed, could have potentially restricted substantial parts of its activities, allegedly posing a “security threat.”
Thus, simply removing an entire polluting sector from one of the milestones in legally binding climate treaties probably seemed like a ready opportunity to push the issue of military greenhouse gas emissions out of the international discourse on climate change. Similarly, the 2015 Paris Agreement (from which the US recently withdrew) again failed to adequately include military activities, leaving it up to signatory countries to report on their environmental record and set their own goals for decarbonizing their militaries.
This even resulted in forcing former NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg to admit, “One of the greatest challenges is that we lack numbers,” after NATO foreign ministers had publicly made climate change a greater foreign policy and national security priority.
So, what do we make of this now?
The Church of the Brethren throughout its history has continuously called out the harm and human suffering resulting from war and has firmly criticized foreign US military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 1970, the church had already further affirmed that we cannot encourage, engage in, or willingly profit from armed conflict at home or abroad. Later, the church in 2018 identified the effects of climate change as “threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions—conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.”
Subsequently, the church concluded that the consumption of fossil fuels is inherently incompatible with the call to care for our neighbors, as is the destructive nature of our military because of its consistent devastation of both human life and our planet.
In an attempt to boost its environmental record and in part as a concession to the global climate crisis, the US military in 2022 released a rigorous-sounding “climate strategy” assessing climate change as a national security threat. The paper states, “If the Army invests in modernization, readiness, and operations, we can create the land forces that our nation needs today while securing a sustainable, cleaner tomorrow.”
Furthermore, it outlines three targets to achieve this alleged goal: to install a microgrid on every base by 2035, reduce net greenhouse gas pollution by 50 percent by 2030, and produce net zero energy by 2050. What sound like ambitious goals to drastically slash emissions, tackle climate change, and protect our planet and vulnerable communities are, in fact, fundamentally a perverse distortion of reality.
Sustainability in this context is dangerously abused for the sake of maintaining and greenwashing an industry that for decades has inflicted long-lasting destruction on communities and the environment through its very operating nature. Ensuring its effective and sustainable operation is in part only an acknowledgment that the future of energy security lies in renewable energy.
Thus, environmental sustainability in this context means to modernize a global military force. This approach to decarbonizing might make its operations and installations less polluting but not less harmful.
For a historic peace church, this has to concern us. It needs to be pushed into public dialogue.
Cornelius Raff, from Mainz, Germany, recently completed a year and a half as a Brethren Volunteer Service worker in the Church of the Brethren Office of Peacebuilding and Policy in Washington, D.C.